I study math at uni and I was shocked realizing all my teachers use ubuntu on both their laptop and work desktop
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.
TIL that plain TeX is a thing.
Elm or mutt? Say pine and I’ll die
I think it was pine, actually, but it was over 10 years ago so I can’t say for sure.
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.
It’s outrageous! You must start a crusade to make them see the error of their ways and start using Arch!
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I’m a teacher at university and I run Arch, BTW. 😁
me too!
I don’t get how people manage to spend so much time keeping arch running. I used it on my laptop for a few years and it just worked?? It was like the easiest to maintain distribution I’ve used other than immutable ones. The only real problems I ever had were accidentally interrupting pacman during a kernel update and not having a kernel, but that was always a like 2 minute fix
Should I ?
No
please don’t
You must! The Penguin demands it!
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.
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.
If you compare with excel or similar. They do not write excel the program. But there is a lot of tinkering with algorithms and functions to get the wanted results.
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)
Rstudio works perfectly, it’s electron
not SunOS then ):
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.
It’s probably like the US military and their missile silos still using floppy disks. Better to keep a time-tested and very familiar system running a critical operation than a new one with a bunch of unknowns. Or like when you go to the bank, and the screen the teller is looking at is just a front end going through a dozen different layers with COBOL code written by long dead or retired people on a mainframe at the other end.
Us end users with very low risk can afford to continuously live on the bleeding edge.
Just a note, the US military completed the phase-out of floppy disks in 2019.
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.
Idk, I honestly like the windows 7 look. But using it after security updates have been stopped is just plain stupid.
I’m running the win 7 wallpaper on my MacBook currently, lol
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.
So it has auto updates enabled? Windows, macOS and a ton of other Linux distros do that as well.
I think it’s moreso that Ubuntu is (one of the) most used desktop Linux OSes, so a lot of corporations and individuals who like to play safe just go with that
From my perspective, if used for work, automatic security updates should be mandatory. Linux is damn impressive with live patch. With thousands or even tens of thousands of endpoints, it’s negligent to not patch.
Features? Don’t care. But security updates are essential in a large organisation.
The worst part of the Linux fan base is the users who hate forced updates, and also don’t believe in AV. Ok on your home network that’s not very risky compared to a corp network with a million student and staff personal information often with byo devices only a network segment away and APT groups targeting you because they know your reputation is worth something to ransom.
if used for work…Features? Don’t care.
Most organizations care about maintaining document compatibility, especially formatting, and that usually means Office365. Microsoft is notorious for publishing a standard and then ignoring their own standard, making it exceedingly difficult to use other office suites.
I’ve heard OnlyOffice does the best at maintaining compatibility.
Sorry to clarify: updates come as security or as feature updates. If I’ve already got a standard operating environment (SOE) with all the features I/staff need to do work, I don’t need new features.
I then have to watch cves with my cve trackers to know when software updates are needed and all devices with those software get updated and the SOE is updated.
I can go on a rant about how bad the Linux has recently made my life as someone’s policy is that any Linux bug might be a security vulnerability and therefore I now have infinite noise in my cve feed, which in turn is making decisions on how to mitigate security issues hard, but that is beyond this discussion.
So in short I’m only talking about when you update, updating only security fixes, not the software and features. Live patching security vulnerabilities is pretty much free low effort, low impact, and in my personal opinion, absolutely critical. But software features patching can be disruptive, leaves little to be gained, and really only should be driven for a request to need that feature at which point it would also include an update to the SOE.
I agree, this doesn’t explain why Ubuntu would be any better than other OSes that also auto update by default…
They probably have been using it for years, and for the last more then a decade I’ve been using Ubuntu as my main Linux distribution since I have work to do and I’ll get to doing work faster in ubuntu than any other distribution.
Why did I start with Ubuntu? 10+ years ago Ubuntu was lightyears ahead for community support for issues. Again, I had work to do, I wasn’t hobbyist playing “fuck windows”.
In fact look at things like ROS where you can get going with “apt install ros-noetic-desktop” and now you can build your robotics stuff instantly. Every dependency to start and all the other tooling is there too. Sure a bunch of people would now say “use nix” but my autonomous robotics project doesn’t care I am trying to get lidar, camera, motors, and SLAM algorithms to work. I don’t want to care or think about compiling ROS for some arch distribution.
I won’t say I don’t dabble with other distributions but if I’ve got work to do, I’m going to use the tools I already know better than the back of my hand. And at the time, when selecting these tools, Ubuntu had it answered and is stable enough to have been unchanging for basically a decade.
Oh and if I needed to, I could pay and get support so the CEO can hear that risk is gone too (despite almost every other vendor we pay never actually resolving a issue before we find and fix it… Though I do like also being able to say “we have raised a ticket with vendor x and am waiting on a reply”).
I think your first point is the main reason Ubuntu has its popularity to thank for; 10-15 years ago it was (one of) the best desktop Linux OSes, people used to its workflow will continue using it as there’s no imminent reason to switch to whatever new thing just came out
Inertia is just a sign of maturity. It’s fine. Nothing wrong with it. Especially when the new stuff is happening along side it. In 10 years there may be people asking why you’re using arch or nix, when whatever new thing is superior. But it’ll just be proof that nix can run in production for 10+ years.
Windows, macOS and a ton of other Linux distros do that as well.
First of all, windows and macOS are not for free. They cost extra money, sometimes hidden in the PC cost when pre-installed. When they do a major update, like Win10 to 11, you are at their mercy, if your license can be used to upgrade. Often it can, but sometimes your PC is not “Windows 11 ready” or so and then you get updates for your old system for a few more years until they drop you like a hot potato and throw you to the malware wolves.
Additionally, in Windows the automatic updates are just for the OS itself and some apps from its store. A few apps like Chrome and FF install their own extra update service on top. A lot of other programs check for updates individually or some not at all and often you have to download and run their installer for every update. Idk how it is in macOS tho. Haven’t used it in years.
Yes, a ton of other Linux distros also have background unattended-upgrade or similar. However, the people who choose Ubuntu over those are usually looking for a quick solution that almost always just installs without problems. They usyally don’t have time or patience for any complications, however small. So they choose the fire-and-forget Linux and additionally have greater chances to find a fix or help in the super rare case it doesn’t work, because the bigger user base increases the likelyhood someone else is familiar or has infos regarding that exotic issue.
macOS is mostly the same as Windows in terms of updating Applications.
The App Store is more prevalent than Microsoft Store, but you can still download an executable for most programs from the browser. Installing is a bit different since you drop the file into the app folder instead of actually having an installation executable.
Then there is homebrew, which is an unofficial package manager, which I am using for everything, if available (which is almost all the time)
You think it is the most used because it is the most used? There must be a reason for that!
It was one of the first polished desktop Linux systems, even though it’s enshittified recently it holds its popularity due to its long-standing status as “THE Linux desktop”
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.
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?” 🤣
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.
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.
Yeah I think they needed horsepower to run some sophisticated models in Matlab, and Apple had a killer educational discount.
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.
I would assume they would be busy solving Integrals not this
They don’t care about solving integrals, it’s math not engineering
Cool story
