> And that's before we start talking about conflicts that can occur between Python libraries....which, let's face it will happen in an "average Joe" environment

> And that's before we start talking about conflicts that can occur between Python libraries....which, let's face it will happen in an "average Joe" environment where Joe is just randomly using apt to install any Python dependencies. What kind of conflicts are you talking about? In both Debian and Ubuntu repos, all Python packages and their dependencies are nicely versioned and separated so there can't be any conflicts between Python versions. As for the handful of Python packages that are mutually exclusive (Pillow and PIL), either only one implementation is in the repos or you can install any one of them and have it work since they're drop-on replacements. Now, if you start installing system-wide packages with sudo pip, you'll of course break things, but if you're installing things from the apt repos, there is no reason to ever do this (and pip will yell at you that you shouldn't do it).