I swear, when I finish this PhD and start my new position I’ll either be asking for a Mac or installing Linux on my current computer. A lot of my work at the moment revolves around remotely connecting to the university’s supercomputer and using git to do version control for documents stored locally. Both of these require decent ssh and X forwarding and I am sick to death of the way Windows XP deals with both of these .The faculty was going to upgrade us all to Windows 7 but then it got merged with another faculty and I guess it slipped down the list of priorities.
I’ve used Mac OS X and/or Linux as my home operating system for quite a while now (must be at least ten years) and while I’m generally okay to use Windows and there are some nice implementations of the programs I need to use (LaTeX, MATLAB, RStudio), the fact is that these programs are available on other operating systems.
You could go all the way and install Linux on your Mac!
I could, but there are a lot of Mac programs that I like. In any case, I don’t think the university will buy me a brand new computer, so throwing Ubuntu on this three year old computer (which has a Vista sticker, but XP SP3 installed) is probably going to be the way I go.
You don’t need admin rights on the PC to create a Linux partition, the only issue is that when IT services finally do get around to upgrading you to Win7 then your Linux partition will be wiped.