this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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I study math at uni and I was shocked realizing all my teachers use ubuntu on both their laptop and work desktop

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[–] [email protected] 146 points 4 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago

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.)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] LeFantome 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Wait what? Telnet? I am guessing cybersecurity is not one of the classes available at your school.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

TIL that plain TeX is a thing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Elm or mutt? Say pine and I'll die

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 4 months ago (3 children)

It's outrageous! You must start a crusade to make them see the error of their ways and start using Arch!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago

please don't

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

You must! The Penguin demands it!

[–] LeFantome 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I teach. I use Arch for my school laptop.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 4 months ago (3 children)

A lot of my professors of meteorology (and IT courses, of course) also use either Ubuntu or Kubuntu! Love to see it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I would have thought you need a bunch of fancy software for meteorology (expecting on windows).

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I'm interested but don't know enough to understand that answer.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I have also seen some desktops of my hospital labs using Ubuntu. Must say, amidst all the win7 monitors, that looked so sexy...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Don't worry, Ubuntu was probably Lucid. 🤭

Medical environments are notorious for inept tech skills and slow technology adoption.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Windows 7 is...ugly so I understand. What I was shocked was they nearly all used it, not just a few

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

I loved it when it came out.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (12 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (7 children)

I remember having my mind blown in college when I saw a Mac Pro tower running Ubuntu in a lab.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

I started using Ubuntu because of Radio Astronomy stuff.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

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.

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