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
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.
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.
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).
maybe linux on mac, lol...
linux on mac, not VM.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
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