Re: FN-FORUM: Mac vs Linux advice?

date posted 12th January 2005 19:21

Imperial will have some very good facilities, considering they're seen
as one of the top places in the country to do a CS degree (at least they
were almost ten years ago when a mate applied for a masters course
there.) Good luck when you do go.

BTW: Yup, Macs come with SSH built in, used through the usual terminal
window.

Worth a mention: Apple do a good educational discount, so it's worth
having a poke about the website / calling them to find out how much
you'll get off - it could swing the decision their way. Also I'd suggest
going to a shop and giving whatever you're thinking of a try, whether
Mac or PC. And... you can always put Linux on the Mac if you decide OSX
isn't for you :-)

Unless things have changed a lot, a Powerbook would be more than a match
for anything you'd do on an undergrad course. Things will have moved on
a bit, but most of my flatmates did their CS courses on 486s and they
were quicker than the machines in their computer room (the undergrad
server always wheezed a bit.) Hmm... memories of a mate coming to the
lab in my department to download Slackware on to floppy disks when it
was first released.

Paul

On 12 Jan 2005 20:03:26 -0000, "Joe Freeman" said:
>
> Imperial said that they give out licenses for all the software that
> you use, so with a Mac I probably wouldn't be able to make use of
> that. However, they also said that no-one would actually _need_ a
> laptop/PC for uni as they are very proud of their IT facilities.
> Personally I would want a laptop though just to make things easier.
>
> It seems that the main advantage of using Linux would be the 'geeky'
> part, so that's basically just command-line stuff. So, with SSH, I
> could connect to Linux boxes anyway (assuming Mac has SSH) and compile
> kernels to my hearts content - yes, I agree it's overrated.
>
> On 12 Jan 2005 12:08:57 -0000, Paul Silver wrote:
> > However, if this is a masters course (you only mentioned one year)
>
> I'm hoping to do a masters - so I'll be in mega-debt after four years,
> but hopefully get straight into a well paid job afterwards. :-)
>
> Been doing my research on the PowerBook (iBook doesn't seem geeky
> enough) and it seems that the disadvantages of the 12" are: crap
> display, slow disk and slowish processor - are these just faults of
> older models? Is it really as bad as is made out?
>
> It's becoming a really difficult decision, if I was more confident
> with Linux suspend/sleep, I'd be swinging that way. But I really
> appreciate all your comments. :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Joe.
>
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