As others have pointed out, the comment left a great deal out.
For example, any mainframe that can be replaced by 120 PC compute nodes isn't well utilized and/or is completely outmoded.
I had a chat with a gentleman once who participated in a replacement of multiple PC servers with a mainframe--but it entailed replacing 7,000 servers with a relatively high-end machine.
The result was that power and real estate savings alone paid for the mainframe--which had more capacity for future expansion as needed.
As always, proper implementation of the right equipment for the job is always crucial--and a shallow analysis that doesn't cover all the variables is simply misleading at best.
I think the KDE interface makes more sense for the Linux newbie, and the Kubuntu distribution has many advantages as well. As mentioned above, tremendous online resources and a very active community for advice and support are substantial advantages.
For LaTeX, I suggest Lyx...available for your Windows side as well as in Linux. See http://www.lyx.org/
I would also create a separate partition for those things you will need to share between both windows and Linux. I'd probably format this as a fat32 partition, since that is somewhat simpler to use for Linux and will appear transparent to Windows. The occasional glitch in the handling of NTFS partitions is not worth the hassle, yet you are bound to have a fair amount of information that it would be helpful to have available in either side.
Slashdot Mirror
As others have pointed out, the comment left a great deal out.
For example, any mainframe that can be replaced by 120 PC compute nodes isn't well utilized and/or is completely outmoded.
I had a chat with a gentleman once who participated in a replacement of multiple PC servers with a mainframe--but it entailed replacing 7,000 servers with a relatively high-end machine.
The result was that power and real estate savings alone paid for the mainframe--which had more capacity for future expansion as needed.
As always, proper implementation of the right equipment for the job is always crucial--and a shallow analysis that doesn't cover all the variables is simply misleading at best.
I think the KDE interface makes more sense for the Linux newbie, and the Kubuntu distribution has many advantages as well. As mentioned above, tremendous online resources and a very active community for advice and support are substantial advantages.
For LaTeX, I suggest Lyx...available for your Windows side as well as in Linux. See http://www.lyx.org/
I would also create a separate partition for those things you will need to share between both windows and Linux. I'd probably format this as a fat32 partition, since that is somewhat simpler to use for Linux and will appear transparent to Windows. The occasional glitch in the handling of NTFS partitions is not worth the hassle, yet you are bound to have a fair amount of information that it would be helpful to have available in either side.
David