[rbanffy]

> Is this much worse than downloading some installer and running it?

Yes.

You should inspect what you download.

Also, you should probably use the Python interpreters provided by your Linux distro, that stay in directories you usually can't write to and come in signed packages. On a Mac, the next best thing would be MacPorts.

[rovr138]

Nothing here overrides there system wide Python version.

The article specificially goes into why not to do it.

> pyenv allows us to set up any version of Python as a global Python interpreter but we are not going to do that. There can be some scripts or other programs that rely on the default interpreter, so we don’t want to mess that up.

[rbanffy]

Using the Python interpreters in your system doesn't mean you can't make virtualenvs out of them - it's just that they are precompiled and well supported on your specific OS.

I used custom Python interpreters a lot and it's nice to be able to rely on the system to provide a sensible environment instead of forcing myself to build my own.