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Ask Slashdot: Choosing a Laptop To Support Physics Research?
An anonymous reader writes My daughter is in her third year of college as a physics major. She has an internship in Europe this summer, will graduate next year, and continue with graduate physics studies. Her area of research interest is in gravitational waves and particle physics. She currently has a laptop running Win7 and wants to buy a new laptop. She would like to use Linux on it, and plans to use it for C++ programming, data analysis and simulations (along with the usual email, surfing, music, pictures, etc). For all of the physics-savvy Slashdotters out there: what should she get? PC? Mac? What do you recommend for running Linux? For a C++ development environment? What laptop do you use and how is it configured to support your physics-related activities?
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Both come with supported by the factory Ubuntu installs.. and both are very very fast -- and cheaper than an equivalent spec Mac.
https://help.ubuntu.com/commun...
You can get a DELL XPS 13 with Ubuntu on it for about $1K. Good machine, ssd, the whole nine.
is the best way to go.
but not an Apple Newton
any laptop would do...but my advice to her don't go to grad school in physics...seriously!
I wrote a thesis on my Mac Book Pro. It ran R, postgresql, MS Office, Parallels, etc. with no problem. It was also lightweight and reliable. The only software that crashed on it was MS Office. I just bought a new Mac book Pro and I am running R, VMWare, Office, VPN clients, remote desktop clients. etc. It is easy to use which means I spend more time working on my problem domain and less time working as my own IT support. Which is important, you do not want to worry about your computer, just about your problem domain. Every hour waster trying to chase down 'mystery crashes' is an hour of life wasted.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Why would she need anything specific ? Any entry level laptop will have more CPU and GPU capability to do whatever she's gonna be asked. I doubt she will end up doing fine-grained world-wide weather simulation or end up requiring building Chromium from source. Hardware-spec wise, this is a pointless question... As for PC/Mac, it is also pointless. You buy Apple-branded products if you want all the Apple coziness and conviviality of OS X, the underlying machine is pretty much identical...
Does she want to / need to run the same software as her colleagues? If so, then the answer is an easy one.....
...who spent years at CERN, tell her to also learn Python. C++ is great too. They each have their specialty.
Mac laptops are very popular and useful at CERN. Macbooks are really popular with Particle Physicists and Astronomers, I think because it lets us run Microsoft PowerPoint (a necessary evil) and linux command-line tools, and write code. Linux is used on the compute clusters there.
Read OP's question. *She* wants Linux.
... if it's good enough for Sheldon, it's good enough for you!
I'm an astrophysicist, my wife is a high energy physicist. Most of our colleagues use Macs of some sort, either Mac Book Pros or Mac Book Airs (depending how much local computation you plan on doing). However, we don't use them in a Mac-like fashion, but rather install XQuartz and use them as unix-like boxes. The remainder use Linux. Nobody serious uses Windows -- it almost qualifies as a warning sign when you see somebody doing so.
The idea behind using Macs is to be able to live in a mostly unix-like environment but also be able to run power point or the equivalent -- the open source presentation software situation is pretty disappointing at the moment, and giving presentations is a pretty critical part of the job.
The Macs with Retina displays are second-to-none. Visually spectacular that nothing comes close to. Get a model that has the memory/processor you want and put VirtualBox on it for Linux and run it full-screen. I don't do physics, but I spend most of my time in the Linux VM. It's wonderful. I'm not a fan-boy, but the Apple hardware is worth it.
MacBook Pro + XCode (including command-line tools)
Daily work: MacTex, GIMP, SAGE, python (plus scipy, etc).
Utilities: brew, github
Also: TextWrangler, LibreOffice
Your daughter can install all of these herself, with advice/help from fellow students.
Non-free: Mathematica, matlab find common usage ... but are costly for non-students.
Physics can be huge data sets and FEA type programs, in which case you get the highest end laptop you can afford. Otherwise, pick a laptop known for reliability with quick service when something goes wrong.
Me, I would rather have a MacBook Pro which I can run Window, Mac, Linux, etc. Yup, Dell's workstation class laptops, the M2800 to M6800 systems, but they are MacBook Pro type prices.
But does she want it as a main operating system or does she want to be able to work with Linux? In the later case, I'd say just run it as a virtual machine above windows. That gives much less issues with hardware drivers, and makes it also much easier to copy the setup to another machine if anything goes wrong.
Matlab and Mathematica both have Linux and Mac OS versions. In terms of C++ development tools, there are some that are Windows only, but there are several that are both Linux and Mac OS. The big problem with buying a Linux laptop is making sure everything works. There's System 76 and Dell has a developer laptop that supports Linux. But if you look around you'll find plenty of other options. Many laptops that don't expressly say "works with linux" will often work with Linux, if you spend the time to get the wireless cards and graphics to work. Some, like the high end Lenovos, usually run Linux quite well. In some cases the machines might run a little hot. Also, you can always run Linux in a virtual machine on a Mac using VMWare, Virtual box or Parallels. There's no legal way to run Mac OSX on a Linux laptop in virtualization.
If she wants Linux, however, there's probably a good reason. For example, I wind up have to hand build and monkey patch some machine learning libraries because they work with Linux and I'm running Mac OS X. If I were running Linux I could just do a simple install of the software. It's not the end of the world, but it can be a time sink. Also, running Linux under visualization is not ideal if you do a lot of graphics oriented processing. For example, visualizing data. Granted, my daughter is 6, but if she wanted a Linux machine, I'd get her one. (She's already got an account on a Linux desktop at home).
I'm surprised to read she's planning to use C++; most physics theoretical computational stuff isn't done with an object oriented language, but a procedural language (like C or Fortran*) or in something like Mathematica or MATLAB. But whatever the kids are into these days. ... I have noticed that a lot of folks at e.g. JPL use Macbooks -- unless there's a very specific reason to choose Linux over Darwin, OS X will scratch that Unix itch, and you can always throw on a second partition and use bootcamp or VMWare Fusion to run Windows stuff.
*Yes, good old Fortran is still very much alive and kicking for scientific computing done on big iron.
I am a particle physicist working at a large particle physics laboratory in the Geneva area...
If you want to go particle physics mainstream: get a mac
Otherwise: get a windows laptop and run a virtual machine with linux on it.
I do the latter. All major coding is done on a linux desktop machine. Small things can be done on the virtual machine.
From my experience windows is better at dealing with various video conferencing systems, and there are less problems accessing the wireless network at my workplace.
Linux friendly, tough, ROOTS ready, with eco-battery mode battery can last the grad school
As a tell all of our new hires. "It's just a linux machine with a nice UI."
If you spring for AppleCare you can't go wrong. Apple warranty and support have no equal when you can go into a physical store and have the problem addressed.
At the top end:
https://system76.com/cart/conf...
http://www.dell.com/us/busines...
(customizable with Ubuntu 14.04)
What do you recommend for running Linux?
The latest Ubuntu LTS is a good start.
For a C++ development environment?
I really like Code::Blocks, but I'm thinking that wi'll be up to her...
An nVidia GPU helps accelerate the only "gravitational wave" program I've ever run (https://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/). Likely not relevant, but hey you did ask Slashdot.
Not sure why wanting to use Linux and buying a new Laptop are related. If she wants Linux, simply install a Linux distro (Ubuntu is one of the easiest distros to work with but quite bloated) on her Win7. It should give her dual boot option when start the laptop.
My laptop supports all the laws of phyics, including gravity and thermodynamics. What kind of experiments does she look at doing with the laptop?
IMHO Desktops is where all the development goes - simply because you can get a more powerful configuration for less (yes you can still develop an a laptop but you will be sacrificing power/monitors for portability). Anyhow my recommendations apply to both (laptop and desktop):
As for development (C++ on Linux - I am making a game):
- A modern CPU (last two years) will do (the more cores you have the more parallel computation you can do). I am running an old (ancient by standards) core I7 920 so any modern laptop I7 or AMD cpu will do
- For memory you should get 6 GB minimum (I had to upgrade from 6 GB to 12 as I am running 8 computational threads), so you will need the memory for that (speed does not matter that much IMO)
- SSD for hard drives are nice but for computation I have found to be more CPU bound than IO bound.
As for Visualization (I have basic experience but this is my advice):
- Good GPU (Again mostly on preference whether you want AMD or NVidia. I have both and both have issues).
As for linux:
I use Mint. But I find this to be more of a preference than actual merit. Any will do (and depends on her comfort level)
The problems with laptops compared to desktop is that with a desktop you can get much better equipment (GPU and CPU especially) that will be much more powerful that the mobile counter part for the same price.
(Yes I have laptop, no I do not develop on it due to screen size and power of the desktop).
Probably. Suggest she use virtualbox or VMware to build a couple of vm's that she can then use to run whatever OS her contemporaries run, so she can share code with the department she works in... getting her something with a lot of disk and ram to support those multiple OSes is a good idea....
and as another commenter pointed out, the best people to ask this question of are the Department Head of the department she is going to.
Some communities/collaborations use their PC for mail and as a terminal, do everything through ssh (or putty) on clusters.
Some mainly use Macs for C/C++ development.
Some use Matlab/Mathematic/other package on Windows.
Some use Scientific Linux, and you find everything nicely packaged as rpm.
Some use Debian, and you find everything nicely packaged as pkg.
There's some beefy laptops out there, but if you're doing data analysis and simulations you're going to have to be plugged in 24/7. At that point you lose the main benefit of a laptop while still losing in the performance department.
Get a desktop.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Get a good space on E3, then get a chromebook or some dumb terminal to act as the end machine.
