[Radiance-general] OS Compariton (WAS:Re: rad -n and -N parameters / switches)

[Lars O. Grobe]

16.06.2011 21:21, Guglielmetti, Robert wrote:

> Chris is right, we're veering, so new subject line.
>
> Chris, when I got my first OSX system (2002), the difference between OSX
> 10.1 and any Linux distro at the time was vast; there simply was no
> comparison. I mean, really. No comparison, if we're talking barriers to
> entry for Radiance. Today, I would say Ubuntu is pretty close to MacOS,
> but still not quite as polished as MacOS. I use Snow Leopard, and then I
> have WinXP, Win7, Ubuntu 11.04 VMs available on VMWare Fusion. So far I'm
> still willing to pay the Apple tax on my hardware every few years or so.

I think it depends on what you want to do. If you want to integrate e.g. 
with some architectural CAD, Mac has a lot of software that you will not 
find in Linux world. If you start scripting, coupling Radiance into 
other tools (e.g. combining it with visualization software), go into 
heavy rendering - Linux will be the way to do so without pain. So back 
in 2002, I was a proud user of a Powerbook, and I had Radiance installed 
on it. However, I was suffering that I could not get some nice tools 
working (opendx, comfortable gnuplot, useable latex-environment). And 
heavy rendering I did using a mosix-cluster with lots (!) of cores, 
something impossible on other platforms.

So I think it really depends on what your working conditions are. If you 
are doing enough numerical simulation to have a dedicated machine for it 
(something with a fast cpu, lots of memory, good cooling, but maybe no 
sound- and graphics card and probably not even a screen as it will be 
located far from your workdesk anyhow), that would probably be a highly 
optimized linux installation. Everything else would just make it 
complicated, and you would not want to have a CAD installtion on this. 
If you are running Radiance on your work desk - hey, it is 
multiplatform, so you can do so whatever os you use.

In this case, Mac users enjoy downloading and copying binaries provided 
by Greg into their path and adjusting some settings. Linux users are 
even luckier, they typically will just select Radiance and have all the 
installation done automatically by their package manager (at least for 
Debian and Ubuntu, Radiance is part of the distributions). Windows users 
will suffer, as they first need to choose a way to somehow emulate a 
unix-like environment (using e.g. cygwin). Still, it works for all of them.

Cheers, Lars.