Buying a machine to learn an OS

Buying a machine to learn an OS

Buying machines and delegating them to specific purposes


Even if you answered just one of these questions with more than a yes or no I'd appreciate it alot.



My short term plan is to wait for apple to refresh the mac miniand use it 100% for playtime. This will force me to finally learn the mac os.

1a Is this a bad idea?
1b Are they even going to refresh it?
1c Is it not going to be a good dual screen multimedia video streaming and browsing device?
1d Does onenote suck with it? I use onenote to scrapbook, collect info, organize trips and shopping so I could foresee using it even if playtime mode. I could also see myself getting a wacom cintiq hybrid and then plugging it into a mac and see if I am able to ink. Can I ink?
1e Are there any situations in life when it would actually benefit you to know more than windows OW?

My next plan in the future is to find an excuse to have some sort of linux machine or laptop. I will delegate it to some task and then this will force me to learn how to use linux.


2a What is the best version to use to learn how to use linux? All I know about linux is the word "ubuntu" and alot of penguins
2b What kind of task would a linux laptop or convertible be useful for? Will I lose onenote, wacom pen inking, touch gestures, or anything else that I have come to be used to with my windows 8.1 devices?
2c Does this plan suck?
2d I am afraid of having to deal with downloading drivers nightmare. Not that I don't already have that issue with windows, but I still wonder this.
2e What about antivirus software? Won't all of my norton antivirus software not work anymore on a linux machine?
2f What is the smartest way to actually get a linux laptop? Should I get the cheapest macbook or the cheapest windows laptop and then nuke its OS for linux?
2g What kind of tasks do you foresee a student or an engineer that would be particularly suitable for an engineer ?

 

IMO, yes you would be better off playing in a VM or hackintosh environment especially if you are wanting to also play with Linux distros etc. it is cheaper and forces you to learn a few more quirks and setups of OSX

who knows, I suspect they may with Haswell mid 2015 but Apple does not give us refresh information in advance

not really, OSX is just starting to get semi decent with dual screen support ( triple and quad is a nightmare ) however the limited IGP in them are not great for pushing a couple of high res screens with fast media on them, a couple screens of web browsers sure.

You can ink but WACOM, like Adobe CS runs better on Windows 7 and 8 nowadays. and to my experience, YES one Note sucks on OSX and iOS

of course, I learned this heavily when I started learning windows 7 a couple years ago. however most OS's do a lot of things similar on the face. the differences are in the backend, I would say learn MS and Linux/Unix command line. it is more learning their file management and applications you will use.

why not use Linux in a dual boot with windows like my husband does? you can learn and compare and even learn VM's as well. keep in mind many of OSX command line is Linux/Unix. If you want a to setup a dedicated Linux setup, go into setting up a Linux firewall, Web and file server configuration. their server and cloud support is unmatched.

No Idea. My Husband uses Ubuntu, Puppy, Debian and Mint

useful for most anything, what you lose depends on what you can get drivers for or can not. I know Wacom works well with Ubuntu and so do some touch screens, but you will have a few limits on applications. to my knowledge Linux is not big on the grapghics design areas as of yet. (

depends on personal needs and preferences.

with every OS. every manufacturer tends to be different on their driver support as well. you actually find windows 7/8 easier to deal with drivers than Linux and OSX to my experience

it wont work, but you can get any number of free AV's that work very well ... just like you can in Windows and OSX

cheap windows laptop or even a refurb or old one that has hardware that is easily compatable with Linux. so try to avoid graphics switching as to my knowledge it is still flakey but others will know better than I. I know the old Dell D620 and upward were popular platforms, some resellers even sell laptops with Linux installed or supported.

what kind of engineering? and how heavy of work. I deal with engineering in architecture now and then, one of my daughters is taking Mech E with a heavy load of 3D assembly and structural. in both our cases you want a top end windows laptop with a Professional GPU to number crunch far faster than a gaming card etc. if you have specific needs please post over in WNSIB and fill in the form and we can all try to help you more.

 

So basically you are saying

1. Consider getting a powerful windows machine.
2. Run a VM or hakintosh on it.

?

I would still have to buy a new machine. I'm not gonna mess with my main work laptop with different OS's. I should still get a windows machine if I wanted to learn mac's OS or linux? You said it would help me learn more of the quirks? I am not sure I understand that.

I am not sure how running a VM forces me to learn. I would have to click something to start the VM and it would have to load and I would need internet to run it right? Then I could just use windows when I am feeling lazy. Won't it slow down the device if I have multiple OS's running ?

I am only raising these points to probe further. I don't actually mean to contradict or raise a fuss.

 

A few years back I had the, um... 'pleasure' of buying a mac system for something like 80% off, brand new in the box. I thought a little like you and said, if nothing else, I will learn. And learning is always worth every penny. Always.

I am now much more comfortable with the changes in OS/x over the years and sure, it has helped on many occasions (mostly to help solve an issue quickly on my client's mac systems).

But the most important thing I've learned? Yeah; OS/x sucks for me.

