Jarlath wrote:
This is way offtopic, but I'm learning Gimp and Inkscape and planned on buying a desktop PC soon and then trying to get some work in graphic design - maybe in a printing company for starters.
However, during this learning phase, I've noticed that my 750Mhz / 512MB Ram laptop is doing quite well under Ubuntu.
Do any of you think it would be as practical to work on a laptop exclusively?
I am working under Ubuntu as well, and I think that merely for a start this should be ok, but if you are working with larger images and particularly with filters, I would recommend getting a faster CPU (and additional RAM couldn't hurt, as well! ;-) Running some of the Gimp's filters can become time-consuming under your system. I don't know, though, inhowfar you are able to upgrade your CPU. Otherwise, in the long run I would recommend getting a faster (desktop) PC, maybe (if you can afford it) with at least 2 GHz. I do have no idea, though, about the performance of dual-core processors under Ubuntu (which is just great otherwise).
Btw, when you are thinking about working for print, color management & 16-bit support are important. The Gimp doesn't support this, yet, but I've heard that Krita (requires KDE) is good for those purposes. Krita is part of the KOffice suite.
HTH,
Claus