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The miniforge installer is a relatively new, community-led, minimal conda installer that (as it says in its readme) "can be directly compared to Miniconda, with the added feature that conda-forge is the default channel".
It is unclear what is different between miniforge and Miniconda, or what the miniforge use case is.
If miniforge is the same as Miniconda except it just uses the conda-forge channel by default, why create a whole different installer - why not just use miniconda and add conda-forge as the first channel to use in ~/.condarc?
If miniforge is different from Miniconda, what is different about the two?
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Miniforge allows you to install the conda package manager with the following features pre-configured: conda-forge set as the default (and only) channel. Packages in the base environment are obtained from the conda-forge channel.
It is a small, bootstrap version of Anaconda that includes only conda, Python, the packages they depend on, and a small number of other useful packages, including pip, zlib and a few others. Use the conda install command to install 720+ additional conda packages from the Anaconda repository.
On Windows, macOS, and Linux, it is best to install Miniconda for the local user, which does not require administrator permissions and is the most robust type of installation. However, if you need to, you can install Miniconda system wide, which does require administrator permissions.
Differences. There are essentially two main differences: Number of packages: Anaconda comes with over 150 data science packages, whereas miniconda comes with only a handful. Interface: Anaconda has a graphical user interface (GUI) called the Navigator, while miniconda has a command-line interface.
While both the conda and miniconda installers are published under a BSD 3-clause license, if you actually use the installed conda clients without removing the Main channel, you'll be in violation of Anaconda's ToS. The miniforge installer avoids this altogether, which is of particular interest to large organizations that wish to use conda.
Both Anaconda and Miniconda uses Conda as the package manager. The difference among Anaconda and Miniconda is that Miniconda only comes the package management system. So when you install it, there is just the management system and not coming with a bundle of pre-installed packages like Anaconda does.
Miniforge3-MacOSX-arm64.sh, which according to its description: OS X | arm64 (Apple Silicon) is also an Apple Silicon, arm64 (M1) compatible version of miniconda. As far as I can tell, the difference in that miniforge comes with only the conda-forge channel enabled. The license.
Basically, Miniconda is just conda and its minimal dependencies. And the environment where conda is installed is the "base" environment, which is previously called "root" environment. Meta packages, are packages that do NOT contain actual softwares and simply depend on other packages to be installed.
miniforge is the community (conda-forge) driven minimalistic conda installer. Subsequent package installations come thus from conda-forge channel.
miniconda is the Anaconda (company) driven minimalistic conda installer. Subsequent package installations come from the anaconda channels (default or otherwise).
miniforge started a few months ago because miniconda doens't support aarch64, very quickly the 'PyPy' people jumped on board, and in the mean time there are also miniforge versions for all Linux architectures, as well as MacOS.
Soon there will also be a windows variant (hopefully also for both CPython and PyPy)
I guess that an ARMv7 (32Bit ARM) variant is also on the horizon (Raspbian)
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