I study math at uni and I was shocked realizing all my teachers use ubuntu on both their laptop and work desktop
Why?
Probably because Windows is best suited for games and cookie-cutter corporate applications while basically every supercomputer, cluster, etc. runs Linux. Professors aren’t usually running games or cookie-cutter business software so why not? If your one-off, experimental research code is going to ultimately be run on a more powerful system running Linux, why write it on Windows and waste time debugging once you try to run it for real?
But like you could run games on Linux. https://protondb.com
A lot of my professors of meteorology (and IT courses, of course) also use either Ubuntu or Kubuntu! Love to see it
I would have thought you need a bunch of fancy software for meteorology (expecting on windows).
A lot of advanced analytical tools in biotech at least are developed to be compute cluster compatible, and thus work best on unix-like CLI, e.g. Linux (or Mac with a bit of tinkering)
And here I was using windows in a VM to run rstudio 😪
Times have changed for sure. (Tho I haven’t used rstudio for many years and it may still be unsupported)
True. HPC definitely plays a big role in the field, and essentially all compute clusters run some sort of Linux distro. Even though clients that can also be run locally then often have Windows binaries too, I’d say software support on Linux is at least as good as on Windows, probably a bit better.
Cool story
I remember having my mind blown in college when I saw a Mac Pro tower running Ubuntu in a lab.
At one point I triple booted my laptop with Ubuntu, Windows 7 and OSX mostly just to prove I could. Weird times, a lot has changed since then.
Just seemed odd to pay your way into the Apple ecosystem just to wipe it and install Ubuntu
It’s really nice hardware. And for some segments of the market, it’s not even particularly expensive compared to alternatives of similar build quality.
Not only did my math master’s thesis adviser use Linux, he read his email from a command line program and wrote his papers in plain TeX, considering LaTeX a new fangled tool he didn’t need.
my whole university email server was accessed via telnet. So everyone used tty for email.
I think there may have been a gui or mail app that you coud point to it, but no one did. There was about a million(trillian?) gui’s people used for icq messaging though.
Wait what? Telnet? I am guessing cybersecurity is not one of the classes available at your school.