I work professionally providing some of these tools and I get lost with all the variations so you're not alone. You generally don't want to mess with the "system" or "preinstalled" version of python on your system as it has a chance of breaking things. Anaconda or similar tools will package their own version so if you mess those up you can just delete it and reinstall it without breaking anything else. Virtual environments are definitely the way to go but get 10 python developers in a room and they'll give you 10 different virtual environment tool recommendations.