[ddj] Computer recommendations

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Quoting Randall Wright <rw26 at lrw.net>:

> I have a mac laptop (work supplied) that boots windows and linux as
> well as mac all via vmware. It is very useful as I often get tasked
> with website front end work which means I need to look at my work on
> internet explorer and safari as well as firefox, opera and the like.
> The mac comes with the BSD command line tools like ssh that are a pain
> to set up under windows. But I prefer to work in linux.
> I use R, perl, php,. python, libreoffice, msql and mongo db as well as
> various dbm implementations.
>
> Actually, I can run all three operating systems at the same time in
> different windows on virtual desktops in linux, but memory can get
> scarce and Windows get even more unstable than it usually is. And,
> vmware multiple operating systems seem to run considerably slower than
> booting into a single os.
>
> Randy

Just about every "web developer" I know uses a Mac and Chrome. Very  
few of them run VMware and I have yet to meet one that dual-boots.  
I've never owned a Mac - it's a fine machine but the hardware is  
overpriced for the kind of scientific workstation tools I use.

Just about all the major open source tools have native ports for both  
Windows and Macintosh. R/RStudio, an Apache/PHP/MySQL stack, Perl,  
Ruby and Python, LibreOffice *and* VirtualBox all work on Windows and  
Macintosh. Most of the core tools on OSGeo-Live have Windows and Mac  
installers as well.

Personally I don't like VirtualBox; it's slow and only the core is  
open source. My modus operandi is to buy Windows laptops and dual-boot  
them with Linux as soon as I get all the drivers nailed down. But  
that's not how most of the web developers I know do things. ;-)

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