[screature2]

Conda's actually a pretty well respected python distribution package manager from Anaconda.com (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaconda_(Python_distribution)). Anaconda has a lot of the standard scientific python computing packages in addition to a virtual environment and package manager or you could use Miniconda version for just the conda package manager + virtualenv.

I think whether you need a virtualenv depends on your system python version and compatibility of any of the dependencies, but it's also pretty nice to be able to spin up or blow away envs without bloating your main python directory or worrying that you're overwriting dependencies for a different project.