[Qgis-user] What hardware for QGIS

[neil2 at ansergis.net]

 Hello,

 I am just getting to know QGIS having taken a brief two day overview 
 course at GISRUK 2012 and realised that it really is becoming a 
 practical alternative to Arc.
 One of the many attractions of it is the possibility to also escape 
 from windows.

 So I am looking at buying an Apple Mac and was hoping for some advice :

 a) What are the limits to the resources that QGIS can realistically use 
 (i.e. in the same way that ArcMap is still pretty much stuck with single 
 core 32bit processing so there isn't much point sticking 16Gig of memory 
 in a machine running it).

 b) If I do go with Mac, am I better to install the Mac version of QGIS 
 or run Linux also.

 c) As I am unlikely to entirely escape ESRI, has anyone experience of 
 running ArcGIS on a windows simulator? (i.e. do I need to divide my 
 resources between two machines).

 d) On the course we ran the linux version of QGIS on a virtual machine. 
 This has some attractions in terms of managing various clients projects. 
 But what are the performance issues?

 Process wise I am likely to need to cover the gamut, from 
 straightforward overlay to process models, 3D graphics and 
 visualisation.


 Thanks in advance for your opinions.

 Neil