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Dear Sergei,
Caution: This is a "free open source"-biased message. It may contain
offensive material (which, nevertheless, accurately represents the
writer's views).
> 1. MS Windows:
> While many people would probably exclude Windows right away,
Right they are ...
Why pay for broken game machine ?
Wouldn't it be a fair deal to donate 1/4 of the money that you would pay
microsoft, to aid development of the free open-source applications that
you will be using for (bio)crystallography ? (and only considering those
projects that accept donations).
> True, a Windows box can never be a full replacement for a Unix
> workstation. However, many pieces of software (not least the CCP4/CCP4i)
> are perfectly usable under Windows!
Just because a bicycle is also a perfectly usable means of traveling,
doesn't mean that we should always prefer bicycles instead of cars,
trains, or airplanes.
> The main advantage in our case,
> and in most other places, probably, is that nearly all students use/own PCs
> (desktops or laptops) already.
So, they can have a proper unix clone (GNU/Linux) with all these beautiful
(and free open-source) applications even at home. If for some reason the
students believe that the acronym "PC" is synonymous with the trademark
"Windoze", then you have plenty of educating to do.
> With Windows, there exist ways and tools that provide
> modalities typical for unix environments -- how usable are
> all these? How usable is cygwin?
Why not using something fully usable in its native environment ? Even if
you can convince a windoze box to behave momentarily as a unix machine,
its (broken) core will eventually subvert the best efforts.
For example, I'm having a hard time trying to imagine a student wanting to
run a parallel job using MPI in a room full of windoze XP boxes.
> 3. Linux:
> Many advantages and one big concern: the difficulty of setting up.
To quote Thomas Scoville (from his article "UNIX As Literature") :
"Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price
of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd
rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon
like NT."
Nicholas
--
Dr Nicholas M. Glykos, Department of Molecular
Biology and Genetics, Democritus University of Thrace,
Dimitras 19, 68100 Alexandroupolis, GREECE, Fax ++302551030613
Tel ++302551030620 (77620), http://www.mbg.duth.gr/~glykos/
