I find that interesting.
I would expect that many scientists are “nerds” and would lean towards Linux.
Also would suspect the ratio of scientist vs population would be much higher.
They are nerds who care about other things than their operating system. That’s like wondering why they also don’t build their own networks down there and self host everything. Those are particular hobbies that don’t interest the vast majority of people, nerd or otherwise.
The Apple II was gaining a lot of popularity with colleges before the Mac even came out. And by the time System 7 was renamed to Mac OS 7 in the mid 90s Apple had gone HARD on getting Macs (and until the 90s Apple IIs) into all schools levels.
to be fair the apple II was a fairly common computer in that age (appleII 80’s im talking here not the 90’s stuff). they were like the first things out there and ibm came later and ibm clones came still later. But yeah mac worked for the position in the schools.
i feel like if you’re not sat stationary at a workstation (who is these days) what you want is a laptop that’s good at being a laptop. 99% of the software developers i work with (not a small number) use Macbook Pros. they are well built, have good components, have best in class battery life (we’ll see how things shake out with Qualcomm), and are BSD based and therefore Unix compatible. my servers and gaming/CUDA PC? Linux all day. my laptop? Macbook. i’m not ideological enough to have range anxiety every time i step away from my desk. plus any decent sized org is going to have to administrate these machines, from scientists to administrators, and catering to .4% of your users is not a good ROI if your software vendors struggled for 8 years to get their Windows 98 based specialty sensor software to run on Mac.
that .4% is likely not 0 because they are nerds.
seriously tho if Qualcomm chips can make a Linux book that lasts all day i would happily make the switch
Long time CentOS and Ubuntu user here. I switched to OSX because of the Apple Silicon speed and battery life. I still spend a lot of my day ssh into various Linux boxes, but running OSX on Apple Silicon has made my laptop use much more enjoyable since I’m not constantly worried about where I’m going to plug in to charge my laptop anymore.
I agree quite a bit. One thing to note is ever since the m1-3 chips and breakage with brew, my local circle is going other machines. I know brew eventually fixed things but some packages never got updated/broke permanently.
Yeah it’s much better now. Things have mostly settled. It was more of a knee jerk reaction tbh. But it did get more people interested/exposed to Linux for dev machines. Which I think is good for the long run.
We need good options as devs. Mac/Linux are still my gotos for that reason.
Statcounter relies on web tracking to try to estimate the usage shares. Theoretically, there could be millions of science PCs running Linux, but one guy is browsing the internet with a Windows PC. Basically, take this data with a massive grain of salt…
these reports are very flawed. a lot of websites are only capable of identifying windows or apple computers. tons of them mis-identify linux as windows.
They use Apple. And then bitch that its update process is so bad, it can’t restart where it left off when the connection breaks, it can’t use caches/mirrors properly, blabla. Bitch, don’t use it then.
I find that interesting. I would expect that many scientists are “nerds” and would lean towards Linux. Also would suspect the ratio of scientist vs population would be much higher.
Guess I’ve been proven wrong.
They are nerds who care about other things than their operating system. That’s like wondering why they also don’t build their own networks down there and self host everything. Those are particular hobbies that don’t interest the vast majority of people, nerd or otherwise.
Yup. At work I manage thousands of Linux servers. At home? I run Windows. It’s a job, not a hobby for me.
😮
mac was very popular in academia even before osx. It was like the only place you would find macs in the early aughts.
Apple was popular in academia even before Mac OS.
The Apple II was gaining a lot of popularity with colleges before the Mac even came out. And by the time System 7 was renamed to Mac OS 7 in the mid 90s Apple had gone HARD on getting Macs (and until the 90s Apple IIs) into all schools levels.
to be fair the apple II was a fairly common computer in that age (appleII 80’s im talking here not the 90’s stuff). they were like the first things out there and ibm came later and ibm clones came still later. But yeah mac worked for the position in the schools.
i feel like if you’re not sat stationary at a workstation (who is these days) what you want is a laptop that’s good at being a laptop. 99% of the software developers i work with (not a small number) use Macbook Pros. they are well built, have good components, have best in class battery life (we’ll see how things shake out with Qualcomm), and are BSD based and therefore Unix compatible. my servers and gaming/CUDA PC? Linux all day. my laptop? Macbook. i’m not ideological enough to have range anxiety every time i step away from my desk. plus any decent sized org is going to have to administrate these machines, from scientists to administrators, and catering to .4% of your users is not a good ROI if your software vendors struggled for 8 years to get their Windows 98 based specialty sensor software to run on Mac.
that .4% is likely not 0 because they are nerds.
seriously tho if Qualcomm chips can make a Linux book that lasts all day i would happily make the switch
Long time CentOS and Ubuntu user here. I switched to OSX because of the Apple Silicon speed and battery life. I still spend a lot of my day ssh into various Linux boxes, but running OSX on Apple Silicon has made my laptop use much more enjoyable since I’m not constantly worried about where I’m going to plug in to charge my laptop anymore.
My sister got a tuxedo at work 😮 and damn are those nice laptops! Best battery life I ever saw on a laptop not running macOS.
I agree quite a bit. One thing to note is ever since the m1-3 chips and breakage with brew, my local circle is going other machines. I know brew eventually fixed things but some packages never got updated/broke permanently.
i haven’t personally had trouble with that since early 2023, but it depends on your dependencies
Yeah it’s much better now. Things have mostly settled. It was more of a knee jerk reaction tbh. But it did get more people interested/exposed to Linux for dev machines. Which I think is good for the long run.
We need good options as devs. Mac/Linux are still my gotos for that reason.
Statcounter relies on web tracking to try to estimate the usage shares. Theoretically, there could be millions of science PCs running Linux, but one guy is browsing the internet with a Windows PC. Basically, take this data with a massive grain of salt…
Do you really believe that this is a real data?
these reports are very flawed. a lot of websites are only capable of identifying windows or apple computers. tons of them mis-identify linux as windows.
They use Apple. And then bitch that its update process is so bad, it can’t restart where it left off when the connection breaks, it can’t use caches/mirrors properly, blabla. Bitch, don’t use it then.
It’s the cold. See comment: https://lemmy.nowsci.com/comment/10188718
mac was very popular in academia even before osx. It was like the only place you would find macs in the early aughts.