You need to make a list of compelling reasons not to get a MacBook Pro. It can do anything Linux does, has a command-line environment, really awesome development tools, and just works - well, better than anything else just works. And it's fairly high quality. and a physics person doesn't need to be dinking around with Linux config. So make a list of compelling reasons to not use a MBP, and if they're compelling enough, get something else. Dell has a Linux laptop for developers.
...that connects to a Beowulf cluster.
If she is going to be running simulations, I suggest a processor with at least 4 physical cores, and at least 8 GB of ram. I worked for a few years in a hydroscience department where simulations were run extensively. the software was capable of threading to many cores, and it was a big plus to have those cores available (think hours of processing, versus days). Some of those river simulations could also make use of huge amounts of ram. I think 8 GB would be a good start. Some of the software can also make use of a good GPU for acceleration, but that is more for a desktop than laptop. It doesn't matter which vendor, although intel provides better throughput that AMD in my experience.
I would suggest that you include a graphics tablet. The field you describe is wide. Ranging from heavy number cruncher to equation pusher, so the capabilities of the laptop needed will vary a lot. ( But as a student that's probably not her next laptop but the one after that. )
Also if she needs very heavy processing the university will provide that.
However any physicist will make good use of a graphics tablet, especially a Cintiq type tablet. Though you could save yourself a ton going for Bosto or Yiynova. II understand there are also kits out there that will convert an LCD monitor to a Cintiq clone. BUt such a mod may make your laptop unclosable.
Most distros come with text editors that color-code your text and collapse functions, stuff like that. Linking and compiling from the command line is a breeze. I like Mint Mate a lot as a full featured desktop environment, it has the full support of the ubuntu-compatible software library behind it and also supports debian packages natively. And it's real pretty, especially with Cairo Dock.
The only "entertainment stuff" I've had trouble with on Linux in the past 5 years is transferring music to iPhones, which is 100% Apple's fault. No walled gardens for me.
Local knowledge is key, so it'd be better to find out what everyone else uses and get the same. Research packages are quite often poorly written and documented, so having people who've fixed the problems already is helpful.
Note: I work at a research university doing IT support.
Like it or now, Word and Excel documents are the common format for most large organizations.
This means you need Windows or a Macintosh. (I find as soon as you are doing detailed tech documentation, the various Open Office suites start having trouble with diagrams, complicated formatting, etc.)
Also like it or not, Linux (at best) or *nix at a minimum are also required for most open source science software. Pretty much everything is pre-built for Linux, the Mac is supported by most, but not quite all mainstream science packages.
This means you need Linux or at worst, a Macintosh.
So, my recommendations: Window PC running Linux in a VM or a Macintosh.
Personally, I'd look at an Ultralight (many decent manufacturers + VMWare w/ a pre-built Linux VM) or a MacBook Air. Either will require MS Office.
Especially if she's running simulations or calculations which might run overnight. Get a desktop with tons of CPU, memory and, if you're adventurous, an NVIDIA card or two. Bonus points: spec it out and build it together! Then take the money you saved and buy a cheap netbook (most important factor is ergonomics). Campuses tend to have wireless everywhere, so she can use the netbook to remote in anywhere, any time. And she doesn't have to worry about her web browsing disrupting her computations.
Use what the big boys/girls use: ROOT https://root.cern.ch , includes a C++ interpreter. Most excellent, even for non-physics. Maybe the linux crowd will catch on someday. Handles data for the LHC.
SAGE http://sagemath.org/ fantastic compilation of math software. Must get this immediately.
There's tons of physics software. Linux or Mac. Just erase the Windows, install Linux, let her decide what machine to get next.
All she is likely to be doing to it is browsing data sets and useless crap like that. Any laptop will do. If she needs to crunch numbers, no laptop will do.
Any of the newer Dell Precision M class workstation laptops can do this. M6500s and up are all I-5s and I-7 procs and can go up to 32GB of RAM. They are designed for CAD and engineering simulations. They cost more than consumer class laptops, but they're beefy and tough as hell. I have a 17" m6500 and I've dropped it several times from six feet and it didn't even phase it. The larger ones can hold two hard drives and the cases are metal.
For serious data analysis and development a laptop isn't the right tool. You want a really good keyboard and a large display (or 2) so get a desktop. For general data analysis you will still want a pretty beefy workstation (e.g. >16Gb memory) and to get those specs in a laptop gets pretty expensive. For heavy duty work she is going to ssh or vnc to a big server/cluster and she will really appreciate the extra real estate on the display(s).
She can get any laptop for general email, web surfing, etc while out and about (or maybe a tablet?). But it is much easier to query huge amounts of data or write serious code at a nice desk setup in her room (or office if she gets one).
I really like my Dell M4800 Core-i7 4800MQ (quad-core) laptop. It is very powerful both in terms of CPU performance and graphics performance. It has been a very good engineering workstation and has no trouble decoding 1080p video and running FSX with all the detail turned up to max.
Whatever you do, don't waste money on a cheapo big-box bottom-dollar consumer laptop.
Go for a thinkpad with an nvidia card.
As indication swiss universities mass-negotiate and suggest such configurations (at lower prices than the market)
http://projektneptun.ch/en/products/archive/fall-2014/#manufacturer-2
The high end machines should be ideal
I work with robotics and computer vision and needed a notebook with a discrete GPU with CUDA support, OpenCV, Caffe. I ended up with what a notebook that is sold as a gaming notebook. I have a Lenovo Y50 and other than Lenovo's recent crapware faux pas have been very pleased with it but there are many good options in this class. A 1TB HD lets me dual boot Windows and Linux and have lots of room for storing datasets and volumes of training images.
If it's just for general computing then many options, many good options.
And as QuietLagoon said, look at what her colleagues are using.
Try https://www.scientificlinux.org
It's by Fermi
I would say get her a Mac, very popular among the student and science crowd and it can run Windows, Linux and OSX and has decent hardware. getting her a budget laptop just sucks....
Maybe she does. Or maybe she wants a general Linuxy feel, where you can open a bash shell, run vim inside emacs and 'rm -rf *' does what you expect.
The mac works fine for this and the hardware is very good.
You can run Linux on a mac if you want to.
A Macbook Pro is a good answer. Any number of modern PC laptops would be fine also. There's no obvious best choice.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Bingo. I spent a summer at PPPL, and *everyone* used a Mac (and all the cluster machines were Linux). Ditto for 2/3 of the faculty and students in my undergraduate physics department.
Obviously, a laptop with a serious GPU and high bandwidth digital port to attach others, as needed. .. power. .. The Power.
.
Enjoy the
.
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YES!, The POWER!!
(MHAHahahahaha.., etc.)
I'm a computational physicist. Everyone tends to run Linux or Mac in this area. Those that use Mac use macports or fink to get the Unix shell tools. I tend to like the Lenovo T series laptops for running Linux. There is a pretty big community using them with Linux, and they have generally pretty good compatibility. The last laptop I bought was one of these, and I swapped out the HDD for an SSD and upgraded the RAM. A higher resolution screen is worth it.
People tend to code in Emacs or Vim and use GCC/G++, the Intel C/C++ compiler, Portland Group or IBM's XL C/C++. This often depends on what compiler the supercomputer you are running on uses. MATLAB is incredible useful for data analysis and plotting as well. Knowing LaTeX is important for writing papers and the thesis. I strongly recommending learning git, and using it for version control for both code and papers.
For particle physics, she's going to encounter old FORTRAN code all over the place. She should prepared to have to deal with that, g77, gfortran and the Intel compiler. There is a ton of messy legacy FORTRAN code written for calculations years ago that eventually need to get modified for higher order calculations. This is awful work.
Having said that, she should consider doing something other than particle physics. It does not have good career prospects. There are a lot of particle physics PhDs languishing in postdocs for decades waiting for a professor position to open up. More than 50% of particle physics PhDs leave science altogether and end up in finance, consulting or insurance. Only 2% eventually end up with a tenure-track position. People who have stellar research backgrounds aren't getting positions. It's very difficult to get an engineering job as a particle physicist. She should ask her future advisor where his former students ended up and what career prospects look like.
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Most good free software for researchers is written for Unix-like OSes, so ports to Windows often have idiosyncrasies and sometimes lag behind official releases. Having a real Unix-like OS is definitely better for running this kind of software.
You can always run Windows on Mac OS using VirtualBox (or any of the paid VM programs), but managing and running other OSes on Windows is often less flexible because of the lack of support for non-Microsoft filesystems.
Also, you want a computer for which you don't need to buy and download anti-virus, anti-Trojan, firewall, backup and other software. You want something that just works. Macs cost more, but they just work. When you're in school it's better to NOT need to spend time tinkering and fixing computer issues.
Realistically, she'll do anything serious on a desktop or server machine. Therefore the laptop is at best a let's try something simple or used as a remote terminal to her real processing.
Any recent Windows or Macintosh laptop will work for this. She can just load a VM on either platform if she want to play in real Linux with the portable, but most of the serious work will be done by logging in remotely via RDP, VNC, or whatever to some real horsepower. Having the Mac/Windows gives her all of the usual Office tools as well. I'm a programmer/engineer, not a physics person, but my Macintosh has worked perfectly for stuff like this. Friends have Windows machines they are just as happy with.
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
I think it depends on the Linux knowledge of the user and the time they have available to play with the system. As a postdoc and starting faculty member I used to have a Dell and it was blazingly fast but required a huge amount of tweaking to get power management and shutdown working (and ultimately these never really worked well at all).
