technically you can use some system wide packages and the ones in your conda env. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it fully and it’s definitely not the easiest but we do have something called the escape hatch which allows you to access package outside the conda environment from within it. The use case we have for this internally is to access company specific packages that are installed on all images from inside any conda environemnt. It typically involves authentication or access to certain resources. So that is possible but I wouldn’t use it for vanilla packages because it would be a pain to setup and probably won’t work in all cases 🙂.