MacBook - share your experiences
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by
JeanTate
My workhorse machine has been a Windows one, back to 3.1 and before. For GALFIT, I have a Linux box. Recently I was given - as an early Xmas present - a MacBook Pro (MBP); I've not used a Mac until now.
Some things worked very intuitively, "right out of the box". Others that I have become familiar with, not so much. For example, my MBP came with Python already installed ... sans packages like matplotlib and numpy. StackOverflow - my go-to place for answers - has a leading solution that recommends Anaconda, so I installed it. Bad move! Turns out that can create Python conflicts which are not easy to resolve. So I ended up installing pip and doing lots of pip's! Some things are just weird, like needing to install Pillow to get matplotlib produce .jpg output images; maybe it's a 3.5 vs 2.7 thing?
One big negative - so far - compared with my Windows laptop (which has Windows 7, I refuse to lose so much by upgrading to 10; why oh why did MS not make stuff backward compatible!): Finder is definitely inferior to Windows Explorer! 😮 For example, moving files from one directory to another is a real pain (possible only in the icon view, and even then very tricky), and when I end up with thousands of files - as I will shortly, all the inputs and outputs for contour overlay images - how am I going to manage them?
Enough of my experience; care to share yours?
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by
ivywong
scientist, admin
This might be helpful ....
http://www.astrobetter.com/wiki/Setup+a+New+Mac+for+Astronomy
Posted
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by
JeanTate
in response to ivywong's comment.
Thanks Ivy! 😃
It recommends Anaconda ... I can see that that's a very extensive and powerful package (or rather, set of packages), well suited for astronomy. However, I'll be holding off from installing it fully; the Python conflicts look rather challenging to resolve ...
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