What is the difference between conda 'base' and 'root' enviroments?

Question

I have recently been pulling my hair out trying to organize my conda environments. I ended up reinstalling miniconda and I'm in a good spot.

When I run conda env list I get:

# conda environments:
#
base                  *  /Users/rheft/miniconda3
sonny36                  /Users/rheft/miniconda3/envs/sonny36

I would expect "root" to be included here. Furthermore when I look at my conda environments from inside jupyter notebooks there are 3 environments listed.

root         -- /Users/rheft/miniconda3
miniconda3   -- /Users/rheft/miniconda3
sonny36      -- /Users/rheft/miniconda3/envs/sonny36

Why doesn't root show when I run conda env list? Although everything works correctly, I would like to remove the duplicated environment if possible.

Answer 1

root is the old (pre-conda 4.4) name for the main environment; in conda 4.4, it was renamed to be base. Most likely the reason you have a Jupyter environment named root is because you have a kernel installed with that name in it.