Conda is an environment manager. It lets you create environments and install various things into them. Then by activating specific environments, you can get all the packages that were installed into them.
Defaults can be set in ~/.condarc:
auto_activate_base: false
create_default_packages:
- pip
This will disable installing things into the base environment by accident and it will install pip as well.
conda create --name myenv
Activate an environment:
conda activate myenv
Deactivate an environment:
conda deactivate myenv