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.
Chad
plain TeX is a joy to use, but you must really understand boxes and glue etc on a deep level. LaTeX makes that easier, but at the cost of extreme complexity internally (compare the output routines for example.)
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.
TIL that plain TeX is a thing.
It's outrageous! You must start a crusade to make them see the error of their ways and start using Arch!
Should I ?
No
You must! The Penguin demands it!
please don't
I teach. I use Arch for my school laptop.
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)
I'm interested but don't know enough to understand that answer.
If stuff is designed for big servers that run Linux, it's easier to get it to run on a desktop PC if the PC runs Linux too because then it's the same thing except much less powerful.
Code and snippets to analyze data work well when you can send chunks of it to multiple servers (think analyzing the effect of weather patterns).
Since a lot of that stuff is running on Linux (similar to cloud computing) it makes sense that people that write function/scripts/utilities would already be comfortable in that environment and use it as their daily driver.
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.
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)
Yeah I was scared they were into proprietary licenses
I have also seen some desktops of my hospital labs using Ubuntu. Must say, amidst all the win7 monitors, that looked so sexy...
Windows 7, first released in 2009, now well out of the most extended of support. Glad to see security of medical records is a top priority.
Don't worry, Ubuntu was probably Lucid. 🤭
Medical environments are notorious for inept tech skills and slow technology adoption.
Windows 7 is...ugly so I understand. What I was shocked was they nearly all used it, not just a few
I loved it when it came out.
it's kinda the fire-and-forget of OSes. you just press the update/upgrade button when the unattended-upgrade didn't catch all and it just works for free and forever.
I remember having my mind blown in college when I saw a Mac Pro tower running Ubuntu in a lab.
I started using Ubuntu because of Radio Astronomy stuff.
Most of my teachers either used MacOS or Ubuntu very few times I saw Windows but again my studies were in computer science so a bit of a bias.
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?
Why what?
Why were you shocked? Why this post? What is this about?
Because usually very few people use Linux, especially in public sector. And here it was all of my teachers, not just one
Cool story
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0