Too limited, too controlling and contrary to what most may think, too slow for my tastes. But like a $20 tart from 50 feet away, you look and say 'ooh, shiny'.


I agree with the VM route. At least you won't have 'junk' hardware lying around which you can't get rid of even by giving it away (took me more than 2 years...).

Good luck.

 

There are 2 parts to computers: hardware and software. To run all the software you are likely to use for engineering, you will need a workstation. For notebooks, that means Dell Precision, HP Zbook, or Lenovo Thinkpad W-series.

Now, once you have that workstation, you can run whichever software you choose on it. Operating systems are software. You can either have one main OS and use virtual machines to try others (at the cost of some graphics performance inside the VM), or you can install multiple different operating systems on your hard drive or SSD and dual- or multi-boot by selecting which one to use each time you turn on the computer. This is much more efficient than buying multiple systems, one for each OS. Dual-booting requires no extra resources because only one OS is being used at a time. Virtualization requires some extra resources, but nothing a workstation with plenty of RAM can't handle. Your use of internet in a virtual machine would be the same as your internet use in the OS natively. VMs are stored locally on your hard drive or SSD and you don't need internet to access them.

I would recommend Ubuntu as a good starter Linux distribution, as it gives a full-functioning experience from the start with more ability to use mouse to navigate and less necessary dependence on the command line (terminal) compared to others.

 

If your laptop has multiple drives, you can create a partition on your data drive for Linux or whatever OS you can to try.

My laptop boots direct to windows, but if I hit F12 at start I can easily select to boot Ubuntu.


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Yes, you can make a good learning platform for most OS's that way as many legacy and almost all modern desktop OS's are X86 based.

Yes, because setting up a hackintosh forces you to learn the issues with kexts, EFI and all the startup and hardware bombs that the Apple support can deal with on a hardware level ( and 99% of the time they are clueless anyways ). making something not native work teaches a lot more than insert USB drive hold the " C " key and startup to install

do not need the internet to run it as it becomes essentially an ISO on your drive, but yes you would run it ontop of windows or your host OS. it will eat a slittle of your performance BUT the benefit as I have been shown is you can copy your VM image and play and customize and push the boundries with the OS and learn its inner workings and not care about screwing it up. if you crash your VM. you spend 30 seconds deleting the active copy and copying back your clean image. ( just remember to keep your data outside the VM )

no problem, we are all glad to try and help

 

This article says that I would need to purchase VM software:
How to Run Mac OS X in VirtualBox on Windows

Is it feasible or even a good idea to try to have a laptop that runs OS X, ubuntu, and windows 8.1?

"If your laptop has multiple drives, you can create a partition on your data drive for Linux or whatever OS you can to try. "

"Virtualization requires some extra resources, but nothing a workstation with plenty of RAM can't handle. Your use of internet in a virtual machine would be the same as your internet use in the OS natively. VMs are stored locally on your hard drive or SSD and you don't need internet to access them. "

So it seems like I'll need 3 different hard drives then? Or at least 3 hard drives worth of "stuff" to hold the OS's? ATM I assuming that this "stuff" is the megabytes and that is the only limit on how many OS's I can put. Am I wrong? What are the vendors and types of specs on a drive, which I am assuming is the same as hard drive, would be good to look for to find a suitable machine to run a bunch of OS's?

Man I was going to get a eurocom shark 3 because it looked like a good deal for the power it provides but then I read that closed forum about eurocom... Now it feels when I read the reviews for these budget power laptops I can't trust anyone!

 

no you do not need more than one drive, just partitions on a single drive. I know of a few users that run upwards of 10 OS's off a single 1T drive for application testing on old legacy gear

Eurocom shark is just another Clevo rebrand and you can get them from any number of resellers depending on where you live.

I do believe there was a way to do OSX on free VM software as well, but am not fully sure. my main OSX box nowadays is actually a full fledged hackintosh. ( don't use my other Macs too often it seems )

pretty much anything will do it, I would say you would want 240GB of SSD or hard drive minimum though.

 

Just to add my two cents...

1a) Yes. First, if you're deadset on buying an Apple computer, the current ones (and older ones) work just fine for running OSX. But, as KCETech1 says, a Hackintosh in a VM would be much more cost effective and will force you to learn more about how OSX works than just playing around with it on Apple hardware.
1b) Eventually. Though, again, it doesn't really matter for your wants/needs.
1c) Eh... OSX has some quirks when it comes to multimonitor setups. I never found a rock-solid way to get it working well in a Hackintosh setup, and Apple hardware doesn't do it much better.
1d) I don't use OSX much, but OneNote should work the same across platforms; that said, I have no problems with it in Windows, so I assume that the OSX version is decent as well. Should be able to use a tablet with OSX just fine, assuming it has OSX drivers.
1e) Most businesses run off of some version of Windows. Severs are usually either Windows Server or some flavor of Linux. Mainframes are mostly Linux or some version of IBM's OS lineup (z/OS, for example). OSX's former glory in the business world was in multimedia production, though according to what I read (and posts made my KCETech1), even there OSX fell in favor of Windows-based workstation computers. That said, there's nothing wrong with learning a new OS; at the very least it adds an additional technical skill on your resume if you become a somewhat-knowledgeable OSX user.