If you look around a typical meeting at CERN the overwhelming majority of us now have macs. These are not as cheap as a Dell but they are a lot better at taking a few knocks (which happens if you are always carrying it around) and they just work without all the tweaking and configuring which Linux needs (and which I no longer have time for). The downside is that open source software we use in physics is not always easily portable to a mac although with the increasing number of mac users this is improving a lot plus you can always run a Linux VM on the laptop if you need to and I've used this to debug code.
Ultimately it depends on the user. Those with less knowledge of how to configure linux or with less time to do it should probably look at a mac. However if you have the time and know-how Linux on a Dell will be cheaper and possibly faster performance-wise.
Physics PhD here.
Have been using Macs all along. Currently 15" rMBP. Yes, it's expensive. But you get a very well built machine for your money. Plus, it's expandable to 16 GB RAM (which the Dell XPS isn't).
OS X gives you the combination of running all open-source UNIX software in a pleasant, modern OS, along with Windoze if needed.
Yes, computer brand shouldn't matter, but in practice it does. So far Apple makes the best overall laptops. This could change in the future, but I don't see it now.
I don't know why your daughter needs Linux, but best option for C++/C dev would be:
1. Visual Studio (either Community edition or Ed edition) (by far, best dev. environment for C++/C development)
2. Intel gives out Intel Studio (compiler, libraries for numerical analysis, utilities) to student.
What more could you ask for ??? !!!
If you want to, you can buy her Mathematica 10 for students .
First I'd just get a mac. the Unix environment is highly standard (yes the sysadmin is very different, but she's not going to be doing that). It will cost a bit more than a dell but not much and it will likely have a high resale value. What you get is highly worry free compared to running your own linux box which is worth it, especially for the circumstances you describe. There's also lots of distro and libs for the mac and the compilers are top notch. Ive noticed Many mathlibs are already compiled for SIMD or GPU on macs probably because of how standardized the environment and hardware is-- i certainly don't find it as inconsistent as Linux platforms.
And if you do absolutely have to run Windows or Linux at some point well it turns out that Virtual Box create a more standard environment for those platforms than any hardware platform.
And if you just can't abide the mac OS then wipe it an install Linux. That's effectively what Linus did (he now uses a Chomebook Pixel but just because it's well made-- he still uses Linux). Or get a companion for it: raspberry Pi 2 for $50. the new ones come with Free Windows 10, Free Wolfram/Mathematica and it's easy to run X-windows or a remote screen from the mac to the Rapsberry pi.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
> the open source presentation software situation is pretty disappointing at the moment, and giving presentations is a pretty critical part of the job
It's not as bad as it used to be. My wife is a tenured professor with a joint appointment in mathematics and physics and now does everything with Linux and LibreOffice. Historically the biggest drawback for her has been Open(LIbre)Office's inability to embed movies, but it seems to have been fixed and she is a happy camper now. The biggest benefit is that she now doesn't have to spend $1000 on a Macbook to get a decent laptop that she can travel with so that's money that can go towards research instead.
The machine you buy doesn't matter too much. Make sure it's something comfortable to use.
From my experience in writing software for high energy nuclear physics research, everyone uses a Unix-like environment. The production system runs Linux, and I write and test all my code on Linux on my laptop. Those who have an abundance of funding tend to use Macs, but at the end of the day they are no better off for it, in my opinion.
My wife is a particle physicist, and staff member at one of the top physics labs in the world. Most software development for physics these days are done on Linux systems. See www.scientificlinux.org at Fermi National Laboratory. Macs are popular amongst physicists for their personal computers, but they still develop and build code on Linux systems. You might want to check out www.zareason.com for Linux computers and laptops that may be appropriate for her. Stay away from Windows systems. They won't provide her the experience with the systems she will need when she is in grad school and beyond. The only Windows systems at Fermi National Laboratory where my wife works are in admin and HR.
Laptops suck. They are hard to find driver for.. unless you want to run the sucky Windows home edition and malware that it comes with. And.. they don't last. Buy one this year, you will be buying another next year.
Get a tablet with a good stand and bluetooth keboard.
Get an unlimited data connection for your phone and tether it. Unless you spend all your time in the presence of wifi. If so then maybe you don't need to bother with the phone data.
Get a good, always on internet connection for home.
Get a good desktop with all the processing power needed for your physics simulations and more.
The next part should be ovious.. do all your work on the desktop. If you don't feel like being tied down use VNC or a similar solution from the tablet.
Do it this way and everything pretty much "just works". And... it does so for years! Laptops are such a ripoff!
I'm a physics professor and watch students using their computer all the time. My advice: get the most media-enabled laptop computer you can. Get colorful keyboard overlays and maximize the storage and WiFi hardware. Students rarely use their computers or the high speed internet at campuses for anything productive. Mostly it's watching videos playing music, Facebook, chatting, etc. etc. Don't anyone fool themselves into thinking some college student needs some particular hardware configuration for "their work." In college, it just doesn't happen.
Thinkpads have always been very Linux-friendly laptops, as well as being well-designed and built, robust, and there are masses of ~3 year old ex-corporate units available via brokers, some in virtually as-new condition, at a small fraction of their original price. I've recently bought two top-condition X220s with 8GB RAM for around £300 each (I'm in UK, I got them from Tier 1 Online) and I expect them to serve me well for at least another 3-4 years. Add an SSD for a welcome performance boost for a modest outlay.
There are two proper Linux system vendors you can get laptops from: System76 and ZaReason. See if one of their machines suit out. Both of them have slim and beefy options to choose from.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If she's spending her own money, it's hard to beat the value of a Thinkpad T440s. It's an "Ultrabook" so it's similar form factor to a MacBook Pro. Great screen, good battery life, good processor, and Linux works out of the box.
She will need to get a mini-DisplayPort to HDMI adapter, for giving presentations where there is an HDMI connection to use. The T440s has both mini-DisplayPort and VGA connectors built-in.
I have one running Linux Mint 17.1 64-bit MATE. I got the top-of-the-line one with the 1920x1080 display, which I recommend. I got mine from B&H Photo in New York; it was significantly cheaper than other web sites I checked.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1014801-REG/lenovo_20aq006hus_t440s_i7_4600u_8gb_256ssd_windows_7_windows_8.html
I have mine set up on a docking station, which came with its own power supply. So its power supply stays in my laptop travel bag, ready to go. Just undock and you are good to go. This is one way in which this is actually better than a Mac.
The Mac will cost $700 extra, and come with a higher-resolution display, a quad-core processor, and more RAM. That may be a better deal for her if she plans to do a whole lot of work directly on the laptop, rather than using the laptop to access remote computers.
P.S. I recommend that she take a look at the IPython Notebook, if she hasn't already. Running SciPy under IPython will be great for her.
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/rpmuller/5920182
My favorite: XKCD-style plots in SciPy
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/jakevdp.github.com/downloads/notebooks/XKCD_plots.ipynb
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Perhaps the best part is that if you can't figure something out on your mac, you can ask someone. With Linux you have to find someone with a setup just like yours, and if you google it you will find a proliferation of solutions none of which work for your rig.
Devo could easily have been describing linux when they wrote: What you got is freedom of choice [But] what you want is freedom from choice.
Standards are good. Macs don't really box you in they just reduce the proliferation of options of how to do something. It's not unlike how C++ is super poweful but python's simplicity lets you focus on the creative part more.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
However, we don't use them in a Mac-like fashion, but rather install XQuartz and use them as unix-like boxes.
Presumably either because the apps you need for your physics work are written for some X11 toolkit, rather than having separate GUI code for Macs and the rest of the UN*X world or using some cross-platform toolkit with native Mac support, or because you're using it as an X terminal for those apps and running the apps on some other machine such as a big compute server.
(Or perhaps you prefer xterm/Konsole/gnome-terminal/fill-in-your-favorite-X11-toolkit-based-terminal-emulator to Terminal.)
She will have to write articles, and presentations. In physics, this is exclusively done in LaTeX, because of the equations. The faculty is likely to have computation machines in case she needs to do heavy simulations. Heavy computation power is not necessary on the laptop.
I would suggest selecting from the laptops with a very good screen one with relatively low other specs. Because reading many articles becomes tiresome on a low resolution.
For example: Asus Zenbook UX305FA-FB001H-BE
And avoid macs. You just pay more for the same. They are not worth it.
I use an Asus laptop with an i7 and 12G RAM for my development machine. Windows 7 base OS plus various virtualboxes running Ubuntu (LXDE, not Unity).
I barely use the Windows OS, mostly just for Outlook (haven't found a replacement I like) and some games.
Keeping my dev environment inside a virtual machine has proven to be extremely productive. Developers do some crazy stuff sometimes. Trash something important on your VM? No worries, revert to a recent snapshot (you took one, right?) and keep going. Want to try something radically different with your dev setup? Spin up a separate VM and do whatever you like with no worries.
I personally script my VM setup using Vagrant, so that creating a new VM with my preferred base configuration is as simple as typing "vagrant up".
Freaking crazy expensive compared to an equivalent desktop, but I've released software from a balcony in Maui. Worth the extra bucks in my book, YMMV.
When traveling across borders and through airports a lot, things have a habit of disappearing, getting stolen, or confiscated by authorities who want to search what you have. At least with a cheaper laptop, you aren't out as much. And make sure if there's anything important you can't afford to lose, make sure its backed up, preferably to an online service so you don't lose it if some "authority" decides there's something illegal on it.
This message was written on a Thinkpad R60 I paid under $100 for last year, even after having to buy a new battery for it. Dual core, 2G memory (I supplied those though).
Interesting. I'm not a physicist, and I would have assumed that most physicists would use Beamer or the like for presentations, and that just requires a PDF viewer. Easier to use than Powerpoint if one writes most things in LaTeX.
