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PC or Mac laptop for EE student?

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Infraviolet:
Personal suggestion would a be a typical PC laptop running a pleasant Linux distro (Mint, Ubuntu...) with a VM where you can put Windows. You may well need the Windows VM to run certain Windows only software in, but you won't want to be reliant on a Windows laptop for general use. Windows is evr more cloud connected and forced updates can crash things at the worst possible time, better to have a stable platform you can trust for getting online, processing documents, doing generally anything, and Windows in the VM for when you can't avoid it.

james_s:
While I like my employer issued Macbook, for an EE student that would definitely be playing things on Hard mode, a lot of professional tools are Windows only, or Windows/Linux, Mac support is relatively rare. I'm really not a fan of Windows beyond 7, but it is still the defacto standard and going with anything else is going to result in extra challenges. An advantage of a Windows laptop is you can also run Linux on it if you want, with a Mac you are locked into MacOS now since they moved away from Intel CPUs.

Someone:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on June 11, 2023, 07:45:28 pm ---LTSpice do have a native MacOS version
--- End quote ---
Have yo ever used the native version? its absolutely nothing like the windows version (which is already bad enough).

DiTBho:

--- Quote from: aeberbach on June 12, 2023, 09:18:15 pm ---OS X 10.4 was released in 2004, >18 years ago. Any bearing on current state of things?

--- End quote ---

At the time, it was an unexpected problem for me, so I simply suggested verifying things in advance before the definitive purchase.

nctnico:

--- Quote from: Infraviolet on June 12, 2023, 09:36:35 pm ---Personal suggestion would a be a typical PC laptop running a pleasant Linux distro (Mint, Ubuntu...) with a VM where you can put Windows. You may well need the Windows VM to run certain Windows only software in, but you won't want to be reliant on a Windows laptop for general use. Windows is evr more cloud connected and forced updates can crash things at the worst possible time, better to have a stable platform you can trust for getting online, processing documents, doing generally anything, and Windows in the VM for when you can't avoid it.

--- End quote ---
Agreed. I'm planning on buying a new laptop later this year and it will run Linux as the base OS with Windows in a VM for the applications that need it. A large part of electronics engineering is around developing software and all those environments run way better on Linux.

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