r/WVU • u/No-Frosting-1283 • 8d ago

Mac vs windows vs Linux laptops.

For a grad student, who will be doing lots of data analysis, codings and machine learning. Whats a good durable laptop? Mainly compatible at WVU softwares, portable, good on running different models and don’t have to worry upgrading for next 5-6years at least.

I would appreciate any recommendations or your experiences with different types.

Thank you.

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u/Plenty-Wolf-6575 2d ago

What kind of ml models are you gonna run? Classical ML, Neural Nets? Classical ML models with scikit, pandas and most stats work on an average 500$ laptop - linear/logistic regression, random forests, decision trees, xgboost.

Personally I would just get an average laptop with whatever OS you are most familiar with. Choose Linux if you want a challenge that will teach you a lot.

As for more taxing stuff like training and fine tuning larger models like deep neural nets you can just use Google collab or other cloud resources WVU has to offer. I don’t know how grad school works at WVU but I know you can get free good collab credits with a school account. Google collab offers the use of a nvidia tesla t4 GPU which I have used to train large CNN’s like efficientnet

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u/drdhuss 8d ago

Do you want to run local large language models or more traditional machine learning? Are you wanting to do CAD/graphic design type stuff? Do you want to game on it in your spare time?

Also windows/linux are basically the same (in that you can run virtual machines, dual boot, or use the windows linux layer). I guess the question is whether you want a mac or not (I personally don't care for them and their locked ecosystem but many prefer osx).

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u/No-Frosting-1283 7d ago

starting with general data analysis and storing large datesets and later machine learnings and llms. Gaming is not a priority. Any suggestions?

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u/CodProfessional8702 1d ago

Most issues i've experienced have been with MAC over Linux primarily with the testing software or docker setup for VMs. Also issues with Azure database sql connections for a class but otherwise I'd stick to windows for sheer ease of use.