A macbook pro or macbook air is very likely to be the solution her co workers will be using.
The real work happens on the clusters. Nobody uses windows, close to everybody is using apple portable computers.
> Linux can have flakey support for some music files, music players, video, etc ....
Are you on crack? Did you just come in from a 90s wormhole? Linux doesn't have this kind of problem at all anymore. If anything it wipes the floor with the other options and provides the OTHER things with what they need to have decent media support.
If your usage of media is remotely interesting, it's the Mac that will give you problems.
Macs MIGHT have a "usability" advantage in certain very narrowly defined use cases. Beyond that you're on your own on a Mac worse than a 90s version of Slackware.
Of course if the's already bought into the Apple brand then her options are limited. It's that way by design.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The idea behind using Macs is to be able to live in a mostly unix-like environment but also be able to run power point or the equivalent -- the open source presentation software situation is pretty disappointing at the moment, and giving presentations is a pretty critical part of the job.
Most physicists use LaTeX to make their presentations.
And are willing to workout just lugging this thing around.
http://www.eurocom.com/ec/release(219)ec
Also, don't mind 1h battery time !
But what an hour this could be ;-) eheheh, read and enjoy the nerdgasm.
Push Windows onto KVM on top of Linux (best) or Linux on virtualbox on Windows (worst).
Why? don't you think what ever lab she is at will have either their own or access to a supercomputer? Why waste money on some weird cloud based computing that if she actually did run a simulation on would probably bankrupt her.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I have a Dell Precision M3800. You can buy it from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed. I didn't know this, I bought with Win 8 and installed Fedora 21, and was surprised when *everything* "just worked" - literally no futzing at all after a yum update and dickering with the sound volume.
Advantages:
1) 4K support right out of the gate.
2) Screen is amazing
3) Fast as f**k
4) Built as an engineering/physics "mobile workstation", and it shows.
5) Very thin, very light!
6) Native Linux support.
Cons:
1) It's a bit spendy. $1200 in the basic config, I think. Mine with 3 years of next-day support and a case came to about $1550.
2) Ethernet is provided via USB3 dongle. It's a full Gb so performance won't suffer but it can be awkward if you really *need* ethernet on the road. I have ethernet at work and wifi everywhere else so it's a non-issue for me.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If your daughter knows how to install Linux, which nowadays isn't very hard depending on the distro, you can always check their site.
:
Most major distros provide a list of hardware that should be compatible, to avoid having to mess with drivers and such.
Here are a couple of links
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/
http://community.linuxmint.com/hardware
https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn
Most physicists where use LaTeX to make their presentations.?
The GP was specific in speaking about CERN, and this is probably observational judgement. I don't believe that you can make an observational judgement about all physicists everywhere. It may well vary with, e.g., sub-specialty. Or what time period you are doing your observations. (I know that a couple of decades ago LaTex was quite popular in a couple of places, and probably several others. This doesn't mean that's still true. And if I go back to when I was occasionally working at the Laurence Berkeley Lab Unix systems were quite rare. I think there was one on [what was then considered] a micro computer...but I never actually saw it...well, that was *several* decades ago. And it may have been VMS.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If she's doing anything of consequence on simulation (Monte Carlo etc) and analyzing large volumes of data it'll all be on a grid somewhere. The keyboard in front of you is an interface to the systems really doing the work. Pick a laptop with a nice keyboard and nice display. Personally I like the Mac trackpad better than any I've ever touched on Windows and that's a big selling point for me. Run NX to get on the boxen where the real work is done. The other advantage of using your laptop basically as a terminal is that it's easier to back up the boxes doing the work when they are statically located. If you laptop dies, is crushed, stolen etc then you don't lose the real work.
The power of UNIX in a case carved from a solid block of aluminum. What more do you need to know? I mean unless you want a cheap, plastic HP running Windows.
While hardware choices vary significantly, one strong consideration for software/applications is "UberStudent", a Ubuntu based Linux distribution developed by organization through collaboration with developers in Germany (and other EU locations) and in USA. The OS is geared specifically for advanced high school and university level students, and not only has excellent math and science applications, but online research tools and resources (one at least normally paid subscriotion), study guides, and reporting capabilities as well as thesis and testing tutorilas. Good infornation is available on wikipedia.
I wasn't in physics but I was in the hard sciences. I will mention in particular the matter of longevity. I started grad school with a ThinkPad - a rather cheap one - and it was still working when I finished over half a decade later. I defended my thesis with a newer model only because I needed better graphics capabilities for some of my renderings.
By comparison I had colleagues who had Dell, Asus, Apple, HP, Toshiba, you name it. Average life expectancy for them was 3 years or less. One colleague went through at least 3 laptops before defending. The Apple laptops weren't any better for longevity than the Dells, Asuses (whatever plural of Asus should be) or any other sans the IBM or Lenovo ThinkPads.
And don't do the Lenovo non-ThinkPads, either. They are just average. Grad school is frustrating enough with good hardware, don't make your daughter waste her time troubleshooting poor hardware.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I've noted in meetings here at Fermilab that many physicists have Macs but there are also a fair number with Dell or Toshiba laptops running
Scientific Linux (Fermi). Macs have the advantage over Windows since you have access to many Linux command line functions by opening
a Terminal window.
Congratulations on your daughter's exceptional academic trajectory. This laptop may be worth considering. https://puri.sm/ https://www.crowdsupply.com/pu... This linux distro may be worth her consideration, as well. https://www.scientificlinux.or... cheers, frequency.dynamics
I have a friend who did his PhD in high-energy physics. He was first at Fermi, then later at the LHC. Data sets often started at 1TB and grew from there. No laptop is capable of handing that kind of data right now; you use your laptop to log in to the supercomputers that can. In other words, you don't need a lot of CPU power in your laptop; you just need a competent system for accessing the supercomputers and for displaying your results in presentations and publications.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Get her a proper tower workstation/server at a desk that she can offload big jobs to and a cheap laptop to connect to it.
Good-bye
It sounds like your daughter is a competent individual capable of knowing full well what she wants. So why are you here asking for advice? Are you going to ambush her with your perfect choice and refuse to let her get the one she really wants?
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
If running Linux is the goal, then I would be tempted a lot by the Purism Librem laptop. Finally, a high-spec laptop that's actually built with Linux in mind.
Of course, I would not get the base configuration. Hard drives are for suckers. And at this point, I would wait for actual hardware to ship so reviewers can touch on the other stuff, such as keyboard, trackpad, build quality, battery life, and fan noise.
Have a nice time.
Link to entry level. You can choose an upgraded version with SSD, or save some money and add your own. Either way, it's a solid system, ample power, excellent cooling. Web browsing and basic office software will get about 4 hours on the battery, under full (gaming, presumably physics sim) load you'll get just under two hours.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
As an earth scientist who does a lot of computational work I'm 66% qualified to respond, I have severely struggled any time I get onto a proprietary software platform and can't install packages with a simple apt-get/yum/emerge command. Because linux is so widely used in clusters and comp intensive environments, there will be a lot of packages that will perform best there. Compilers, linux is integrated with and includes a full compiler suite. While OSX has a number of ported packages, these are always going to be more limited and installation and configuration of software isn't OSXs strong suit. Get your MS Office fix with virtualbox and you are all set.
For hardware, I've got linux on a lenovo thinkpad x230 with 3rd gen i5 (irrelevant to this thread, but on a mac mini too) and it was painless to install. It boots in 15 seconds off SSD, runs a virtual machine without bogging things down, drives a 2K display and has 8-10 hours of battery without much configuration. I don't think local compute performance is an issue since she'll probably either be running small simulations of be using a compute server of some kind. Mac hardware is nice and good design is worth the price premium, but the linux/kernel support for the hardware is always a little behind in my somewhat dated experience.
High-end thinkpad or alienware laptop for 3000$. Excellent graphics card is a must. It would be impossible to do physics research on anything else ;-)
As a physicist (previously at CERN, actually), that is certainly what I did. Beamer and TikZ goes a long way, after a horrible learning curve (which I mostly got out of the way during under-graduate studies). After setting up initial documents it is a breeze to create new ones that build on the old ones, and you have all the glory of version control, which in itself is an absolute deal-breaker for using anything else, in my eyes.
Windows is certainly out of the question. The CERN infrastructure is really Linux heavy, but I know that home institutions of several groups lean towards OS X, at least for the more administrative positions. The data crunchers (which is typically PhDs) in general work on Linux configurations.
OS X and Linux setups can be made quite compatible, but there is no question about that there is a threshold to pass for full compliance. In any way, analysis is often run on separate Linux clusters over SSH anyway, so it does not really matter too much. PuTTY in all its glory, but Windows is not really a choice for a machine that is supposed to work with analysis. People working in the industry often have a hard time to realize why this is, but, well...
If you're in a hurry, System76: https://system76.com/ Otherwise, I'd go for a Purism laptop: https://www.crowdsupply.com/pu... now on pre-order, shipping begins April 2015.
This question really has jack shit to do with physics. You're looking for whatever laptop best fits a bunch of preferences that nobody else will ever guess (seriously, this is going to be the most important stuff) plus with the requirement that it also be good for editing and compiling C++. The latter can be done with damn near anything. So that leaves people to only debate .. all the usual stuff we have been talking about for the last 30 years. Your entire question is really just this: what's the best laptop?
Next, we shall Kirk vs Picard vs Sheridan. You might also want to Ask Slashdot which political party's candidates you should vote for.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
One very mundane thing that is often overlooked in price comparisons is warranty coverage. A given Apple may appear cheaper but comes with a meager 1-year warrant. Adding Applecare for 3-years warranty adds another $200+. On the Dell side many business laptops and mobile workstations come with a base 3-year warranty that can be extended out to 5 years if desired at a fairly low cost.
