While there are certainly advantages to Anaconda, I've never encountered any troubles installing Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, or scikit-learn on any OS X or linux syst

While there are certainly advantages to Anaconda, I've never encountered any troubles installing Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, or scikit-learn on any OS X or linux system. In my experience, getting GCC up and running is far more of a pain in the ass (and it usually isn't even that bad). I use pyenv[1] and pyenv-virtualenv[2] to easily keep track of Python versions and virtual environments. I keep one virtual environment for each project I'm working on, and things prettymuch Just Work. [1]: https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv [2]: https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv-virtualenv https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv-virtualenv