The lightweight part is pretty useful. LXC is definitely overkill. I don't want to have to bridge my graphics and networking over so that I can run programs a

The lightweight part is pretty useful. LXC is definitely overkill. I don't want to have to bridge my graphics and networking over so that I can run programs against different versions of libraries. Going more lightweight, if I'm doing PYTHONPATH and PYTHONHOME, I would start scripting them, script the installation of libraries into my virtual environment that I just recreated badly... --no-site-packages has been default for a while. http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/virtualenv.html#the-system-site-packages-option http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/virtualenv.html#the-syst... I don't really see the argument about compiling against system headers and libs. Generally I do want to isolate my Python modules that are calling into other binary libs but don't care about isolating those binary libs themselves because their interface isn't changing when the Python wrapper for them changes. This is unless they are part of what I'm wanting to develop/deploy with, in which case the source will be in the virtualenv and install into the virtualenv using the config script at worst. A frequent example ends up being how Pygame will compile against some system libvideo.so, the behavior of which I never change, but may Pygames might have their own API's etc, and so the many compiled versions do have their own use. Virtualenv is actually pretty noob friendly because one of the mistakes I see far more frequently than the others is that users will install things using pip system-wide that conflict with the system package manager. This can become pretty difficult to unscrew for inexperienced Linux users. I've been meaning to actually add some virtualenv docs because of the frequency with which inexperienced Python and Linux users in general will waltz in and not be able to compile something because only the old version of Cython etc are on Ubuntu 11.blah and thus we start bringing in distribution-specific package managers into the realm Python package management was intended for and people try to figure out what version of Ubuntu they need instead of figuring out that they can install everything in one place in many instances and maintain an entire slew of projects without conflicts and without calling on IRC when synaptics clobbers things.