I'm a big fan of Ubuntu. The ability to easily get utilities/apps as you need them is very nice. After that, I'd take Mac OS X (which is not Linux, but is UNIX). I never found Debian, Red Hat, nor SuSe to be as pleasant as OS X or Ubuntu.
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Best Linux distribution for computational work
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Posted 1 month ago #
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^^ doing anything computationally intensive (i.e. days of continuous calculations) on a laptop would be stupid. Thus ^^^^ and ^^^^^ assume the laptop user will prefer the most user friendly distribution. Debian is more stable than Ubuntu and would be the preferred option for machines designed not to fail (servers and some desktops).
Posted 1 month ago # -
^ Ah, good point.
Posted 1 month ago # -
All you need is Excel
Posted 1 month ago # -
slackware
Posted 1 month ago # -
weeeee my OS is as cool as q36`s!!
Posted 1 month ago # -
If you are going to run Linux and are not into being a sysadmin, use Ubuntu. If you are concerned about computational performance today, it is more about CPU speed, RAM, and disk I/O and little about the OS. Check out the 8-Core MacPro, that's a monster. But to be honest, I am running a MacBookPro with 2.8 GHz Core-Duo and 8GB of RAM and it suits me just fine. I have Ubuntu and XP in virtual machines- check out VirtualBox for more info.
Posted 1 month ago # -
Ubuntu for me. Configure hard drives as RAID disks for fail-safe. If the program is very computationally intensive and you still want to work on your computer for other things, use ionice.
- http://linux.die.net/man/1/ionice
Posted 1 month ago #