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June 16, 2020, 07:31:07 AM |
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Hi. I'll be studying computational biochemistry in the fall.
I'm mostly a Windows guy but have dabbled with Ubuntu, Mint, and live distros in the past. I have two laptops: an 8th gen i7 with 16 GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD and a Celeron with 4 GB RAM and a 128 GB SSD. So far, I've looked into the following distros:
Scientific Linux: Apparently this comes with very few actual science-related software since its main purpose is to provide a consistent environment for HPC clusters/compute servers in big organizations like CERN, Fermilab, etc. who write their own software. Recently discontinued.
Bio-Linux: Leans more towards bioinformatics than computational chemistry. Includes 500 bioinformatics tools on a Ubuntu base. Last version is from 2014.
Poseidon Linux: Used to be a more general science distro but many of the included programs were removed in recent versions. Now primarily aimed at oceanographers.
Debian: Not a scientific distro per se but has optional "pure blend" metapackages containing chemistry and other science tools.
VigyaanCD: Live CD based on Knoppix intended for bioinformatics, computational chemistry, and computational biology. Sounds absolutely perfect but hasn't been updated since 2004.
Fedora Scientific: Seems to be more for data science/numerical computing.
So far, I managed to get Debian up and running and installed the pure blend packages. It seems to be working well so this is what I am leaning towards. Vigyaan doesn't seem to work with my hardware and is too old anyway. Bio-Linux works but with some minor driver issues which are probably fixable. Are there any others I might have missed?
I posted this question on Reddit but got no answers so I thought I'd ask here instead since you guys seem like a knowledgeable bunch. Thanks in advance.
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