I don't think that was a reason for scientists to use windows. It maybe allowed those used to windows to keep using it. Or maybe you only mean it was reason t

I don't think that was a reason for scientists to use windows. It maybe allowed those used to windows to keep using it. Or maybe you only mean it was reason to choose Windows over Mac? Because on Linux, installing python with libraries has always been trivially automatic. My windows experiences have always been hunting the net for hopefully compatible installers from 7 different sources and hope it won't mess my python installation... And it always ends up constraining the version I can use. - Python(x,y) was a step forward but stagnated on python 2. - Sagemath, which bundles a huge collection of scientific software gave up on installing on Windows. To this day, their answer is a virtualbox linux image. (It's also been a strong reason for developing SageMath Cloud, so people don't need to install Sage at all.) - Disclaimer: haven't tried Conda.