You can't use conda in many (most?) cases. Specifically, there aren’t conda packages for every Python package. And if there are, they are behind their pip alt

You can't use conda in many (most?) cases. Specifically, there aren’t conda packages for every Python package. And if there are, they are behind their pip alternatives in many cases. Sometimes you then need to fall back to pip. However, it is impossible to install some packages into conda environments via pip. So basically the whole solution falls apart because the python libs you install via pip can't find C libraries installed via conda. Edit: One example is: https://github.com/ContinuumIO/anaconda-issues/issues/177 https://github.com/ContinuumIO/anaconda-issues/issues/177 Their solution was to include openssl into conda. Clearly, this solution doesn't generalize to other libs. Just things that use openssl.