Hacker News Reader

I love it on Windows but I wonder why you use it on Linux. What does it do better than the alternative (native packages and pip)?

View on HN

One word - isolation.

One issue with using your system's packaging system is that a lot of system utilities are written in Python which makes it harder to play around with new versions, bleeding edge libs, etc.

Virtualenv is pretty good for isolation.

I use pyenv on my Mac https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv

Not for binary packages, which usually end up requiring libraries installed into /user/local (and let's not get started about the mess that is Python binary deployment on Windows).

infinite8s beat me to it, exactly what he/she said.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com