[wcrossbow]

Here is one piece of knowledge earned the hard way. Do not use the official python GDAL bindings (`pip install GDAL`) unless you really must. Go with rasterio and don't look back.

[dagw]

Go with rasterio and don't look back

Excellent advice. Add fiona and shapely for manipulating vector data, and pyproj for projections and coordinate systems. Yes there are corner cases where installing 'real' GDAL is still needed, but for most common use cases you can avoid it.

[whinvik]

Yes, I have generally tried to do that. But sometimes there are third party libraries that depend on GDAL and then there's no way around it.