I want to address several of the comments. I used to work for continuum, but I no longer do. I didn't work on the conda team, but as a part of the other teams at continuum, and at my new gig I'm a heavy conda user

1. linux package management is sufficient - this isn't the case. linux package management couples your library versions with your distro verison. Meaning if I want to do something like try out my code with the latest pandas, or run 2 jobs with different versions of numpy I'm out of luck

2. conda went ahead and forked everything without regard for the community - this is completely untrue. We sat down with guido for the very first pydata at google offices in 2012 to discuss many issues, packaging being one of them. Guido acknowledged that the python packaging ecosystem isn't sufficient for the scientific community, and we should go out and solve the problem ourselves - so we did. Honestly on this point, you should just read travis' words about the issue

http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.sg/2013/12/why-i-promote-...

Scientific users need to be able to package non-python libs along with python libs (think zmq, or libhdf5, or R) we need a pkg mgmt solution that sits OUTSIDE of python for this reason. You can think of conda as a little in between place between virtualenv and docker