Ahhh the classic lsb_release issue. I have battled this problem many times. The issue is that your default Python implementation is trying to use Python 3 but lsb_release requires Python 2. To fix this problem do the following:
- Open
/usr/bin/lsb_release(Make sure you use sudo or open as root!) - Edit the first line to be
#! /usr/bin/python2.7 - Save the file
now you can use pip again and everything should be fine.
UPDATE May 2019: Newer versions of Linux are shipping with Python3 by default. As noted in the comments here, you may just need to use a specific version of Python 3.