Thread: Planned Server Downtime

Our sysadmin and a couple other Linux users I know have ended up going to Mac's. A Mac may turn out to be the best option for my daughter to take to college, but I am still looking for alternatives. One problem with getting her a Mac is that I am not familiar with it so could provide no assistance at all. The other downside is the cost. I can get a quite nice laptop for not much more than $500 but a similarly equipped Mac is $1000. The downside with Linux is lack of support at the school. I know my own university, for example, provides no support to students for using Linux, even though virtually all of the campus IT infrastructure now runs on Linux. I looked at some schools she is interested in and see the same situation--they support Windows and Mac but not Linux for students (some do support Linux for faculty). That would put the entire burden on me for support. One possibility is to have Linux with Windows in a VM in case any Windows only software was required. So only one thing is certain at this point: Windows will not be her primary OS due to its proven lack of reliability in real-world use. Actually, she will be getting an Android phone soon, so perhaps I can use that to convert her to something like Chrome OS by next summer.

Difficult choice, especially cost wise. I quite fancy a macbook pro as a new laptop but over here to get one without a tiny screen would be £1500-£1800 quid for good spec!! Where as you say I could have an army of windows based laptops for the same price... so it just seems crazy how much more they cost than regular laptops. Maybe they'll eventually follow suit and also come down but I don't hold my breath.

I have to use windows for development of an old product we still support, and use Oracles(was Suns) VirtualBox for that.. Very reliable, quick and I highly recommend it then of course if you did need to support your daughter you could always remote desktop to it to.. but I'd bet it's safe to say she wouldn't need anywhere near as much support with the Mac as anything else.. I'm amazed how easy it is to do pretty much anything... The other day I installed MS Office with about 7 clicks.. Very quickly too! There are dual boot options too which I believe are pretty easy to setup(parallels & bootcamp) but I've never gone down that avenue... I don't like the idea of having to reboot everytime I want to swap, would drive me mad!

Oh, oh. Daughter's (cheap) Compaq laptop screen quit working last night. She doesn't want to sit in front of her desktop doing all her college essays, so will have to do something about a new laptop now I guess. Macbook Pro w/15" screen will be $1900 + $150 tax, and that includes the education discount. For that I can get her two Dell laptops with similar hardware. Quite a "tax" just to get the Mac OS. And then she has a $2k laptop to have at college and has to absolutely avoid having it get stolen? Looks like I am going to be spending some time on laptop research this weekend. If only schools would support Linux, kids could save big bucks and still have secure machines, and the schools would save money not dealing with malware on student machines (I know my university spends a major portion of its IT budget dealing with Windows malware issues). Unfortunately, most of the IT directors know only Windoze, so make stupid choices. Seriously going to see whether she couldn't get by with Linux as host OS and run Windows just in VM (I too use VirtualBox quite a bit--much easier than VMWare). All her critical writing could be done in Linux so it would be safe despite periodic Facebook browsing.

Hmm yeah, I didn't consider risk of theft.. a $2k shiny mac is certainly a prize for opportunists. Open Office should get her by more than adequatly for an office replacement unless she's an advanced office user. At least she'd be safe when online. I guess if you're a basic user of linux and just happily use the programs set up on there without wanting to fiddle around with settings too much or change hardware (like we both would!) then it should be more stable and faster than a windows box.. it's just when you screw something up you need someone who really knows it to help get back up and running, but I doubt she'll messing with fstab or anything eh lol

Good luck with your decision anyway :-)