On 04/12/18 15:58, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| From: Michael Galea via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
| On 04/11/18 22:27, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| > Do you have a good example of why he would bother firing up Linux? | | I imagine he will want to run the Linux instance in the background so he can | get access to a personal git server.
I would *guess* that git could run natively under Windows. Googling gets hits but I haven't read any of them.
If not, I'd expect that it could run on the Windows Subsystem for Linux. That should incur less overhead (hardware resources and sysadmin resources) than a VM.
Are there other examples?
| 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.
That changes things a lot. The schools guidance should provide baseline requirements.
I'm impressed that the school even considers Linux relevant. I wonder why.
Yeah, it wasn't the school. When we visited the university fair to look into the program, we spoke to an enthusiastic second year student. I asked her, somewhat hopefully, if they used Linux at all. "Absolutely" she said, "It's what I mainly use on my laptop". She had debian installed. My wife, deity bless her, turned to me and said "Isn't that what we use?"
For serious gaming, I imagine you need a notebook with a dedicated GPU. Generally that's annoying to support under Linux. Not an area I know much about.
Gaming notebooks have developed into a different breed.
| 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),
Sure looks that way to me, from a distance.
| 2) Windows seems to be his preferred development target, | 3) He plays a lot (too many really) games on Windows.
Those two go hand-in-hand.
| > I now think that an ultrabook is better for students: easy to carry, | > long battery life. 256G of SSD and 8G of RAM is fine now, I think. I | > love having a great screen. | >
| 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.
The ultrabook is probably not appropriate for what he needs to do. Using the minimum amount of memory might turn out to be a problem. On no basis, I'd recommend 16G (RAM is very expensive these days).
I'd aim for a notebook with some open memory slots that you can populate after purchase. That gets tricky: you'd prefer that the slots each be occupied with high density cards so as to leave room for expansion without having to evict the original cards.
| 2) Make sure the processor support Intel's VT-x for 64 bit development.
I think that all modern chips that would be offered to you would have VT-X. Perhaps VT-D would be useful too, but I don't know.
| 3) Consider an SSD.
I imagine that gaming notebooks would allow both to be installed.
These days, M.2 connector with NVMe is great for SSD. Much faster than SATA.
And then you want a separate 2.5" bay for a SATA HDD.
Don't get me wrong. Linux offers wide horizons. Lots of amazing systems. More than are available on Windows. --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- Michael Galea