As long as you're installing/updating Python via your distro's package manager you won't break anything. Most horror stories of borked system Pythons are caused

As long as you're installing/updating Python via your distro's package manager you won't break anything. Most horror stories of borked system Pythons are caused by people uninstalling/updating packages from the system Python via pip or fiddling with their PATH. altinstall is only useful if you have to compile Python from source to get it onto your system.