So if you want to download precompiled static binaries and "install" them into your home directory or /usr/local/bin that's fine. You can do that, and it works,

So if you want to download precompiled static binaries and "install" them into your home directory or /usr/local/bin that's fine. You can do that, and it works, although now you're stuck in the same quagmire Windows users are stuck in. My question though... why? Everything about that seems to me worse in every way. Specifically regarding python, on my system right now, I have python 2.7, 3.8.5 and 3.9rc1 installed on my system and maintained by the package manager. When 3.9rc2 or 3.9.0 final is released it will update to that. It's configured to run 3.8.5 when I just run "python", although I can manually run other versions by running the command python2 or python3.9, and I could reconfigure the default to be one of the other versions if I wanted. The package manager has versions going back to 3.4. I guess I don't understand the desire to install python manually - what can you do with a manually installed python that you can't do with the one installed by the package manager?