With the near-total shift to a consumer market focus, Apple has forgotten about TCO in any meaningful way as they are now totally wrapped up in the "new" and in irreparable planned obsolescence.
Hey, can you unglue my battery? :)
Why not have a Mac or WinTel machine and put VM software on it to run LINUX, you're likely to have much better compatibility once you go into a VM and it provides the best of both worlds.
A nice big SSD, and 16 GB Ram should suffice, even if you have to get them elsewhere.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Dell customer support is a joke, avoid them. If you must have a laptop, go with: https://system76.com/ Their laptops designed specifically for Ubuntu. Great customer service, no need to wipe windows and reload yourself as it comes with Ubuntu installed. A workstation would be better for number crunching but it's not a portable solution.
I'm a senior majoring in physics and doing research on the the Epoch of Reionization with a radio cosmology group. Most people, at least in the research group, are on mac's as am I. This, I suspect, is mostly due to them being unix boxes with a nice GUI. I'm not sure what software people studying GR normally use but I end up using a lot of Mathematica, IDL, and Python. My little macbook air seems to work well enough, I can do development, run some stuffy locally for quick tests, and spin all the big stuff off onto a cluster. I have noticed that doing some fun integrals in Mathematica involving QM can easily spike my CPU's for a bit but the convenience is worth it. Something that is easy to take to lab meetings to show people your pretty data is fairly important.
In my experience most scientific software, such as those listed above, seems to be available on Mac/Windows/Linux and work about the same. One downside to running Windows though would be that if you are going to be interacting much with a cluster a Linux/Mac system will allow you to more accurately test things locally such as bash/zsh/fish scripts that fire off your analysis program on a cluster or reorganize large amounts of data. A fairly easy workaround would probably be to just install Cygwin on Windows but I have little experience with that.
Any big compute will happen on a cluster anyway.
Just get a good prosumer laptop. The OS doesn't matter. Everything runs SSH.
Lots of comments about Linux on XPS series; I've had up-and-down experiences with hardware build quality with those but what I can solidly recommend is the Dell Latitude series - currently E6540 or the 7000. They're a bit pricey but like the Thinkpad and HP ProBook these are business-oriented machines with great warranty support, and upgradeable parts. And Linux runs just great on them - I write this on a slightly older 6440 with Fedora 21 on it; never had any issues even though Fedora is a relatively "pure" distro that doesn't come with proprietary drivers. I would also recommend Fedora as good mainstream distro for work in the sciences - all the packages you would want to run on a laptop (R/scipy etc) are available as rpms: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/....
Unix-like? You know OS X is actually certified unix, right? And has been since Leopard. Linux is "unix-like".
For a cost comparable to a high end Mac, take a look at places like Eurocom http://www.eurocom.com that allow custom built laptops. They have laptops with XEON core processors, Quadro GPUs, 4K/Retina screens, gobs of RAM, SSDs, etc. Put Arch Linux on it with Kepler, Maple, LibreOffice, etc and you're all set.
At ORNL in Tennessee, 90% of all of the scientists used OS X on their laptops. Most scientists also had a desktop system in their office (stationary) that was running Linux, the most popular variant being OpenSuse. The only Windows machines on site were in the business office.
I am not a fan of the Mac, even though I am on my third one. But it is a far cry better than a Windows machine. And for programming it is excellent, because it is Unix. I use my Mac for all of my "devops" programming. And if she needs to do some heavy duty computation, she will want to run that in AWS or somewhere anyway. The problem with Linux as a general purpose laptop is that you are limited in all of the mainstream things. I assume that she does not do physics all day and all night: so if she wants to, say, watch Netflix, she will have a much easier time with a Mac. Most things can be done with Linux, but it requires research and effort. If she were studying computer science I would say she should go with Linux, but she is studying physics, so she will not want to waste her time on getting Linux to serve up a movie or exasperating over the fact that her Open Office document looks different when someone loads it on a PC, since the Mac supports MS Office. Her time is better spent thinking about gravitational waves. Get her a Mac, and she can do anything she needs to do with minimum hassle. Problem solved. Also, Macs are pretty durable due to the metal case.
The heavy lifting for any academic research in any decent institution would be done on a cluster. No need for a beefy configuration at all.
Something light, durable, and reliable is needed. Hence get a high-end ultrabook-type machine. If it has to run Linux I can't comment on specific models but unless it's manufacturer-supported (eg the XPS 13) there will almost certainly be a little command-line tweaking to get things running just right... Nothing a physicist can't handle, though :-)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This depends on what you're doing. Most research models and the like can very definitely fit in a PC or a laptop- it's just the really high-end stuff that can't fit. Honestly, I don't know who modded your comments up to a "3" or above, but they need to lay the crack pipe down.
I've worked with researchers in academia across a broad spectrum of disciplines, including experimental and theoretical physicists. All of them have standard (albeit toward the high-end because they have the research dollars and salaries to cover the costs), laptops. They don't do hard number crunching on their personal machines, they send that off to clusters or large single-image multiprocessor machines (i.e., SGI). They will need access to ssh and a few other command line tools for pre- and post-processing tasks so most of them have Mac laptops or are running Linux on their formerly-Windows laptops. Again, most researchers have Mac laptops because they get the CLI tools AND Microsoft Office for PowerPoint, Excel and Word all in a single OS. Yeah, people begrudge the cost of Mac laptops, but if they're working on funded research and have a decent stipend/salary it's worth it to them for the ease of use and not having to dual boot all the time or have file sharing issues with Windows and Linux on a laptop.
Just what I've seen and supported. YMMV
Crossover software runs Office (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, at least) just fine, allowing me to function freely in Linux Mint. So for about $40 there are no worries about how good LIbreOffice is. I found Libre serviceable for generating a Powerpoint presentation that I generate and show. Libre broke down when I exchanged Office documents with collegues using Windows. (Libre version about a year ago)
I have used PC's for years using both Windows and Linux, and find the combination that offers me the most flexibility is a Windows laptop with the ability to ssh into my Linux desktop. She may need to run CUDA for large datasets so a good graphics card on the Linux desktop would help, however most physicists have ssh access to high-end machines anyway (supported by their labs).
Use a PC and get Scientific Linux. The lads over at CERN created Scientific Linux exactly for science students. It is free and it is solid and a wonderful distribution. By now I'm sure numerous specialty programs will run on that distro. Imagine that Scientific Linux is what nuclear scientists do in their spare time. WOW!!!!
Any laptop will do, since most of your computing will be done remotely. You just need to be able to run SSH or NoMachine. The only thing that matters is that your laptop has enough resolution to show the remote screen. If she doesn't have Linux experience, then a Linux laptop could help with that, since all the computer clusters run Linux.
I'm a plasma physicist, and I say any laptop will work.
I have to laugh at all the people who think Linux is well supported. This is not to say MS Windows/Mac are better supported. However few people are even in a position to review a sufficient amount of hardware-or have the time/ability to hack on the code to give an expert opinion here. My job entails evaluating hardware and making sure everything can be supported.
The reality is the majority of hardware is poorly supported and you can't get proper support for it. Half the hardware out there today is non-standard, infected with digital restrictions, dependent on proprietary and/or poorly coded components, and if you can get it working today it won't work or be supported tomorrow. Simply put you'd be an idiot to rely on it.
If your in Europe and don't mind an older laptop check out gluglug.org.uk. The complete set of codes available for the components used in this companies laptops. If your not check out www.thinkpenguin.com for pretty much any type of computer and/or parts. The company has warehouses in the US and Europe. You can get hardware elsewhere, but its much more difficult to distinguish good from bad without getting components for evaluation first. Often you'll find its not what some post indicates online as companies change designs without any indication of it on the packaging/specs/documentation.
I would suggest linux over Windows. Mac is fine also.
Definitely get an NVidia brand GPU. I don't like favouritism, but if you want to get stuff done, they have far better library support for general purpose computing on the GPU. GPUs provide a huge performance bump over CPUs for array-based computing, so that's probably the primary issue she will face.
Most likely, most computation will actually be done on a server somewhere, but it will be more flexible. I work in a related area. I have chosen to forego the NVidia GPU because it's not available in my favourite form facter (13" Mac) but I also know how to make effective use of remote machines for number crunching.
Choosing a Mac is a good balance between compatability with Windows-land and being able to have a more powerful development environment.
Mathematicians tend to use Latex, not Word.
First, find out what the lab whe's going to woork at provides. No point duplicating that.
Then install Linux in a dual-boot scenario on her existing laptop. She might need a hard disk upgrade if the disk is full already. She can still use Windows when she needs it, and Linux when she needs *it*.
Note: Most Linux software is free. She should try it, install something else, try it, until she has a mix that works for her. Get on the mailing lists of the distro she's using. Try another distro. She can triple-boot if she likes. Distros are similar, knowledge transfers well, but they're not at all identical.
Then after some experience, she'll have some idea what's lacking. Don't waste your money until you know what she needs.
-- hendrik
As a postdoc and starting faculty member I used to have a Dell and it was blazingly fast but required a huge amount of tweaking to get power management and shutdown working (and ultimately these never really worked well at all).
If you want to use a Dell, I would advise to pick one from the "Business" line of products (Lattitude), instead of the "End-User" line (Precision).
Although they sometime don't have the latest bells and whistles, they tend to be much more supported, both hardware-wise (easier to find replacement parts later on) and software-wise (easier to get Linux running reliably on them).
