Before conda, you needed a C and a fortran compiler, a BLAS and LAPACK installation, and various build tools, to install scipy. Scipy is one - 1 - dependency used in science and engineering. The pain used to be massive. Now, we’re complaining about the existence of 2 high quality (not perfect) alternatives, and pip (part of the official python distro) can install tensorflow etc, GPU libs included, with a oneliner.