Making the jump to Linux with a Gazelle - need advice

[haroldtwilkins]

Hey there!

I'm proud to say that I'll be abandoning my windows allegiance and joining up with the Ubuntu ranks fairly soon - horaaah!

I've been shopping around for the past week at ubuntu laptops and I am very into the System76 Gazelle professional. But I have some concerns as I am looking to use this laptop primarily for web/graphic design & development. I'm worried that the lack of a dedicated graphics card will make working in photoshop/illustrator sluggish.

I've done a bit of research and from what I've seen I have the option to either use wine to run photoshop, or I can run a virtual box instance of windows 7 and run photoshop in there. Either way I'm worried that the Intel HD4000 will not be able to keep up with the work that I will be doing.

I've looked into alternative models with similar specs and a dedicated graphics card. However I would rather have the Gazelle simply because it'll be lighter, slicker, and portable. So the question is, will the Gazelle be able to keep up with the work that I'll be doing on a daily basis - and if not what are some alternative options? Also I'm looking to compile a list of useful web development tools for when I switch over to Ubuntu. So far the only tool that I've decided on is bluefish as my text editor.

[isantop]

Most 2D graphics suites are actually RAM and CPU heavy; a dedicated GPU won't affect the performance at all. The Gazelle is a fantastic system for creative professionals, especially for graphics.

[haroldtwilkins]

Most 2D graphics suites are actually RAM and CPU heavy; a dedicated GPU won't affect the performance at all. The Gazelle is a fantastic system for creative professionals, especially for graphics.

Thanks for the quick reply, that pretty much finalizes my decision!

[MG&TL]

As for web development tools:

• Text editors. You're spoilt for choice here, but the only web-specific one (to my knowledge) is the one you've already chosen, bluefish. If you have time to learn (yes, learn!) a text editor, vim or Emacs will undoubtedly increase your productivity over 'click and arrow key' text editors.
• Web server/ Database. See this page for the traditional LAMP stack of server software.
• Scripting languages/preprocessors. Pretty much everything that runs on windows also runs on Linux, and vice-versa. Ruby, Python, PHP...

I can't think of anything else a web developer would want, but then again, I'm not a web developer.