On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 10:05 PM, James Stroud <xtald...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mac v. Linux where calculations come secondary to office-type > calculations, you have to weigh your level of vendor lock-in. Do you run > Libreoffice or Microsoft Office? Inkscape or Illustrator? Gimp or Photoshop? > Etc. If you are locked-in to commercial products and haven't migrated to open > source, then you may want to think twice about a Linux box. Macs are very > seamless for an office environment, but I don't know if they are appropriate > for heavy-duty calculations given that you'll trade horsepower for the Mac > experience.
In my experience, yes they are (depending on your definition of "heavy-duty" - everything I work with is either small or low-resolution). The real difficulty is integrating Macs into a Linux-centric environment, for example configuring NFS, NIS, etc. Far, far more painful than it needs to be, and for this reason I would avoid Macs for shared workstations or (even worse) servers. But they make excellent standalone systems, are very easy to maintain, and while they may be relatively pricey, some of the premium features (like SSDs) really do make a big difference, and the performance is quite adequate even for the "low-end" laptops like the Air. A $400 Celeron PC laptop, on the other hand, is probably large, heavy, and a piece of junk. -Nat
