On Thu, October 2, 2014 10:48 am, Keith Keller wrote:
On 2014-10-02, Frank Cox theatre@melvilletheatre.com wrote:
Since it has now become amazingly difficult to get a laptop if you're not planning to use Windows, at least around here, I'm wondering what the rest of you fine folks do when it comes to purchasing a laptop? Next time this comes up, I'd rather not have to spend all day on something that used to take fifteen minutes.
I know this is probably a bit sacrilegious, but recently I have been tending to get a Mac laptop, and run any linux distributions I need inside a VM. OS X is (just barely) tolerable enough to be usable for most of my desktop purposes. (It's not really cost-effective compared to non-Apple laptops, unfortunately.)
Somebody said: having mac is like driving Ferrari. Subaru or Ford will get you there as well, so you just pay extra for chic.
<rant>
Having said that, I do have mac (paid by the Department) so I can support Mac users (and give exact instructions). My particular model of MacBook Pro has known NVIDIA problem (you can search for that): with latest MacOS it kernel panics inside nvidia driver (let's call it: nvidia driver is incompatible with that chip). So: 4 years old decently capable hardware can not be used with latest system. And Apple would not fix that as these machines are beyond 3 year of Apple "protection plan". I reject suggestions to stay with system one version older: the only reason for this laptop was for me to give mac users (whom my job is to recommend to get latest system + updates) exact directions, so _I_ have to have latest system for that. Therefore strong decision not to invest into any Apple hardware whenever possible.
</rant>
Valeri
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++