Upgrading to QIIME 2 2024 for Greengenes2: Clean VM clone or install alongside 2020/2022 via Conda?

Technical Support
1

Hello QIIME 2 community,

I am currently using the official QIIME 2 Oracle VirtualBox VM (originally shipped with the 2020.11 release).

Over time, I installed the 2022 version alongside it within the same VM using Conda. Both versions are working fine. However, I now need to use Greengenes2, which requires a much more recent version of QIIME 2 (2024).

Given my setup, what would you recommend as the best practice?

  1. Option A: Keep my current VM and install the QIIME 2 2024 environment directly alongside my 2020 and 2022 environments using Conda?

  2. Option B: Clone the VM or set up a brand new environment to avoid any system-level issues?

I want to make sure that installing a 2024 release won't break my older environments or run into operating system limitations (since the underlying Ubuntu version of the 2020 VM is quite old).

Thank you very much for your advice and recommendations!

Best regards,

2

Hello and welcome to the forum!

I would try this option first and see if the desired version can be installed without updating conda. It should not affect other environments that are already installed.

If the installation fails, then you need to update conda. If you are afraid that updating conda may break already existing environments (never happened to me, but who knows?), then you can try option B, update conda there, or even install a new Linux release there, then install desired qiime2 version.

Best,
Timur