I started university today, I’m on a more general IT department. In first semester we have only one subject that is actually IT (rest is maths and english) that is about basic programming in C. And it turns out that university computers that we will use for this subject are all running Ubuntu. I planned to bring my laptop anyway because I want to have my configs, but it’s still great that students who never used Linux will be introduced to it (for some basic stuff tho).
I turned down a professorship position at a uni in part because they used windows for the whole curriculum. It would have driven me crazy having to use windows given how annoying it is for dev work. I put value on my sanity and it wasn’t worth the modest pay bump to be driven batty every day.
I likely get to teach an IoT class next term. It’s going to be so much fun with SBC systems running Linux and Arduino sensor systems! That’s worth a ton to me.
I studied ecology, and first semester maths was done by a professor who only accepted our homework if it was coded in GNU Octave.
That was a fun learning experience for most of us who went into it with no computer background.
His (as it later turned out, correct) reasoning was that Matlab is a standard tool in Geosciences, but he didn’t want to require us to buy it, so we’re using the free alternative that can be installed on any Linux system.
It was my first Linux experience, and I got hooked. In my bachelor’s thesis I coded a 3D simulation of groundwater movement, and afterwards I ended up in IT instead of ecology.
My uni provided a complete license for the entire MATLAB suite, but this piece of software is genuinely a nightmare to use. Every time i has to touch it, i wish i just had python instead
Meanwhile my university has a large CS program yet uses Windows for everything, even the fucking Unix class requires Windows/macOS exclusive software. I have no idea how we are ranked top 100 for CS.
I was actually quite surprised using Linux in technical university’s is not the norm in west, in india it’s the norm, every technical university atleast all the CS related departments use linux, my university uses cent os everywhere
He might’ve graduated years ago. My experience (also from India) was Ubuntu/Mint is the most likely OS you will encounter in academia here. In school, we were taught about OSes (just GUI programs from Windows and Linux). And during engineering where basic programming is taught to all, we were encouraged to use Ubuntu and even our computer lab had Ubuntu or Mint installed on all computers.
It is the norm in the West. See other comments. I don’t know why OP is surprised.
I study in a technical university in the west. Apart from my own laptop, I’ve only spotted one Linux computer, which was an IT student’s laptop. Though I don’t study IT myself
Universities have been running Linux since the very early versions. Slackware was pretty common back in the 90s and 2000s and universities had labs full of them not least because there weren’t really laptops so they had to have enough machines for all the students. Universities have been heavily involved in the development of unix from its inception and a lot of the tools were initially written by university professors.
