What do you use escape for in emacs? It’s not in any default kebinding, do you mean vi? Even that doesn’t need escape, ctrl + ] keeps you on the home row.
I just use nix on OS X, better package manager than most linux distros have. I have my own copies of py2/3 and the system one, not a huge deal to be honest (outside of the pain of linux side nixos updates breaking derivations for macOS, but thats generally not a fault of the os).
I assume (presume perhaps) they're a windows user and the -dev mention is more for the case where debug symbols and packages are separated from non debug binaries.
I only know that windows does something different more akin to debug symbols in each binary by default with chicanery to not have it impact things in the general case. But I'm not a windows programmer this is about as much as I know about windows in that regard.