Mac operating system for bioinformatics

Question

[kanwarjag]

You will hate me to post this question on this web page. I think I will get best feedback on my naive question-

I have imac and want to reformat it. I mostly do the bioinformatics work and also use some linux. However my programming expertise is reasonable but not very high. I would like to decide between yosemite vs Mavericks OS, As rule news version should be best but since on this forum colleagues amy used/ installed several packages and may have used in place of linux. What may be the best OS fro iMAc. Does it matter that if a tool is compatible with Maverick will not be compatible with yosemite and vice versa.

Thanks for any suggestion

Answer 1

[Brice Sarver]

The biggest change to the operating system happened recently with El Capitan - basically, there is some difference with how root folders can be accessed. I didn't experience any differences between Yosemite and Mavericks for common tasks that I ran locally, but most of my work is server-based.

[Endre Bakken Stovner]

I often do stuff locally for convenience and experienced almost no differences. I had to reinstall R with homebrew though, but it was completely painless.

[DG]

Yes, although this really just means that it is hard to now put things in /usr/local/bin basically. But you can still install command-line software manually in your home directory somewhere, set your path, and be good to go. On a single user machine it ends up making no real difference.

As for the original question go with the the newer release. There is no real difference between the two but the newer release will be better supported for some of the other ancillary tools you need (XCode, etc).

Answer 2

[Guangchuang Yu]

maybe linux on mac, lol...

[Tky]

It looks great! is this a virtual machine or you installed linux on a Mac?

[Guangchuang Yu]

linux on mac, not VM.

[dally]

This is elementary os yes?

[Guangchuang Yu]

yes! it's very similar to os x.

[dally]

Yea, I personally love it. The power of Linux with the added touch of being beautiful.