I started university today, I’m on a more general IT department. In first semester we have only one subject that is actually IT (rest is maths and english) that is about basic programming in C. And it turns out that university computers that we will use for this subject are all running Ubuntu. I planned to bring my laptop anyway because I want to have my configs, but it’s still great that students who never used Linux will be introduced to it (for some basic stuff tho).
He might’ve graduated years ago. My experience (also from India) was Ubuntu/Mint is the most likely OS you will encounter in academia here. In school, we were taught about OSes (just GUI programs from Windows and Linux). And during engineering where basic programming is taught to all, we were encouraged to use Ubuntu and even our computer lab had Ubuntu or Mint installed on all computers.
Crazy how common Ubuntu is. Totally crazy. They really deserved it I think, but nowadays they do so much annoying stuff that it is quite annoying. For example them using Snaps against everyone else.