https://www.thinkpenguin.com/
http://www.emperorlinux.com/
https://www.system76.com/laptops/
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
http://makezine.com/magazine/make-38...source-laptop/

. ..
.
Plus the one in my first post:
https://www.debian.org/distrib/pre-installed I'm sure many other distros sell the same.

1 members found this post helpful.

Although, just like anything you can save big buck$ just learning a little and no computer or device comes with a free admin.

not really
i can have one program running ad run out of the 8 gig i have

currently i am thinking of installing 32 gig of ram

NOW i do work with LARGE images
32 bit floating point and 16 bit singed images that can be ( w,l) 65536x32786 or 131072x65583
a image that is 12 to 36 gig in size

right now i use a large swap space on a different drive

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well Microsoft dose try VERY hard to support the "lowest common denominator"
the person that will NEVER!!!! try to "learn" anything
and the person that dose NOT WANT TO LEARN

the " point and click" people

Linux os's for the most part will never be FOR "point and click" people
-- canonical is trying for that --- but........

some to a lot of self improvement is needed for using a Linux or even Mac OS

To be clear, Windows has more driver problems than linux does. The last year or so has seen me having to install Windows 7 on machines sold with Windows 8, which you would thing would be straight forward process...WRONG! I've had situations where I had to track down all drivers individually, including the ethernet driver which had to be done on another computer then copied to a usb stick and installed from that on the machine I was working on. Pfft....I could have installed Linux on a dozen machines in the time it took to do that one Windows machine.

Ok, the things you basically need to know is:
What type of Video card you have.
What type of Network controller you have (including ethernet and wifi)

In most cases, ALSA will handle your sound card, right out of the box. Xorg has a Vesa Driver that will work for a plug-and-play type thing, allowing you to have video until you get the right video driver installed.

Now, unless you have some weird Broadcom wifi card, wifi should work too.

If someone were to ask what would be the best platform to build a distro, tailored to your needs. I would reply with much glee; Arch! That's what I use, and I wouldn't consider anything else. Arch gives you the tools to build a system that has everything you need, and not one thing more.

The only problem with Arch is that you really need a few years of experience, and understanding of Linux in general before you tackle an Arch install. There are a couple of install scripts out there, but without the know-how, you may not know how to use those either.

I think for the most part you shouldn't have any trouble with any of the popular distros. You may have to install proprietary drivers once you get the distro installed, but that's not by any means difficult.

If that's the case, consider getting a system with Ubuntu preinstalled, such as from System76 or ZaReason, or the Dell XPS.

Although, even then, you're not going to find the same tight, trouble-free integration that you will find with a Mac. As has already been stated, they control both the hardware and the software, so they have an advantage there. I use a Mac 9-10 hours a day, 5 days a week at work, and everything just works as it should, yes, but I still go home and use Slackware on my ThinkPad T61. Everything "just works" there, too, but I have complete control over my setup, and Slackware doesn't suffer from the "beta" feel of many Linux distros.

Macs work as well as they do because they're high-end hardware. It's not fair to compare them to Linux or Windows. You can't buy a new mac for $399. But you can buy a PC for that much. If you spend $2500 on a PC, then you can compare it to a Mac.

I agree about Slackware. I use Arch for the same reason.

The opensource driveway is littered with great ideas that expected an army of developers to just jump at the idea with no compensation beyond community betterment. It rarely works if the guy or girl with the idea doesn't have the ability and motivation to do the brunt of the work themselves.

Completely agree with you, here. Just as an example, my wife last month lost her 1st generation iPhone, whilst out playing in the snow. Just a few days ago, a man and his two young sons came to our door, with said iPhone. It had been outdoors for a month, in snow and rain. They took it home, stuck it in a bag of rice to dry it out, recharged it, found our address on it. It STILL works, perfectly. I have been through about four Android phones in the same time period. Just holding an iPhone in one hand, and the average Android phone in the other, you can feel the difference in quality. iPhones are heavy, solid, well-built; most Android phones are light and cheap. That's not to say that there aren't well made Android phones, but they are the exception, rather than the rule.

Yup, it's the same with laptops/desktop hardware... there's good non-Apple stuff out there, but it's the exception. These guys make bad-ass hardware, but they are specific to my industry (print). Not unusual for these things to go for 10+ years without a hardware failure.

I would imagine most preinstalled Linux machines don't come with a disk or backup partition for reinstall? So, if you FUBAR it you'd be back to square one and if your a microcoughed, ma¢ even Linux:only person inevitably do you know how slow or FUBARed there computers get... it's like buying a car and never doing an oil change? Unlike oil changes where you have to at lest buy oil, putting it in and Linux is free to learn.

Just saw a link posted by Gregg Bell that made me laugh and think of your post.

this is an example of a medium to large image
the D15 Earth Topographic data in simple cylindrical map projection
16 bit SINGED LSB format raw image
65536 x 32768 pixels ( width x height )

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Z...it?usp=sharing
Ds15.zip is 854.6 MiB
and 4 gig unzipped

G-Drive has no file size limit
BUT
15 Gig is the free size
25 with google photos and g-drive

The stuff on that link you shared is definately some bad ass stuff. I wish I could afford stuff like that. I do a lot of video encoding. It would be nice to be able to Encode videos really fast.

my EX ( this was a few years back ) had XP sp3 and 6 TOOLBARS in IE6
and 8 in firefox

with at least 100 "installers" for crapware on the DESKTOP
and was wondering why it was taking a long time to turn on

My god....If I had a dollar for every time I had to fix someones system for doing that...

lol...not to mention the 40+ "New Folders" on the desktop

I've been telling people for years: "don't ever put executables on the desktop. Windows (explorer) feels as though it has to cache all executable files it finds on the desktop. At least that's the way it used to be.

...and the stupid toolbars...I know exactly what you're talking about. I remember a while back I was trying to clean up my mother in law's computer. I opened IE, and the toolbars took up half the scree. I almost peed a little from laughing so hard

Whats a good way to view it should I install
http://fwtools.maptools.org/ ? It's taking me longer than downloading it the Gimp almost views from the site put then for the .raw download GIMP importer for raw camera images won't load it at all and NASA has a lot of cool big images too tho converted to load (but don't seem that HD here) in Firefox: http://petapixel.com/2013/06/04/nasa...ring-galaxies/
I saw on some show how they combine megapixels from cellphones can't find a link (probably not too unlike) and don't recall the staggering number of pixels the tech could create.