It takes precedence in the path over everything...and in the last version I used (before I upgraded to OS X El Capitain and wiped out everything), things like `curl` were provided [1] ...which I completely understand for Anaconda&#x27;s use case, but it caused a lot of confusing grief to me when I hadn&#x27;t expected that and OpenSSL was having its rough times.<p>I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s the case (curl being part of the package) now, with Anaconda 3 2.4.0+? It certainly isn&#x27;t so when installed via pyenv, so I&#x27;m happy with that. But there were other issues in the past build...BeautifulSoup was inexplicably broken. I mean that it simply did not correctly parse non-trivial HTML pages and yet threw no errors. The results could be replicated for all of my students but I never could isolate the issue... I installed Python 3 and the same version of BS4 from scratch and had no problems, but I can&#x27;t imagine where the Anaconda build would have gotten wrong. It ended up being OK since I just switched to lxml which I now happily use over BS4 on any day, but it was frustrating to not be able to diagnose the problem (I didn&#x27;t get a response in the support forums either). I&#x27;m assuming this problem has gone away in subsequent versions of Anaconda though I haven&#x27;t tried since lxml is perfectly fine to me.<p>And finally...well, I have to admit it, but I use Python like a goddamned moron in that I still don&#x27;t know how to use virutalenv&#x2F;venv to do proper dev isolation. And from the brief research I did, I see that Anaconda has its own conventions, or work flow...something with the conda utility. Again, I can see why it&#x27;s necessary for Anaconda&#x27;s use case (people who want to do data science and not hand-tweak their environment every time they upgrade a package over pip), but it added too many layers for me at the time.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;continuum.io&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!topic&#x2F;anaconda&#x2F;XCSUmZbNqn4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;continuum.io&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!topic&#x2F;anaco...</a>