When my son was at UMd, he used whatever computer was available. He had
a Mac iLamp of his own and bought his own copy of Mathematica for OS X.
In the lab at his job in the sub-sub-sub-basement of the Physics Dept,
and for class labs, I think he used both Unix and Windows computers. He
didn't mention which worked best, and that was 5 years ago. I'd expect
that if it was written for Unix, that would be the OS of choice to run
it, including Linux and OS X, but I don't use the program myself. Thanks
for the clarification.
The OS is not entirely irrelevant for Mathematica, either. Mathematica
is a little slower and somewhat more unstable on Windows than it is
for OS X and other Unix or Linux OSs. This mostly shows up when
doing highly memory-intensive operations.
Also, while it is true that a self-contained Mathematica notebook will
very likely produce the same results in any supported OS, Mathematica
users frequently want to do things to external files, so Windows users
will write their code using Windows file path specifications, while
unix file path specification works for everyone else. There are
various tedious workarounds that allow you to write OS independent
notebooks in these cases, but they are such a nuisance that even
experienced Mathematica programmers seldom use them, and
instead rewrite the offending parts of their code when they
move to or from Windows.
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