I spent like three hours trying to get one of these running and then gave up. I think the paddleOCR one.
It took an hour and a half to install 12 gigabytes of pytorch dependencies that can't even run on my device, and then it told me it had some sort of versioning conflict. (I think I was supposed to use UV, but I had run out of steam by that point.)
Maybe I should have asked Claude to install it for me. I gave Claude root on a $3 VPS, and it seems to enjoy the sysadmin stuff a lot more than I do...
Incidentally I had a similar experience installing open web UI... It installed 12 GB of pytorch crap.. I rage quit and deleted the whole thing, and replicated the functionality I actually needed in 100 lines of HTML.... Too bad I can't do that with OCR ;)
gemini-cli is good for this sort of thing. You can just tell it "Find out why xyz.py doesn't run" and let it crunch. It will try reasonably hard to get you out of Python dependency hell, and (more important) it generally knows when to give up.
But yes, in general, you want to use uv. Otherwise, the next Python application you install WILL break the last one you installed.
I suppose you could use gemini-cli as a substitute for proper Python virtual environment management, always letting it fix whatever broke since the last time you tried to run the program, but that'd be like burning down a rainforest to toast a marshmallow.
It took an hour and a half to install 12 gigabytes of pytorch dependencies that can't even run on my device, and then it told me it had some sort of versioning conflict. (I think I was supposed to use UV, but I had run out of steam by that point.)
Maybe I should have asked Claude to install it for me. I gave Claude root on a $3 VPS, and it seems to enjoy the sysadmin stuff a lot more than I do...
Incidentally I had a similar experience installing open web UI... It installed 12 GB of pytorch crap.. I rage quit and deleted the whole thing, and replicated the functionality I actually needed in 100 lines of HTML.... Too bad I can't do that with OCR ;)