I have a Latitude E6510.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The vast majority of the applications used in HEP and astrophysics don't have GUIs beyond being able to throw up a plot window. Those that do are almost all written for X11 (example: in HEP they are all written using the root.cern.ch package), with a few minor exceptions. But those exceptions (say, Mathematica for theorists or students) are available natively on Macs.
If this wasn't true, nobody would be using Mac laptops. And when you go to a conference, it's almost all you ever do see.
Of course, it helps that the taxpayer is the one buying the laptop!
Any laptop could use scientific linux
My department (chemistry) uses nothing except ms office. Latex for submitting to some journals.
Perhaps when I attain tenure, I'll try to switch it up.
I'm "someone" at PPPL and I don't use a Mac. I prefer emacs to vim, Pepsi to Coke, and Paul is my favorite Beatle.
I'm a physicist. I'm serious. I use Windows.
Usually I take it as a warning sign of a really bad scientist if they care what others use as their OS. As long as the OS lets you run what you need to run it doesn't matter whether you are using Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD etc etc. only a self absorbed bigot would give a shit.
She can either get a Linux-supported laptop, or she can run VirtualBox on Windows or Mac. All of those options work fine.
If you do get a Mac, realize that its much vaunted "UNIX environment" isn't really that useful for software development for anything other than Mac; there are simply too many annoying differences in the command line tools, libraries, and compilers; in addition, the native Mac environment lacks a good package manager. But VirtualBox on Mac works fine if you decide to go that route.
As a third year, she has already some good expertise in her field, and access to professors for what she does not yet know. Does she really need daddy's help here?
Obvious troll ;-P
How exactly is version control useful for writing documents? Backups I can understand, but version control? I'll sometimes save copies with a v1, v2, etc. appended just to have a fall-back in case something goes wrong, but I don't think I've ever actually needed to go back to a previous version.
FFS just buy a frickin Dell, HP, Asus... whatever. As if there's any difference.
Leave the default Windows on it because that's what everyone uses apart from Starbucks tossers who can't cope with complexity and basement dwellers who like to compile their own kernels.
You're over complicating the requirement.
Wireless is still a sore spot. Get an atheros wireless chipset for best compatibility. There is no binary blob bits needed at all for the 802.11n stuff.
I haven't tried the 802.11ac atheros stuff, but it requires a binary blob firmware, and has arbitrary restrictions due to that binary blob, so the advantage of atheros probably goes away when you get into the ac stuff.
Lots of horrible wireless chipsets out there, but $20 on ebay can get an easy to swap pci-e card, and problem solved.
There is always that one damn piece of software. In nearly every endeavour there is a single piece of software that absolutely demands that you have a certain OS. That is this single application is the core of what you do thus having it on a VM would be silly as all your data might feed in or out of that. Sometimes you can be lucky and that that software is multi platform such as matlab. But most circuit simulation software is Windows only. Then there are things like 3DStudio that are also Windows only. Thus if some application is like this is the core of your universe then you are pretty much committed to Windows. But then there are other things that will run on most OSs but run better on the Unix type systems. Python would be a great example. Yes with some arm twisting it will run fine on Windows but is way happier on Mac or Linux.
Then there is the peer group. What do they run. You don't really want to be the odd one out even if they aren't using the best choice.
So what it all really boils down to is what software is critical on a day to day basis? And what do the peers use? These two questions will pretty much answer the question.
...and give her the apps and compute she needs in the cloud.
The Toshiba Chromebook 2 has a 1080p screen and 8+ hours of battery life, plus decent input peripherals. It runs Chrome so all its hardware is supported OOB by Linux (can use Crouton to put Ubuntu on it easily).
Make sure she has a WAN connection available so she can connect to a high-powered Virtual Desktop (or a pool of them) in the cloud where her important, demanding apps will run when they need to. You can scale the power of this machine up and down as needed. She can store all or most of her most critical files on this machine and then her endpoint becomes fungible - if it breaks or gets lost/stolen or she just decides she doesn't like the look of it, does not matter - because her main work machine doesn't change at all.
I'm just in tech sales but even so I can't imagine going back to storing my work life on the little device-of-the-day I toss in my bag and carry around. I'm building a home server to host my personal virtual desktop - it's not even hard or expensive to do that, and bandwidth needs are modest.
Don't put a $1200+ machine in the hands of a college kid (who's in a group of other college kids).
> the open source presentation software situation is pretty disappointing at the moment, and giving presentations is a pretty critical part of the job.
How so? How is Impress that disappointing? Academics are not marketers. They don't care about bells and whistles in their presentations. I got through my PhD just fine with black on white slides with no effects whatsoever. Content is king. Even PDF presentations are sufficient. The open source presentation solutions may not be top of the line, but they are certainly adequate.
definitely worth thinking about. Spending money on hardware is a tremendous waste in this day.
You can get a free amazon ec2 instance for tinkering. It's cheap enough after the free first year. As a student, money is important. Chromebooks are cheap both for money and time and effort. You can throw it away and not lose anything, other than like 200$. The thing is always up to date. There's no thinking.
Do you need photoshop for the physics work? No? Check
Do you need to write documents? Yes? check
Do you need to ssh? Yes? check
Do you need to browse websites? Yes? check
Light? check
cheap? check
no caps-lock? Sold.
Now, with big-data shoes, you can headbutt your way through life...
It is true that many use Mac and most others use Linux. There are a few who do use windows and the reason this works is because no one uses their laptop to do science. They use it for writing slides for the talks that they have to give every week to their collegues. Real work is done on a computing cluster. Any operating system which has ssh will work for HEP. I know I had a windows, linux and osx laptop at various points. It doesn't really matter that much because as I said you are going to do all of your real scientific work on the cluster at the lab. I always liked to have a small, light-weight laptop because it was less onerous to carry around the lab, to conferences and collaboration meetings. What you really want is battery life so that you can sit in the back of a boring meeting and write code on the cluster in your ssh terminal. I think I liked my macbook air best, but had a lenovo x200 as well that worked great because it seriously had ~10 hr battery life.
Just my two cents. Battery life was the most important feature because all real work took place on the cluster.
You can't be serious!
How exactly is version control useful for writing documents?
Are you kidding? Version control is invaluable if you collaborate with co-authors. Most science these days is done collaboratively.
I'll try to keep this short. I am a graduate Physics research student, so I have a lot of first-hand experience here.
First, you're right. Get a laptop that runs Linux well. Others have discussed this thoroughly already, no need for me to repeat what they've already said. Second, definitely get one with the best nVidia graphics you can afford. If Quadro is an option, choose it, hands down.
I've seen people try to do physics and chemistry research in Mac OS or in Windows. It's a pain in the ass (but possible). It's really not worth the trouble... just use Linux. Worst case scenario, even running Linux in a virtual machine is better than being that one person spending half their time trying to figure out how to do XYZ in windows, because the instructions will all be written targeting Linux systems. Also, in physics research, you'll probably be writing code that will eventually run on a supercomputer (or, in our terms: high-performance cluster), so you might as well be running something as similar as possible to the cluster nodes.
Regarding graphics cards, nVidia Quadro is where you want to be (and try to get a good one, if you can afford it). I prefer AMD. I don't *like* nVidia. Unfortunately, being productive doesn't mean getting to use what I *like*. Everybody uses CUDA, which is an nVidia technology. If you want to be able to test CUDA code, you're going to need an nVidia graphics card. There are different versions/levels of CUDA support, I think the technical term is "Compute Capability" or something like that. You want to get the most recent one that you can, and I think these come to the Quadro cards before they come to the consumer lines. The Quadro cards also have other features that make developing CUDA code easier, although I forget exactly what they are. I think they're related to debugging. Consumer GeForce cards DO support CUDA, but still try to get Quadro if you can. By the way, recent "GPU equipped" supercomputers usually have nVidia hardware, too. I really hope AMD steps up their game soon, but the fact is, nVidia owns the high performance GPU computations market right now.
For background info: I personally do computational biophysics research. Yes, I have supercomputers at my disposal, but no, I'm not comfortable using them to test early versions of my code. The on-site supercomputer is CPU-only. I have a workstation that I use for development, which has a quad-core Xeon and an nVidia Tesla card in it (Teslas aren't available in laptops, otherwise I would recommend that instead). Yes, I reach the computational limits of my workstation CPU and my GPU. It's not hard in computational research. Other types of research will also make heavy use of the processor and GPU as well... the difference is that you might wait a few minutes, while a computational researcher waits 80 hours for his results. My laptop is an 8-year-old 17-inch macbook pro. The nVidia GeForce 8600M GT supports CUDA, but not a recent enough "compute capability" to be able to test code that will run on my workstation or the remote supercomputers. I mainly use my laptop to remotely connect (ssh) to my workstation, but that only works well because all of my work is command-line anyway. Speaking of remote supercomputers, I just got a grant that will let me use the Oak Ridge National Labs supercomputer, called "Titan". You can look it up, but it's got an nVidia Tesla in every one of its thousands of nodes (Maybe tens of thousands? I forget.). My advisor and I are hoping to get access to Oak Ridge's brand-new "Summit" supercomputer, which will also be running lots of nVidia GPUs. You can google Titan and Summit for details. Even if you're not doing computational research, or using supercomputers, most research packages support using CUDA for GPU acceleration, so it's a good idea to have anyway.
Point is: Linux + nVidia Quadro. As for brands? Who knows. My workstation is a Dell. My laptop is a Mac. I bought a Mac way-back-when because I knew it would be a "common" hardware configuration (since there's less variety in M
I would get a mid range i5 laptop and used the saved money on good Physics/Math software.
Maple, Mathcad and MatLab were all invaluable as a student in solving complex problems and modeling complex systems.
Get a nicely configured MBP and be done with it.
It's the most common platform in research and academic settings for individual use these days, which means that there is a social dimension to the available support (i.e. people around you can help with problems). Meanwhile, the platform is narrow enough and the OS and hardware tightly bound together enough that one-off bugs and edge cases are exceedingly rare (which is not the case for Linux).
And Apple has very reasonable quality control in both hardware and software.
Having done a Ph.D. and dealt with the pressures and complexities that come therewith, I'd say that the overriding concerns should be reducing the PITA factor, keeping downtimes short, eliminating unexpected behavior and gotchas to whatever extent possible, and buying in to the largest on-the-ground support network (i.e. installed customer base) that you can find with identical hardware/software.
All of these things point to Mac for academic research settings.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
My opinion is to buy a laptop with linux support. I had lots of issues with current kernel versions that don't support new hardware or some specific hardware. A supported linux machine means that some company invested time and energy into that pc to make it linux compliant and you will never have claggy issues. If she needs linux I would recomand a nice UltraBook that has linux supported. There are a few Acer ultrabooks that are very good and linux compliant, for example. Of course there are many producers. Look for the ubuntu stiker .
You could do a lot worse than to buy an HP ZBook I7 G2 Mobile Workstation..
Some of HP's earlier workstations could be ordered with Linux preinstalled.
The current machines have Win 8.1, I think, which can be downgraded to Win 7.
One thing you may have problems with is switching between the on-die GPU and
the discrete GPU. By all means run Linux in a VM under Windows.
Fuck linux. It's slow as shit. Bugridden. Exploit ridden.
Pre pulse audio, systemd linux was good.
But that's gone
So don't choose linux. It is trash now.
(Thanks Homosexual, pro-feminist, gnome-women, debian-women, SJW FUCKS)
I got a semi high end thinkpad when I started school. (T420) That was in 2011 and I still have and use it today. I use it mostly for graphics work (Photoshop,Illustrator) and for GIS work (ArcGIS, QGIS) and it runs pretty well. I'll be getting an SSD soon which should extend the life of the laptop another few years.
I'm a career physicist, and I regularly take college interns. She can use whatever she is comfortable with. I I need my interns to have some particular computer or software I will get it for them.
Personal computers in physics are mostly for writing reports and quick calculations. High power computation and data analysis is done on dedicated server farms.The personal computer is just used as a terminal.
I suggest after you get a laptop done, you look at other useful devices for your daughter at college. You will need to provide her with the following:
1 X vaginal spray to keep her vagina in good smelling condition for those times when she gets drunk and has interest from the guys into smelling her parts
1 X packet of condoms for sex purposes
1 X pain relief for the next day after being fucked for hours by multiple guys cocks
you get the idea, your daughter is going to be pummelled by guys cocks.
In relation to performance cheap and bought from a professional dealer like a new device...
Another astrophysicist here. I see an even mix of Macs and Debian-based Linux. I agree that Windows is a warning sign.
I'll add one nice-to-have hardware feature: a VGA port. I know they're 20 years out of date, but every lecture-hall projection system uses VGA, and it's nice to be able to give a presentation without spending ten minutes searching for a lost adaptor.
Hands down, get a Mac.
Does the institution offer HPC facilities for her to use? If so, do the heavy lifting on that and spend less on a laptop. I work in a UK University, and I see people spending considerable sums on workstations and workstation class laptops when they really just need to use the HPC cluster. When we first started pushing that with out academics, we saw some people coming back with reductions in duration measured in weeks for their simulations.
TL;DR = Buy when you arrive, use what the university provides effectively.
Not only can libreoffice embed videos now, on Linux, following the chain down, it winds up using ffmpeg to do the decoding. This means it can embed any weird-ass pirce of random crap pretty much perfectly.
Systems on Windows and OSX seem much pickier.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
As a senior academic in particle physics I run linux on a Lenovo laptop at the moment. However, this is mainly out of habit as I have been running linux on my desktop/laptops for the last 18 years. If you have linux on your laptop, it is highly unlikely that you will anyway install a version that is compatible with the software used in particle physics (the standard platform will stay as a RHEL 6 at CERN until the end of RUN II at the LHC, so another 4 years or so). For this reason I anyway run the particle physics code inside a virtual machine.
Running code locally can have many advantages. You are not for running big simulations, but lots of the data analysis takes place with datasets that have been reduced to 1 GB or less in size. To not rely on a shared file system and not waiting for X-windows to show up from the other side of the globe is a big advantage.
All papers and reports are written in LaTeX which is supported everywhere. Presentations are written in many different ways (Latex, PowerPoint, LibreOffice, ...). and converted into PDF. In this area you can just do what you are most comfortable with. For communication, skype is used a lot (working fine on all platforms) and CERN is a partner in the Vidyo conference call system that again is supported everywhere.
Conclusion from this is that the system on the machine is not an important choice. For developing and running code you will anyway use a virtualised linux environment, and for the rest, it is a matter of taste.
I'm not a Windows person or a Microsoft person. In my not all that recent experience. Powerpoint is substantially better than impress in certain key areas.
For example, doing complex animations (which are occassionally useful for explain complex sequenced things), LO does (or did) start to fall apart and not sequence things properly: it would merge or skip steps and generally look nasty. I've not checked that recently, though video embedding is now better in LO since it winds up using ffmpeg on Linux which is a much superior to more or less anything else.
However, and this is a HUGE however:
Both LO and PowerPoint vastly exceed the artistic capabilities of the vast majority of people, so the ability of PP to do some deeply complex things better is more or less moot. Most presentations I see want to make me gouge my eye out. Never mind clashing colours, people can't even seem to get straight line segments to line up properly. And most people simply don't have what it takes to do animations because you need serious amounts of time and dedication to get them to not suck. Time moves *fast* and that makes animations very, very time consuming to create.
OK, the line thing seems to be a "bug" in powerpoint where after about 25 minutes it shits over the snap grid and everything becomes misaligned without vast amounts of effort.
Also, also, the drawing tools in both suck. You have to use them if you want to use the animations, but compared to an editor like inkscape, the capabilities are weak. Hell, I can generally get much better pictures out of xfig thanI can out of powerpoint (xfig is less capable, but it's easy to get right up to the limits of its capabilities).
Actually scratch that rant. Most people don't even seem to have figured out that on either system you can make bullet points appear in sequence automatically. I can't count the number of times I've seen copy/pasted frames with the points added. Bonus points for subtle errors such as misalignment or typo corrections creeping in between frames...
In other words, LO is far more than capable for almost all of the presentations I've ever seen. Both packages greatly exceed the ability of 99.99% of users to actually use them.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
She's a third year physics major. She knows exactly what she wants. MBPs, fuck off with that fanboy shit. You've never used OS X UNIX if you think it's anything like GNU.
Not even true at CERN. A good fraction of people use LaTeX for presentations, but pretty much no-one in management or engineering, uses LaTeX. I'd say Powerpoint definitely dominates at CERN. Although, I think presentation software is pretty rubbish in general. I use LaTeX to make PDF presentations, simply due to portability. It'll work everywhere and won't crap out because I used a newer version of Powerpoint than the computer in the presentation room. Keynote is nice but I can't even run it in a virtual machine and I don't think my next laptop will be Apple, so in the long term it's not great, and in the end I make a PDF with it anyway. Macs aren't great for presentations anyway - you've a sweet looking laptop, but then you always need a stupid dongle (or strap-on as I like to call it) to connect it to a screen (because most projectors in the workplace have HDMI at best).
I've a master and a PhD in physics and I've been working as a phisicist during the last 5 years, this is my insight.
First of all, not every kind of phisicist does software development, if you don't any laptop and even a chromebook, would do. However, this is getting increasingly rare, only really outstanding scientists can afford this luxury, so chances are that she'll need a real laptop of some kind
Windows, Mac and Linux all have some advantages and some disadvantages, here are the nost important:
Windows: you have all the graphical software you need, whatever field you are going to study. Some communities rely on specific commercial software which are typically only available for Windows and Mac. On the other hand, developement on windows is going to be difficult: all the developers use Mac or Linux for a reason, just installing python on Windows is a pain, let alone using makefiles or similar.
Mac: it is a good tradeoff, you have almost every graphical software and a developement environment which is relatively well supported. Between ports and fink and homebrew, installing developement software on a Mac is always on the hedge of becoming a mess, but not as bad as windows. On the other hand, you'll have to spend big cash on it. Not just for the hardware, also software tend to be more expensive, i.e. the Intel compiler suite is free for academic use on Linux and Windows, but for Mac you only get a reduced version (and it used to be 150$ until last year!).
Linux: by far the most powerful development environment, ad everything is pre-packaged and tidy, you waste no time installing packages and fixing dependencies like on mac. You trade off by not being able to use some specific proprietary softwares, popular in some communities; it is better to keep a windows partition just in case. You may need to do some tweaking in order to get it to work properly on your laptop, and battery performance may never be on par with the same laptop on Windows (or MacOSX).
Personally, I do a lot of developement. I would never use anything else than Linux on the desktop, but I'm sort of tempted to go for a Mac for my next laptop in a couple of years. My main problemd on the Linux laptop (a 2nd gen XPS13) is that skype for linux sucks. Or maybe in a couple of years I won't have the need to buy a laptop anymore, I'll just buy a tablet and take out my old laptop those few times I need to ssh from home. When I was a student, I used a cheap (still 1k$ at the time!) HP laptop and dual boot it with Linux and Windows, I could write my PhD thesis on it no problem, I liked that it was quite bulky with a big keyboard, suspend to ram never worked properly.
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
"What laptop do you use and how is it configured to support your physics-related activities?"
Check if the laptop works with 250 Volt 50 Hertz an has the plug for the country she's going in.
Be sure to include the invoice and payment papers in the bag during the voyage, to avoid customs issues with the laptop.
Also a spare battery would be nice, if it doesn't boot up during the security check because it's empty, the laptop might be confiscated.
PS. Get an international drivers license for her.
When my sister wrote her thesis, she had a hard time keeping her laptop from overheating while she ran FEM calculations that took several hours.
First my credentials: I have an M.Sc. in experimental particle physics and spent six months at CERN collecting and analyzing that data, so this is the voice of experience, not guesswork. I was there in the year 2000, and have since moved into teaching.
She'll want to be running the CERNlib under Linux. You can download that here. CERN is the world's biggest particle physics installation, and they produce PAW (Physics Analysis Workstation) and GEANT (forget the acronym; it was in beta and unavailable in my day) which are the standard software tools for particle physics analysis. CERN also releases their own version of Linux, available here. That's what she wants to be running for her goals, on a computer that has well above average processor power, memory and hard drive performance, but nothing particularly impressive for video and sound.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Probably nobody will read this since it is way down at the bottom, but in my opinion the best choice would be something very light and portable.
In her chosen field, all of the really heavy lifting will be done on external clusters or the like - so something that can open a secure shell on a remote system and transfer files easily is the only thing that is really neccessary. Larger and larger portions of the scientists I see and/or support are purchasing MacBook Airs because dragging a tiny 11" model around all the time is way easier than anything larger. Then plutting it into a monitor and keyboard when at the desk, and you're good to connect to the server doing the real work.
As much as I like the Macs, there are probably reasonable other ultra-portables that are worth considering if the Windows or Linux environment floats your boat, but the Mac does fit with lots of hardware and software.
Im a physics staff scientist doing mixed language (c, c++ and fortran mostly) development work. While its for massively parallel implementations actually coding on HPC systems is ridiculous so I always use my macbook pro. I have tried various platforms and have so far come back to this one every time. As your daughter is starting its probably best to find out what they use on site and get something compatible. Learning a new platform and science and code is a bit much for one starting out.
Mo00o
Lenovo w540 good graphics (Nvidia Quadro), upt 32GB Ram.
Many physicists have a macbook. Some of them run linux, some have both linux and mac (like me). In some situations you do need to use an well supported platform, this is either windows or MacOs. If she stays with macOs only - she still can use all linux applications.
Yes, VM's can work, and have advantages
But if her long-term aim is to use only Linux, she should run LInux on the bare machine. The virtualisation hardware on modern processors has cut down drastically on the virtualisation overhead, making it practical, and it may well turn out to be her preferred mode of operation on her final laptop
I can't run a virtual machine with any speed on my ancient laptop; it just doesn't have the right hardware. Her old laptop may be as decrepit s mine; she needs to be aware that dual boot is an alternative.
And even so, aren't there still issues with high-speed graphics? I've heard rumours that they've started making some graphics processors so they can be partitioned for virtual machines, but I hadn't heard that they were actually practical yet.
-- hendrik
So what? She can run linux on mac, can't she? I run linux on my macbook, but I still keep macOS and occasionally boot into macOs to update my TOMTOM navi. Or to test whether a particular program runs on Mac, to check the possibility that the reason it does not work me is because I have Slackware. To be fair, I got the macbook from my employer. Otherwise I would buy a ThinkPad or Dell. But many physicists do use macbooks, and it really nice to have a well supported system at hand even for someone who almost always runs Linux.
Except they are currently fixing the kernel and BIOS and whatnot for the 2015 version.
you are jaded. a mac is pretty close to linux. most of the same commands, etc. maybe youve never used a mac command line
before. and who the fuck says GNU, it isnt 1986 anymore. keep up chum.
I don't do it on my laptop and I haven't heard of anyone who does. Calculations tend to be done on dedicated machines, we only use our laptops to log in those machines.
Either way, I recently bought a DELL XPS 13. I use linux and win8 on a virtual machine. If I were to do anything on my laptop, then linux is a must. Don't buy mac.
Mostly, our laptops are Dell Precisions or Lattitudes. NOTE:: DO NOT BUY A CONSUMER-GRADE LAPTOP.. Spend more, buy the "business grade". They'll last longer and have better support and warranties.
I'm not happy with HP warranties. Don't even *think* about Sun....
Does she want to work on computers, or physics? And how knowledgeable is she? A Windows box is a bad joke, spending most of it's CPU cycles on eye candy. Ditto with Macs. For real work, run Linux, which will use the system much more effectively. I'm not a fan of Ubuntu, but if she does go with it, she should *only* use the LTS (long-term support) stable releases. Here - and we're mostly on workstations and servers, we run CentOS (same as RHEL, but free). System software and libraries are "older"... but *VERY* stable. You don't have to debug the o/s....
mark
PS: Dell's OMSA, their maintenance disk, boots... CentOS, so if a saledroid says "huh?", ask for someone who knows something. I believe Dell also offers RHEL as an alternative o/s.
You mention running simulations, compiling, etc. You have some Dell and generic "mac" suggestions.
Sager is a company a lot of people have never heard of, and they market more to gamers, but the systems are very solid, have great performance, and cost less than comparable mainstream systems. I have run different Linux distros on 2 of them (4+ years old, and new).
I'm going to say around $1500 will get you 16GB RAM, 1920x1080 display, i7 CPU, 120GB SSD, 1 TB hd, backlit keyboard, DVD burner, etc
Because they are performance based you may need to tweak settings if you want more battery life, but you didn't mention an interest in that. I've never cared, I wanted a portable workhorse and that's what I got.
Check sagernotebook.com or powernotebooks.com
I refuse to sign
If code & data fidelity & valid results are important: ECC (or at least parity) memory is required.
Sadly, I don't know of any laptop or notebook computers, even in the "workstation" class, that support ECC memory.
For serious work, keep it on a machine that supports ECC. Then VNC into it. VNC sends keystrokes and mouse mickeys from the user and sends back pixels from the target machine. That way, if a keystroke gets mangled in transmission, wrong pixels will be displayed and, hopefully, noticed.
Occaisonally Dell, Lenovo, and distributors such as TigerDirect have good deals on low-end servers with ECC, typically with quadcore-no-hyperthreading single socket Xeons. Caveat emptor: Just because a processor, memory controller, and motherboard support ECC memory, that doesn't mean the system assembler is providing it. Verify with the seller; make sure it is specified in the purchase order documents; check when you receive it.
Just give her the money, she's smart, she'll figure it out herself
Bite the bullet and get the most powerful MacBook Pro available, and with the largest display available. You will not be sorry.
Most scientists I know use Macs The Mac operating system is itself a form of Unix. And the full range of programming tools are available for them. Also, if she is worried about not having the usual Microsoft Office platform to do writing, spreadsheets, presentations and such, I recommend that she get a subscription to the Mac version of Office at the time she buys the computer.it is also possible run Windows software on Macs, but virtually everything I use either works on both platforms, or is available in a Mac version. Thus, I have never had a need for Windows since I switched to Mac 5 years ago.
Finally, I also recommend that she acquire the full suite of Apple IOS system mobile devices at the same time, again in the fastest, most heavily endowed versions available. To wit, these include an IPhone and an IPad. All of these pieces of equipment talk to each other, and synchronize files, calendars, so content is available on all of them for both viewing and for being worked on.
I also find my Apple TV indispensable. It is a small black box that connects to a TV and in addition to making it possible to stream content from Netflix, Hulu, most of the major TV networks, plus one's ITunes music and movies. The benefit of all of this is that with the Apple TV, you can wirelessly display any thing you wish, in real time from you laptop, IPhone, or IPad.
If any of the major Adobe programs might be useful, Photoshop, Lightroom, for example, Adobe now makes all of these powerful programs available for use on a subscription basis through its Creative Cloud program. There is a major student discount available for this and for all of the hardware, and the Microsoft Office. So do make all of these purchases before she graduates.
She's a third year physics major. She knows exactly what she wants. MBPs, fuck off with that fanboy shit. You've never used OS X UNIX if you think it's anything like GNU.
Troll a lol a lol.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
...Lenovo Thinkpad T450 or honestly anything from T-series is fine. T-series of ThinkPad is well supported in GNU/Linux and they are insanely durable machines. The new keyboard and the new trackpad do require getting used to (the old Thinkpad keyboard is almost perfect. I really love it.) but they're more than capable and the new keyboard is comfortable and efficient after using it for a while.
However I definitely under any circumstance cannot recommend Apple's Macbook Pros. I used to own a Macbook Pro (two in fact... of the same late 2008 15" model). During the course of few years of travelling and working with fairly large datasets it pissed under itself a dozen of times like a cheap 350€ plastic Acer or MSI laptop. People think that I am joking when I tell that Macbooks are like jewelry (look nice, are expensive, but really fragile) but it's true. They cannot handle heavy workloads in environments other than normal office.
Not to mention that OS X has gone bad (due an acute iOS poisoning) since the greatest thing ever that was the OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Think about this: In Yosemite the X in the close window button in window decoration is "misaligned" (there's actually a pretty interesting science explanation why this is the case). Good design should take account into the technical limitations too.
http://www.robbert.org/2014/10...
Ideally a Windows / Ubuntu dual-boot (or maybe VM) with at least 1 TB and 8 GB. There's a significant amount of physics-related free/cheap applications written only for Windows. Don't spend more than necessary unless there's just a glut of money.