Strategies for avoiding having to use --break-system-packages with pip

I have a (relatively) clean Debian 12 installation running on my two
workhorse systems, a desktop server at home and my laptop that travels
around with me.

I moved from Xubuntu to Debian on both these systems a few months ago.

I ran Xubuntu for many years and acquired a whole lot of python
packages installed with pip, as root.  For the last couple of years I
had to use the --break-system-packages option to get things installed.

As far as I'm aware I never hit any dependency problems doing this.
It's probably because things I installed with pip were mostly quite
small, specialised, packages that I used in just one or two utility
programs that I had written myself.  In quite a few cases these were
realated to image processing and such things.


So far I've managed to keep my Debian 12 installations 'pip free', I
haven't even got pip installed.  However I may have just come across
something that would at least be very useful and it comes from PyPi.
(It's tkintertable if that's of any interest or relevance)


What are my options?
  
    Just install it using pip as root and --break-system-packages,
    what's likely to break?

    Use a virtual environment, what do I have to do then to make using
    my program (that uses tkintertable) 'transparent', i.e. I just
    want to be able to run the program from the command prompt like
    any other program.

    Download tkintertable from git into my development environment and
    use that.  My PYTHONPATH will need to point to it but I can't see
    any further issues with doing this.

    Anything else?  As far as I can see using pipx doesn't help me at
    all (see recent thread here).

--
Chris Green
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