[Qgis-user] advice on the right hardware and o.s. to maximise qgis potential

[pcreso at pcreso.com]

One additional point, while I agree that Linux is the optimal operating system, if you are not an existing Linux user, then you'll get lots of conflicting advice as to which Linux distribution is best. So I'll start the conflict :-)

I use both OpenSuse & Ubuntu & would rank OpenSuse as slightly ahead at the moment. Fedora is another viable alternative. All have extensive GIS software repositories which make the installation & upgrading of QGIS and related applications a pretty straightforward exercise.

Many Linux purists prefer Debian, which is certainly robust & stable, but I find more complex to administer than some more user friendly distros.

I'd look around & see which of the above you have some local support for & run with that, if you are new to Linux, having a colleague to help is more useful than your choice of distribution.

Otherwise Alex's reply pretty much covers it.

Cheers,

   Brent Wood




--- On Mon, 3/12/12, Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com> wrote:

From: Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com>
Subject: Re: [Qgis-user] advice on the right hardware and o.s. to maximise qgis potential
To: qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
Date: Monday, March 12, 2012, 12:34 PM

On 03/11/2012 04:16 PM, john raskulinecz wrote:
> 
> DEAR LIST, 
>  WAS WONDERING IF ANYONE CAN GIVE ME SOME ADVICE AS TO WHAT WOULD BE THE BEST HARD WARE AND OPERATING SYSTEM TO COMPILE SO AS TO MAXIMISE GQGIS'S POTENTIAL AND UTILITIES. I AM ABOUT TO BUY A NEW DESK TOP SPECIFICALY TO RUN QGIS AND ALL PLUGINS AND WILL BE BUILDING FROM SCRATCH. ANY IDEAS AS TO MAC VS. PC OR INTEL VS. AMD OR HOW MUCH MEMORY, SPEED IS ENOUGH OR IS OVERKILL. I DON'T WANT TO INCITE THE TRADITIONAL MAC -PC WAR BUT ANY HELP OR GUIDENCE EOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED.
>  J.R.
>                            
> 

Those answers actually depend more on your budget than anything else.

Best operating system - Linux,
because 64bit builds are packaged and compiling is easy (Mac compiling
is not so easy for add ons, and Windows compiling at this point in time
seems to require Visual Studio). Note even if you do buy Windows, make
sure you get 64 bit, you will need to compile QGIS yourself to get a 64
bit version at this time.
A large number of QGIS developers/power users are on linux too.

Your bottleneck is actually most likely going to be disk speed for
read/write.

A minimum spec GIS workstation(Assuming we mean desktop not server or
laptop) for reasonable performance:
Intel i7
4 GB ram (min, 8-16 better)
an SSD for the OS (Intel's have the best reliability)
an SATA III, big drive for storage (WD, Seagate, Hitach or Samsung)
an PCI express graphics card of 256MB+

There's no way to know what would be overkill without knowing what kind
of datasets you'll be working on and how big they are. The bigger the
datasets the more RAM you'll want.

Enjoy,
Alex
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