There’s a phrase: “We are now in an era of abundant computing power”. While I certainly agree — I believe it myself too — there are always fields where no processing power is enough, including graphics and video processing.
I am also working in such a field, and I believe I have got quite a powerful main rig (that I could afford). My main rig is Intel Core i7 2630QM Sandy Bridge (2.0GHz, Quad-core, mobile) with 16GB RAM running Windows 7. While it might not sound as powerful as you might think (it still struggles on large After Effect compositions, for example), it is certainly more powerful than many new computers today.
Another field that screams for processing power is programming. While text editing (and yes, programming is really just text editing) is not a burden on the computer itself, compiling and testing sure does. Some programs take a long time to compile even on fast processors. And for testing, it’s very common to launch virtual machines, which consume quite a bit of RAM. Also, some IDEs also take a lot of RAM and processing power to provide better code insight1.
My main work on the computer is programming. But I seriously doubt I need a Core i7 with 16GB of RAM to develop on. So I decided to dig out my old notebook (Dell Studio 1537: Core 2 Duo 2.26GHz Penryn with 4GB RAM) which was running Windows Vista (argh!). I formatted it completely and installed Linux Mint2.
Surprisingly, after trying to make myself comfortable, apart from some nitpick (Win+D doesn’t work, for example), to my surprise I find it perfectly usable. (In the past I have only used Linux as a testing/production server which means terminal only.)
I haven’t begun productive work on this machine yet, but I do plan to use this as my main machine for development in the future. I currently bring IntelliJ Idea and Sublime Text with me, but plan to migrate to Vim in near future.
Of course, some works aren’t meant to be done on Linux (for example, developing a Windows-only software :P). I still use my i7 machine for that.
BTW, I am using Linux not because it is free. I could get Windows for free too from DreamSpark3. But the main reason is that, depend on the DE, it is significantly lighter to run. I am not averse to paying, as I am also using IntelliJ IDEA, a paid software. But if a free software is suitable for my needs, I sure will use them instead of paid software.
JetBrains suite of IDEs is powerful but also consumes a lot of resources. ↩︎
A distro with a desktop environment that’s actually usable. I originally planned to run Windows 8.1 along with Linux Mint, but due to the lack of drivers that plan was abandoned. ↩︎
(Added 2024) Now known as Azure for Students. ↩︎