I am a Computer Science student and I want buy a laptop. Which one, according to you, is better Macbook Air or Windows laptop?
It's personal preference.
I know a lot of people choose mac, personally I'm windows (A big point for me is screen size and cost). But I work with a lot of servers etc, so have a basic/good understand of linux as well.
Bare in mind which ever system you choose you'll run into different environment issues etc, so reiterate: it's personal preference.
Well I would choose the Macbook Air if performance isn't an issue for you 'cause for the price you could buy a monster windows laptop. The reason would be stability, kind of smooth performance all over (without pushing its limits) and design. But I also do design, ux/ui, audio and video manipulation. And don't forget that you could install Linux on both OSx and Windows
Well...In the past I had a Windows pc. But now I have a Mac. And I totally happy about my choice. It is awesome. Fast, beautiful to behold, good design, thin laptop. I have several useful app installed there. iOS store is a wonderful universe of great apps.
Anyway I think at the end it's a matter of tastes and personal preferences!
Marco Alka
Software Engineer, Technical Consultant & Mentor
For a computer science student, I would recommend Linux, as it requires you to learn a lot about how the operating system works. You will see many principles and things being applied there from your theoretical courses about operating systems, algorithms and patterns, etc. Depending on your level of masochistness, you might use a user-system, like Mint or Elementary OS, or you might want to use a super-user system, like Arch, or you might want to use a "I am Linus Torvalds" system, like Gentoo or Stali.
At some Universities, students might prefer BSD over Linux. BSD is really nice, do not underestimate it just because it is not as famous. In terms of stuff you can learn, BSD is pretty compareable to Linux.
In case you are required to have one of the above mentioned operating systems, I would rather go for the one which you have more experience with and which your professors prefer (as they will have to teach you stuff and probably do not want to debug applications for other OSs or search for alternative software)