NumPy, SciPy, & Python 3X Installation/compatibility issues

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 3:07 AM,  <esawiek at gmail.com> wrote:
> 4.      In the long run, would it be better to use UNIX instead of Windows, if I were to use Python for all of my research?

Yes. Absolutely yes. But that's because it's better to run Unix than
Windows regardless of all other considerations. :)

As a general rule, a Linux (I can't speak for other flavours of Unix,
but I expect they'll be mostly the same) system will tend to settle
into better performance the longer it keeps running, as long as it has
sufficient RAM. The things you use will tend to be in cache, but other
than that, nothing much changes as you seek toward infinite uptime.
Windows, on the other hand, tends to accumulate cruft; the longer you
keep the system running, the more RAM gets wasted in various nooks and
crannies. I can't be sure of whether it's the OS itself or an
application, but I do know that my Windows laptop sometimes needs to
be rebooted just because "stuff's feeling a bit sluggish", and none of
my Linux boxes are like that.

That said, though, my idea of uptime is measured in months. If you're
the sort of person who arrives at work, turns on the computer, uses it
for a day, and then turns it off and goes home, the difference gets a
lot smaller. (Unless you suspend/hibernate rather than actually
shutting down, in which case the difference gets bigger again.) I
still prefer a Unix system, though, because the worst messes I can get
myself into can usually be cured by SSH'ing in and killing some
process, which on Windows is both harder to do and less effective.

ChrisA