You can use pyenv. it will handle everything. https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv

There are like 10,000 different solutions, but I would just recommend using what's built in to python

If you have multiple versions installed you should be able to call python3.12 to use 3.12, etc

Best practice is to use a different virtual environment for every project, which is basically a copy of an existing installed python version with its own packages folder. Calling pip with the system python installs it for the entire OS. Calling it with sudo puts the packages in a separate package directory reserved for the operating system and can create conflicts and break stuff (as far as I remember, this could have changed in recent versions)

Make a virtual environment with python3.13 -m venv venv the 2nd one is the directory name. Instead of calling the system python, call the executable at venv/bin/python3

If you do source venv/bin/activate it will temporarily replace all your bash commands to point to the executables in your venv instead of the system python install (for pip, etc). deactivate to revert. IDEs should detect the virtual environment in your project folder and automatically activate it

I started using hatch lately and really like how I can manage everything from the pyproject.toml file

https://github.com/pypa/hatch

https://github.com/jdx/mise