On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 01:46:01PM -0400, Michael Galea via talk wrote:
I imagine he will want to run the Linux instance in the background so he can get access to a personal git server.
The course he is taken is in game design and it is mixed Windows/Linux, so what he actually uses the Linux for will be mandated by the school. I myself would push him completely to Linux but for: 1) Some game design systems have sole support or better support under Windows (according to him), 2) Windows seems to be his preferred development target, 3) He plays a lot (too many really) games on Windows.
Well, he did come to my work to pick up some professional development working in C on Linux, so he's not inexperienced. He can still be turned from the dark side.
We have 5 dedicated Linux machines in the home, 3 are always on. (I am not counting the multitude of tablets and embedded Linux devices, only things I upgrade on a regular basis). We have one Windows machine is entirely dedicated to games, but runs Chrome, Thunderbird, Libreoffice and the Gimp instead of whatever Microsoft runs). I would ditch Windows 10 if Wine was good enough.
And there is my Son's Windows machine, whatever is on that (shudders).
Good point, but I suspect that the laptop should be meaty enough to play the things he develops on it. He uses unity and recommendations for building a dev machine range from 8-32 GB.
He can always rsync from the residence to the (family) home for backup.
Thanks to all the subsequent commenters! Summarizing: 1) Don't forget VirtualBox, it works well. Some say try Hyper-V since it is native. But then he would need Windows Professional, hmmm. 2) Make sure the processor support Intel's VT-x for 64 bit development. 3) Consider an SSD. 4) Some say 8GB memory is enough, some favour 32GB. The university recommends 8GB at minimum. 5) It was pointed out has Microsoft has "Linux subsystem for Windows", but its command line only.
Well if you are doing unity development and 3D games, that something like a Thinkpad P51 might be what to look at. I have have a W530 myself at home (the 5 year old predecessor to it) and a W541 at work. (They went W530, W540 (and W541 with a fixed trackpoint), P50 and P51). I helped a friend get a P50 for development work last year and she likes it a lot. They max out at 64GB ram, so 32GB is trivial for those, and they can fit two 1TB disks if you really need it, or a mix of disk and SSD (which is how I run mine which has 1TB disk and 1TB SSD). -- Len Sorensen