On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 01:46:01PM -0400, Michael Galea via talk wrote: > I imagine he will want to run the Linux instance in the background so he can > get access to a personal git server. > > The course he is taken is in game design and it is mixed Windows/Linux, so > what he actually uses the Linux for will be mandated by the school. > I myself would push him completely to Linux but for: > 1) Some game design systems have sole support or better support under > Windows (according to him), > 2) Windows seems to be his preferred development target, > 3) He plays a lot (too many really) games on Windows. > > Well, he did come to my work to pick up some professional development > working in C on Linux, so he's not inexperienced. He can still be turned > from the dark side. > > We have 5 dedicated Linux machines in the home, 3 are always on. (I am not > counting the multitude of tablets and embedded Linux devices, only things I > upgrade on a regular basis). > We have one Windows machine is entirely dedicated to games, but runs Chrome, > Thunderbird, Libreoffice and the Gimp instead of whatever Microsoft runs). I > would ditch Windows 10 if Wine was good enough. > > And there is my Son's Windows machine, whatever is on that (shudders). > > Good point, but I suspect that the laptop should be meaty enough to play the > things he develops on it. He uses unity and recommendations for building a > dev machine range from 8-32 GB. > > He can always rsync from the residence to the (family) home for backup. > > Thanks to all the subsequent commenters! Summarizing: > 1) Don't forget VirtualBox, it works well. Some say try Hyper-V since it is > native. But then he would need Windows Professional, hmmm. > 2) Make sure the processor support Intel's VT-x for 64 bit development. > 3) Consider an SSD. > 4) Some say 8GB memory is enough, some favour 32GB. The university > recommends 8GB at minimum. > 5) It was pointed out has Microsoft has "Linux subsystem for Windows", but > its command line only.
Well if you are doing unity development and 3D games, that something like a Thinkpad P51 might be what to look at. I have have a W530 myself at home (the 5 year old predecessor to it) and a W541 at work. (They went W530, W540 (and W541 with a fixed trackpoint), P50 and P51). I helped a friend get a P50 for development work last year and she likes it a lot. They max out at 64GB ram, so 32GB is trivial for those, and they can fit two 1TB disks if you really need it, or a mix of disk and SSD (which is how I run mine which has 1TB disk and 1TB SSD). -- Len Sorensen --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk