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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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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...