[SciPy-User] Ubuntu vs Fedora for scientific work?

[David Cournapeau]

Hi Dharhas,

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 5:24 AM, Dharhas
Pothina<Dharhas.Pothina at twdb.state.tx.us> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> This is slightly off topic but I felt that this lists membership would have good input on this question. I am presently running fedora 8 on my main workstation and it is getting a bit long in the tooth. Back when I set this machine up, RHEL was too much of a pain to use because scientific packages were always extremely outdated and difficult to install. Ubuntu was nice to use at home but installing scientific packages like the Intel Fortran compiler etc was complicated (not impossible, just more work than I wanted). So I went with Fedora which has worked pretty well so far.

Distribution choices are kind of religious choices, almost like vim
vs. Emacs kind of things. In my opinion:
  - Knowing one well matters much more than which one you choose.
  - If you work with other people, particularly people more
knowledgable than you, choosing the same platform as them is better,
everything else being equal.

Installing the intel compiler is not so difficult anymore on Ubuntu -
Ubuntu being popular as it is now, I think most projects will support
Ubuntu (at least the LTS version) as a second platform after RHEL.

Also, the current availability of virtual machines means that as long
as you have enough memory, having several OS at the same time is much
easier than it used to be,

cheers,

David