<esaw...@gmail.com> wrote: > 4. In the long run, would it be better to use UNIX instead of Windows, if > I were to use Python for all of my research? > Thanks in advance. EK
For scientific computing, a UNIX or Linux system is clearly preferable. Most of the scientific computing software is built around the UNIX ecosystem. This is the reason many scientists prefer to work on a Mac. I have a UNIX system ready to use in the terminal, developer tools are free, and it stills runs all the deskop apps I need (even Microsoft Office). Apple even provides us with highly optimized LAPACK, BLAS and FFT libraries as a part of the operating system (Accelerate Framework). Even the free NumPy and SciPy installers can link to Accelerate on a Mac. Matlab runs on Linux and Mac as well. That is not s reason to stay on Windows. An alternative to a Mac is to install Oracle Virtualbox and use it to run Windows or Linux. Windows as host tends to work best on a laptop. On a workstation it does not matter. If you are using Windows now and are happy with it, I would suggest you just install Ubuntu into an VM with Virtualbox and forget about Windows installers for Python, NumPy, SciPy, et al. Spend some money to buy an SSD drive and more RAM if you need. The performance with Virtualbox is excellent. Get a Python distro that uses MKL for faster linear algebra, such as Enthought or Anaconda. Windows can be a great desktop OS because of all the available applications. It sucks rocks for any coding or scientific computing. But there is no law that says you need to use either. You can have the best of both world's if you like. Sturla -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
