When using the common "#!/usr/bin/env python" shebang, recent versions of the Python launcher will search the PATH for "python" as specified in the shebang.

But Python on Windows installs as python.exe for all versions, both 2 and 3. So in a PC where Python 3 is first on PATH, this shebang will choose Python 3. That's in contrast to any other shebang like "#!python" or "#!/usr/bin/python" which will prefer Python 2.

That's rather subtle and confusing...

To the best of my knowledge most Linux distros still install Python 2 as python and Python 3 as python3 (I think that's in the Makefile too). But of course there might also be distros that install python3 as python.

See the discussion in issue 28686 regarding the use of version detection and/or versioned executable names with env shebangs. I think the launcher should at least support searching PATH for pythonX.exe and pythonX.Y.exe, so users can at least manually copy or symlink to python.exe.

This is not strictly a duplicate of issue28686, but it's close enough, so let's keep the discussion of changing the original shebang behaviour over on that issue.