If your conda environment is taking a long time to solve (or failing to solve altogether), you might want to try mamba, which reimplements conda in C++ with an improved dependency solving algorithm.

To install in your existing conda setup (from their instructions on Github)

conda install mamba -n base -c conda-forge

Then you should be able to run mamba instead of conda for commands like creating environments:

mamba env create -n my_project --file environment.yml

It's not a complete replacement for conda (yet), you still have to use conda activate to activate your environments, but it seems to greatly speed up installing packages and creating environments.

The same developers have also created rhumba, a similar package manager for R - this might also be worth looking at for creating reproducible R environments.