Now your user need to learn a lot about Docker to edit anything. And you need to find a place to host those huge images. What's free today may not be in a year, see Docker Hub.

Edit: Not saying offering it as an option is bad. But your pip install should work regardless, scipy=0.10.1 is bad whether you offer a Docker image or not.

docker is not the right tool for the job here. this is not an app. this is a nacent project and if you want people to benefit from the underlying code, and contribute back to it to grow this field, you provide proof of concept code, not full, complex and opinionated interfaces that are all crufted up with containerization/packaging. venv is a core module of python and its dead simple to get a virtual environment up and running. you dont have to do any crazy things to expose hardware to it (GPUS), you just run two commands to create and source the environment and then everything just works.