Conda is a package manager
This article cleared up what (Ana)conda precisely is. Altough I’ve used the miniconda installers and the mkl-built numpy library for a long time to get modern and fast version of the various scientific libraries working on a variety of platforms (Ubuntu with outdated matplotlib, CentOS servers with even more outdated or simply unavailable packges, Windows desktops). So it turns out conda is a package manager (I’ve always used the command as such) and just provides hosting for the packages. Anaconda is the distribution that you can also download, and then possible pay for support on. I did not know that conda is pippable!