uv itself is the only Python tool I install globally now, and it's a self-contained binary that doesn't rely on Python. ruff is also self-contained, but I install tools like ruff (and Python itself) into each project's virtual environment using uv. This has nice benefits. For example, automated tests that include linting with ruff do not suddenly fail because the system-wide ruff was updated to a version that changes rules (or different versions are on different machines). Version pinning gets applied to tooling just as it does to packages. I can then upgrade tools when I know it's a good time to deal with potentially breaking changes. And one project doesn't hold back the rest. Once things are working, they work on all machines that use the same project repo.

If I want to use Python based tools outside of projects, I now do little shell scripts. For example, my /usr/local/bin/wormhole looks like this:

  #!/bin/sh
  uvx \
      --quiet \
      --prerelease disallow \
      --python-preference only-managed \
      --from magic-wormhole \
      wormhole "$@"

I don't understand why people would rather do this part specfically, rather than activate a venv.