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`.