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

[Sturla Molden]

<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?
> Thanks in advance. EK

For scientific computing, a UNIX or Linux system is clearly preferable.
Most of the scientific computing software is built around the UNIX
ecosystem.

This is the reason many scientists prefer to work on a Mac. I have a UNIX
system ready to use in the terminal, developer tools are free, and it
stills runs all the deskop apps I need (even Microsoft Office).  Apple even
provides us with highly optimized LAPACK, BLAS and FFT libraries as a part
of the operating system (Accelerate Framework). Even the free NumPy and
SciPy installers can link to Accelerate on a Mac. 

Matlab runs on Linux and Mac as well. That is not s reason to stay on
Windows.

An alternative to a Mac is to install Oracle Virtualbox and use it to run
Windows or Linux. Windows as host tends to work best on a laptop. On a
workstation it does not matter. 

If you are using Windows now and are happy with it, I would suggest you
just install Ubuntu into an VM with Virtualbox and forget about Windows
installers for Python, NumPy, SciPy, et al. Spend some money to buy an SSD
drive and more RAM if you need. The performance with Virtualbox is
excellent. Get a Python distro that uses MKL for faster linear algebra,
such as Enthought or Anaconda. Windows can be a great desktop OS because of
all the available applications. It sucks rocks for any coding or scientific
computing. But there is no law that says you need to use either. You can
have the best of both world's if you like.

Sturla