Seeing RHEL/CentOS keep coming up led me to some googling and the first result for "RHEL python" is http://www.python.org/download/linux/ http://www.python.org/

Seeing RHEL/CentOS keep coming up led me to some googling and the first result for "RHEL python" is http://www.python.org/download/linux/ http://www.python.org/download/linux/ (about as official as it gets) which says The IUS Community Project maintains recent versions of Python for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS. Installations are parallel installed next to stock versions of python therefore don't disrupt the functionality of critical python utilities on the system. Doesn't that solve the issue and keep you from being hamstrung by those distros?