Really? I was told Mint was supposed to be the kiddie-pool version of Linux, but it gave me GCC and a bunch of common dependencies anyway.

(By my understanding, `pyenv install` will expect to be able to run a compiler to build a downloaded Python source tarball. Uv uses prebuilt versions from https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone ; there is work being done in the Python community on a standard for packaging such builds, similarly to wheels, so that you can just use that instead of compiling it yourself. But Python comes out of an old culture where users expect to do that sort of thing.)

In Debian build-essential package is only recommended dependency of pip. Pyenv obviously wouldn't work without it.