> Sometimes it helps to have more than one OS on your computer. For Open > Source projects the Windows version is often late in coming and harder > to install. For example on Slackware Linux all the bits and pieces > needed for compiling Scribus come with the system, the compiler, the > linker, the QT4 libraries and so on. It is a fair amount of work to > assemble and install these on other Linux flavors, and even more work > on MSWIn and OS X. So those who live on the bleeding edge, like me, > find that Linux is a more comfortable way to go.
I'll second this. If you're doing a lot with OpenSource, the only operating system to use is Linux. My work toolchain includes: - Scribus - LaTeX - LyX - R / ggplot2 / RKWard - ImageMagick - Python - Spyder - numpy - ITK - PyQt / Qt (and probably others I've overlooked). To install these applications on a Windows or Mac is a multi-day affair. Longer if I have to compile anything from source. On a Linux computer (I use Ubuntu, mostly), I install the OS and run a simple shell script. Nearly everything is available from the repositories and it takes maybe an hour or so to download and install. During that time, I can work on other stuff. The more invested I become in open source solutions, the more sense that Linux makes. I prefer to run it natively, but there are a few places where I'm not able to do that. In those cases a virtual machine works quite well. I even get decent performance when running models and compiling large LyX/LaTeX documents (true monsters with several hundred pages of text and many thousands of images). If it's not feasible to partition and multiboot, a virtual machine can save a lot of time. Cheers, Rob
