Dineshkumar Ponnusamy

There are two different versions of python. One is the older version 2.x and there is new forked version 3.x. The only problem is 3.0 doesn't have backward compatibility, which means the program written for 2.x cannot be run on 3.x and vice versa.

Python 2.x vs Python 3.x

Till today, there are certain group of people who are stick to 2.x version and some of them using 3.x version. There are only minor changes, most of the packages (libraries or 3rd party supporting scripts) supports both the version.

There is no hard and fast rule for version, you can choose whatever you want. In my humble opinion you can choose 3.x if you never used python, because the old version (2.x) is officially discontinued from 2010, no major releases after 2.7.

For Linux users, Python 2.x versions are installed by default, if you have any Linux based OS released after 2010, likely you will have 3.0 but anytime you can install 3.x.