I have also seen some desktops of my hospital labs using Ubuntu. Must say, amidst all the win7 monitors, that looked so sexy...
Linux
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.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
I started using Ubuntu because of Radio Astronomy stuff.
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.
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.
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.)
I set up Alpine to read my Gmail last summer, and while the nostalgia hit was nice, the browser version was more responsive and useful, cap I went back to that.
Chad
I remember having my mind blown in college when I saw a Mac Pro tower running Ubuntu in a lab.
Why? It was an Intel Mac. They can even boot windows.
Just seemed odd to pay your way into the Apple ecosystem just to wipe it and install Ubuntu
Oh, that. Yes. I can’t fathom using Apple hardware outside of the Apple ecosystem unless that machine if EOL. But never for windows haha.
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.
I did the same on a PC I built like 10 years ago just because "why not?" 🤣
Cool story
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)
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)
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.
Would meteorologists be writing that stuff or just using it? I would have thought using, but not programming.
Not sure. Like any field I suspect there’s specialties including people who do research/modeling vs consuming that data and advising based on it.
They certainly do, at least to an extent. In many fields where you have to work with a lot of data people will use R or Python to handle/transform/perform calculations.
Yeah I was scared they were into proprietary licenses
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 ask why, try bud dry
Duff Life for me, thanks.
What about good ole Big Top Beer at my local Raytown market
Why what?
Why is there something instead of nothing
When I look at my gut, I ask myself the same question 😭
Well Liebniz said it's because of a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself, if that helps.
No, because it's circular logic. There's no reason for a necessary being to exist before it does, and no evidence that one does in the real world.
Are you speaking about you ?