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Re: Mma on win95 vs. Linux

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg3433] Re: Mma on win95 vs. Linux
  • From: ajk at garnet.berkeley.edu (Adam Jacobs)
  • Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 02:23:47 -0500
  • Organization: University of California, Berkeley
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

In article <4h8sf8$om1 at dragonfly.wolfram.com>,
Gerald Luther Graef <ggraef at alpha1.csd.uwm.edu> wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I'm looking into purchasing Mathematica for my home system, but face
>the question of whether to put it on the Win95 or Linux part of my system.
>Does anyone have any thoughts on the relative merits of the two versions?
>The machine is a P5/75 with 24 mb RAM.
>
>Thanks...Gerry

I have Mathematica running on both my Windows '95 and Linux machines.
Before I upgraded the latter machine, the hardware configurations were
similar.  Performance on computation-intensive stuff seemed to be
about equivalent; the Linux machine might have had a slight edge.  In
any case I almost always use the Linux version simply because (a) I do
most of my work under Linux anyway and am constantly interchanging
files between Mathematica and my own programs (b) in my lab I have
Mathematica on a DEC Alpha workstation and the Linux version provides
identical behaviour on my home machine.

I'm embarassed to admit it but, having tried the notebook front end
under Windows, I prefer it a little to the X-Windows (Motif) version
-- not that the differences are so great.  But I often bypass the
notebook altogether and use the command interface and EMACS :-).

In summary, there shouldn't be a major performance difference between
the Windows and the Linux versions.  I'd advise you to choose
according to the operating system you intend to be using most of the
time otherwise.

Adam Jacobs

P.S. Isn't it great that the makers of major mathematics/simulation/
data analysis tools like Mathematica, Maple, IDL and Matlab have all
seen fit to make them available under Linux?   I'm happily using all
four on a regular basis (each has its strengths, though if I were on a
desert island and had to choose only one it'd be Mathematica for sure).





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