Following someone else’s suggestions, I made a venv file called venv and installed pygame in it using venv/bin/pip install pygame from the directory where I have the main project in. Interestingly, it installed just fine, but when I try to do pip install pygame while in the virtual environment’s bin folder, I get the externally managed environment error. My venv folder doesn’t have an environment folder, it’s just ~/path-to/venv, where venv is the name of the virtual environment. probably should have picked a different name tbh. Anyways I followed your suggestion making replacements where necessary to run the program. Dunno if I’m doing something wrong but it isn’t working for me.