[juriansluiman]

Afaik, it has nothing to do with Ubuntu or any other Linux distro specifically, but this is rather a choice from python itself. See PEP394 [1]:

"for the time being, all distributions should ensure that python refers to the same target as python2."

I read above as the python community itself made "python" the default for python 2.7 and "python3" for python 3.x. Nevertheless, an unfortunate choice at this time. I understand the reasoning at the time of writing (March 2011) but now this should be reconsidered.

    [1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/

[rtpg]

We actually hit an unfortunate consequence of this with some scripts being called in python 2 mode while we were working in a python 3 virtual environment.