2a) Ubuntu is one of the more popular Linux flavors, though there are *a lot* of flavors out there... You could also look into distros that spawn from Ubuntu (I use Mint, for example), or distros that Ubuntu spawn from (Debian). Likewise, you could look at entirely different distros, depending on what you want/need. Some Google searching or checking out websites like DistroWatch would give you a better sense of what's out there. But, really, there is no such thing as a "best" distro, in much the same way that Windows, OSX, Linux, nor BSD are "best" OSes. "Best" implies some objective measure of it being better than others, but there's not at lot of things that can be objectively measured when you're talking about which OS is best for you personally.
2b) OneNote is Windows/OSX only, no Linux version exists (though you could use an abstraction layer like Wine to run Windows programs in Linux). Wacom support is depending on what laptop you have and what drivers exists; my Thinkpad X61t's Wacom display works just fine under Ubuntu and Mint, for example. However, asking "will X work under Linux under laptop XYZ" will allow you to discover one (somewhat) major flaw of Linux (and FOSS as a whole): Since (most) open-source software is written and updated by volunteers, hardware support can be a hit-or-miss for certain features on certain laptops. This isn't a problem with Windows (since Microsoft commands a huge portion of the computer industry) or OSX (Apple has complete control over OSX's hardware).
2c) Why would it suck?
2d) Depends on the Linux distro you use. Ubuntu and other "friendly" distros more or less run well out-of-the-box. You might have to manually install a wireless driver or manually configure a Wacom tablet to work (maybe), but most things should work well without much effort on your part. However, if you choose a much more bare-bones distro (Slackware, Gentoo, Arch, for example), you'll have to do quite a lot more to get it to work on your computer. There's also the option of running Linux in a VM; VirtualBox and VMWare run Linux distros pretty well, in my experience.
2e) Norton doesn't sell Linux AVs. And really, there's not much of a point in using a AV product on Linux since the chances of the OS being infected are pretty much zero. The only practical use I can think of for using one would be to make sure email attachments you send out don't contain malware than can infect Windows/OSX machines. The biggest worry (for *any* OS used) will be social engineering, which targets the human using the computer (and no AV can stop you from granting remote access to "Dave from Windows", for example).
2f) You don't need to buy a new computer to run Linux; you can just use it in a VM or dual-boot. But, if you insist, you could buy pretty much whatever laptop you want in install Linux yourself; you need to do some research though to make sure that the hardware in laptop XYZ works well with the distro you want to use, however. Or, you could buy from a Linux-specific laptop reseller like System76 or ZaReason, which sell laptops pre-installed with some form of Linux, should you not be comfortable doing it yourself (of course, these laptops shouldn't have driver issues with any of the laptop's hardware).
2g) Depends on what engineering you plan on going into. If it's something "physical", like Civil/Mechanical/Industrial, then CAD work comes to mind (you'd want a workstation laptop for that). Software Engineering (Computer Science) doesn't need anything special as far as software is concerned, other than maybe an IDE or two. Chemical: I suppose MATLAB and other modeling software?

Think of it in terms of cars:

1) You could buy a fancy-dansy car which presents a very simple interface for you to use (touchscreen controls?) and doesn't require much in the way of maintenance (oil changes and the like) which is taken care of by the dealer, or...
2) You could buy a beater-car which requires some work to get moving. Say, you have to buy a few tires for it, install those, replace some rusted pistons in the engine, replace the broken glass, etc.

Actually, running OSX or Linux in a VM isn't *that* bad; I only exaggerated in the car example to make a point. You learn jack all about Car 1 since you never have to mess with the internals. Hell, you never even have to open the hood of the car to peek at the engine! However, with a beater-car, you have to either know a bit about how cars work or learn how they work in order to fix the car up to such a state that it's running and you're able to use it.

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You're computer won't slow down much if you're running a VM on top of whatever OS your current computer uses, depending on how you set it up. If you set up the VM to only use 1 core and 512MB of RAM, then it won't affect your native OS much. However, if you have the VM run on all 2 or 4 cores and use up a good chunk of your memory, and then have the VM work on an intensive task, then you'll probably see some sort of slowdown.

 

an old sandy bridge with 2 ram slots for 16gb of ram will run anything you want and do it well. I run xp, win7, server2008, server2012, ubuntu, and sometimes osx on 1 machine. You save space, money, time, and if you are looking to learn and mess with the snapshot feature is a great tool.

 

FWIW, I have never had issues running CAD software like SolidWorks on consumer grade GPUs.

I also had no issues using my studio 1557 as a daily driver for SolidWorks after graduating, while using it at work.

YMMV, but we purchased 30 desktops to run a variety of software, and all are doing fine with pretty basic 1GB GPUs. I have actually seen more glitching and driver issues with Quadro cards.

I have a BSE in Mech. Eng., I use SolidWorks daily and have my CSWP certification.