PC or Mac for at- home engineering?

On Sunday, August 31, 2014 10:35:31 AM UTC-4, radam...@gmail.com wrote:

Some day I might actually get to semi- retire, and would like to continue to do explorations on my own dime. I do a lot of signal- processing work with Matlab, but also do analog and digital design and might even need to spin some simple PC boards. Which is better for this , PC or Mac ? I don't know what Mocrosoft has in store to replace win7 with something serious and not a toy. But I like that there's lots of nearly- free programs for PC 's and that seems less common for macs.



Bob

The best option would be get hold of a cheap
PC, and install a good Linux distribution (
Fedora, Ubuntu etc.,) and then you would be
able to run just about anything you want.

 

[Paul E Bennett]

radams2000@gmail.com wrote:

Some day I might actually get to semi- retire, and would like to continue
to do explorations on my own dime. I do a lot of signal- processing work
with Matlab, but also do analog and digital design and might even need to
spin some simple PC boards. Which is better for this , PC or Mac ? I don't
know what Mocrosoft has in store to replace win7 with something serious
and not a toy. But I like that there's lots of nearly- free programs for
PC 's and that seems less common for macs.

Bob

It is sometimes what you are used to. A colleague of mine has a Mac laptop
on which he has three OS's loaded that take just a three finger swipe to
change between them.

I considered the Mac-Mini as a possible CAD-station machine but as I am
already running VariCAD under Linux I decided to get the Intel NUC class of
small PC's in a box. These come "barebones" and you add the memory and drive
capecities you want. Everything else (graphics, sound and wifi) are already
built in. This turned out to be much less of a cost than the Mac-Mini.

Having bought several NUC's I have pickd up a job that requires me to run
Windows 7 in order to run some specific software (Wine wouldn't behave well
enough with this package) and it was a minimal charge by the local store to
put Win7 on the machine (Win 8 would have been easier but not suit the
package to be run). The other NUC's will be getting the Linux Treatment.

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[Michael A. Terrell]

Phil Hobbs wrote:

It's different GUIs that are the real pain.

Goofy, Useless Interfaces suck.


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