Ubuntu – How to remove Python 2 from Ubuntu 20.04

20.04pythonpython-2.7python3

I've upgraded recently from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. But I can see that Python2 is still the default instead of python 3.8.2.

$ python -V

Python 2.7.18rc1

$ python3 -V

Python 3.8.2

Is it possible to remove python 2 and replace it with Python 3.8?

EDIT:
I have always used the following aliases in my ubuntu 18.04:

alias python='python3'
alias pip='pip3'

After upgrading, I removed those aliases because I thought python2 should no longer be there but it is still there.

Thanks

Before proceeding make sure that you do not really have packages which depend on Python 2.

Then you need to install special package which set aliases for you:

sudo apt-get install python-is-python3

And optionally remove all trails of Python 2 packages manually by

sudo apt-get autoremove --purge

Ah! The problem you seem to be facing is you can't create virtualenv with python3.

And to install dependencies for python3 environment you run pip3 install package-name

Follow these steps for creating virtualenv in python3 environment:

virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 yourenv
source yourenv/bin/activate
pip3 install mysql-connector

after installing both

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo apt-get install python3-pip

under Ubuntu 16.04 I can simply use

pip2 install module
pip3 install module

to install the desired module for Python2 or Python3, respectively.

I hope that is helpful and works for you, too!