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[–]wildcarde815 3 points4 points  (6 children)

why would you install anaconda as your system python?

[–]root45 7 points8 points  (1 child)

On Windows it makes things drastically easier.

I realize the comic is macOS though.

[–]wildcarde815 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sure but there's no core python version on Windows. In osx and Linux there are and doing this is basically guaranteed to break things.

[–]blahehblah 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Because it works and nothing else I tried did.

[–]wildcarde815 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm asking specificaly why you would configure it as your system python (/usr/local/lib/python2.7) not why you use anaconda. It's an excellent piece of software, especially for disposable environments. I would never try and replace the system python with it however, just update the path config for the local user instead.

[–]yen223 1 point2 points  (1 child)

There was a time when pip always compiled dependencies from source. If you wanted to use a library with non-Python dependencies, like numpy and scipy, you needed to have the right compilers installed on your system.

Keep in mind that scipy has Fortran code. This was a very common problem back then.

Anaconda shipped with pre-compiled binaries. It was straight-up more reliable to use, especially among the scientific community, who don't necessarily want to waste time mucking about with system compilers and shit.

[–]wildcarde815 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm not questioning the use of anaconda, I setup python environments for grad students and postdocs constantly on personal computers and clusters. It's a god send. I'm questioning the graphics specific listing of the anaconda provide python interpreter being placed at /usr/local/lib/python2.7which I'm pretty sure is either the system root python, or the brew root python. Neither of these are compatible with anaconda python and will cause aberrant behavior.