Thanks for all the answers. So, yes, it is clear that installing cmake with pip is a bad idea. By the way, I only use pip in virtualenvs and install packages for the whole system with pacman or from PKGBUILDs from AUR. But let me explain a little bit more the origin of this question, because maybe you can also find the problem faster than me. I was trying to find an issue trying to compile python-scikit-build. Note in that the current PKGBUILD in AUR fails because there are some missing python2 packages that were removed from official repos. But in the comments, @bnavigator left a fixed PKGBUILD. I leave the link here: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:bnavigator:archlinux/python-sci... Note also that he included a patch from upstream to modify platform.linux_distribution() (which was removed in python 3.8) to distro.id(). However, when trying to build this package we both get the same error: TypeError: dist must be a Distribution instance This is solved, however, when using cmake from pip in a virtualenv. So maybe this is some issue related to python-setuptools, cmake (or other package) from official repos? Again, thanks for all the answers. Best wishes, Iyán