[loopasam]

The article shows that buying Windows with a laptop doesn't cost you much more than no Windows at all. Based on this and my experience, I suggest to get a Windows first and install whatever Linux you like as dual-boot. The reasons are:

1) Having a Windows installed strongly guarantees that you are going to have a functional machine no matter what. Depending on your experience with Linux you might screw things up. If it happens you still have Windows as a back-up.

2) If your aim is to communicate research results, it is very likely that you are going to need to use Office at some point, to interact with your supervisor, colleagues, that don't care about OS and just run Windows (the majority of people). You can use Office within Linux but I find it much easier to use directly from Windows (reduces the pipework and focus on the science).

3) It maybe no longer holds, but a few years ago it was really frustrating to use and connect machines running Linux on a projector. For instance let's say you have to give a talk at a conference, you want to be 100% sure that it will work out of the box and that you don't have to fiddle around to show your slides. Windows does that really well (drivers are primarily developed for it I guess) and allows you to focus on the presentation only (stressful enough). I've witnessed numerous times good science being badly communicated because of this issue, where people try to tune the resolution for 10 minutes before starting and the slides end-up being half-cropped.

In summary, dual-boots guarantees compatibility with the outside world (science research perspective), and you can use your Linux the rest of the time :-)

[rythie]

> 2) If your aim is to communicate research results, it is very likely that you are going to need to use Office at some point

Given that I work in a research department, math/scientific research papers are typically written in Latex - Microsoft's support for formulae is pretty bad from what I hear. Also, it's quite likely that your supervisor will have a Mac, those are extremely popular with academics.

> 3) Windows does that really well (drivers are primarily developed for it I guess)

PowerPoint can really mess that up, you adjust the the screen so it's just right, then hit full screen and PowerPoint changes it a completely different resolution!

Also, I've seen tons of people struggle to connect to projectors, this is far from Linux-only problem, typical problems are not knowing the hot key to switch outputs, using the wrong resolution, extend vs. clone and not having an adaptor (typically mac, but not always).