With that said, let's identify the minimum requirements that you would require when it comes to a laptop worthy of being called a data scientist's weapon of choice. Huge datasets these days have outgrown the processing power of a single machine and will depend on you accessing the cloud for processing, in which case portability is going to be of value to you. The next thing to note is that with higher power the battery life also shrinks and as a result you are losing out on portability yet again. The higher the processing power the heavier the laptop gets and hence it's portability is reduced and vice versa. When it coms to choosing the right machine you usually have to choose between two factors: If you're someone who's just entered the world of data or if you're a veteran data scientist that needs an upgrade on his/her local machine this post will provide you with the comprehensive guide that is necessary to make the right choice when it comes to buying a machine that is capable of handling your data-sets. No beard.Data Analysis, Machine Learning model training and the like require some serious processing power. If I had a big beard, I would also tell you that proprietary software is evil and all that Richard Stallman stuff, but you know. With package managers, your favourite compiler/interpreter is only a command away.

Most programming languages work out of the box. If you do check it out, you'll come to find that things like package managers makes everything SUPER easy. The good thing about Ubuntu vs Linux in the 90s is that you don't have to do that you can easily run Ubuntu as your primary operating system without ever touching the terminal (though you are certainly more limited by your GUI than on Windows). Also, using the terminal becomes second nature.

It forces you to be a lot more computer literate than you would otherwise be. I have been using various distributions of Linux for several years now (Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat) and would certainly recommend checking Ubuntu out.

This is a great deal more difficult with OSX. If they were asking people to use Ubuntu, then that would be fine because you can just run that on a VM. Yeah, I agree that asking people to use OSX is ridiculous.

Windows vs mac for data science