Creating conda environment using only symbolic links

Question

I want to create an environment which is an exact copy of my root environment, but not making any hard copies of packages (later I will add a few packages not i

Answer 1

conda uses hardlinks internally when it can (nearly always) so the cost of new environments is minimal, so my recommendation is to use:

conda create -n newroot --clone root

Do not use --copy since that explicitly avoids using hardlinks.