It's pretty sane if you are also a python programmer. I personally can no longer keep track of how I installed/set up my environments and would much prefer everything under a single package manager (instead of pip, easy install, eggs, virtual env, apt-get, nvm, npm, docker, brew, macports, etc etc).

Conda is not a python package manager. It's just a package manager. You can keep all kinds of software in your home folder.

The biggest advantage for me is using conda environments to avoid having to install everything globally. That way if I want to switch back and forth between python2 and python3 or different versions of node, I can just do `source activate foo`.

Yea, I wish there was more of this, but the limiting factor is walkthrough documentation for folks who are new to packaging to learn to create and debug conda packages. I have long wanted to write an such and intro tutorial, but only recently succeeded in learning how to build packages and haven't had the time science.

The real problem is that creating a good intro developer experience takes sustained skilled time. I'm right now working on a similar project at GoCardless and we've got 3 engineers and a designer focused almost full-time on writing, designing, and user-testing our API tutorial. The Conda community would either have a patreon to sponsor someone to work on it, or convince a company to do that.