Until about 7 or 8 years ago, install pretty much always meant build from source; wheels only came in fairly recently in the history of Python and are still not

Until about 7 or 8 years ago, install pretty much always meant build from source; wheels only came in fairly recently in the history of Python and are still not universal, as you've found out. You'll typically have problems on: * ARM Linux * POWER9/10 * Alpine distros which use MUSL for the C library (https://rpep.dev/posts/alpine-python-antipattern/ https://rpep.dev/posts/alpine-python-antipattern/) * Some packages which depend on C libraries that are difficult to build on Windows (fault of the C libraries rather than Python really). Conda (and previous tools before it like Enthought Canopy) were designed to try to fix this problem, since the core Python packaging tooling just wasn't good enough. Wheels were proposed as a PEP extension and adapted but it took years for common packages to be built as wheels and even now there's nowhere near universal coverage for them even on common platforms.