I study math at uni and I was shocked realizing all my teachers use ubuntu on both their laptop and work desktop

  • ignirtoq
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    1439 months ago

    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.

    • @pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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      229 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.)

    • @oo1@lemmings.world
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      99 months ago

      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.

        • @oo1@lemmings.world
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          19 months ago

          it might’ve been ssh i can’t really remeber. The library catalog was maybe the telnet one. IIRC don’t think either service was accesible via the internet though.

      • ignirtoq
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        29 months ago

        I think it was pine, actually, but it was over 10 years ago so I can’t say for sure.

    • @stewie3128@lemmy.ml
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      29 months ago

      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.

  • Diplomjodler
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    689 months ago

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

  • @wolre@lemmy.world
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    429 months ago

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

    • BarqsHasBite
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      9 months ago

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

      • @niucllos@lemm.ee
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        259 months ago

        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)

        • BarqsHasBite
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          89 months ago

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

          • @zurohki@aussie.zone
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            89 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.

          • @SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world
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            69 months ago

            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.

            • BarqsHasBite
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              29 months ago

              Would meteorologists be writing that stuff or just using it? I would have thought using, but not programming.

              • @SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world
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                59 months ago

                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.

                • @wolre@lemmy.world
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                  49 months ago

                  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.

              • @sep@lemmy.world
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                19 months ago

                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.

        • @wolre@lemmy.world
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          49 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.

        • BubbleMonkey
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          9 months ago

          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)

  • @mitrosus@discuss.tchncs.de
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    299 months ago

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

    • @pingveno@lemmy.ml
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      119 months ago

      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.

      • lemmyvore
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        9 months ago

        Don’t worry, Ubuntu was probably Lucid. 🤭

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

        • TimeSquirrel
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • lemmyvore
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            39 months ago

            Just a note, the US military completed the phase-out of floppy disks in 2019.

    • EtzBetz
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      29 months ago

      I’m running the win 7 wallpaper on my MacBook currently, lol

  • lurch (he/him)
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    219 months ago

    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.

  • @ch00f@lemmy.world
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    129 months ago

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

    • 555
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      -29 months ago

      Why? It was an Intel Mac. They can even boot windows.

      • @Toribor@corndog.social
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        119 months ago

        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.

        • youmaynotknow
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          39 months ago

          I did the same on a PC I built like 10 years ago just because “why not?” 🤣

      • @ch00f@lemmy.world
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        79 months ago

        Just seemed odd to pay your way into the Apple ecosystem just to wipe it and install Ubuntu

        • 555
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          39 months ago

          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.

        • @vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • @ch00f@lemmy.world
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            29 months ago

            Yeah I think they needed horsepower to run some sophisticated models in Matlab, and Apple had a killer educational discount.

  • @ransomwarelettuce@lemmy.world
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    89 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.

    • @ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world
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      229 months ago

      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?

            • JackGreenEarth
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              19 months ago

              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.

              • @frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml
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                9 months ago

                No, because it’s circular logic.

                It is, and that’s inherent in the problem under consideration, the problem of the ‘uncaused caused’ or the ‘first mover’. Logic can either be A) circular or B) not-circular. Any not-circular logic must explain each element by referring to a prior, but then you’ve got an infinite regress. So you’re trapped in a dilemma: do you want the circular logic or the infinite regress? Liebniz’s choice was to say that God was inherently existent, like when Lao Tzu said 道法 自然

                There’s no reason for a necessary being to exist before it does

                Correct. It is necessary: it is self-causing. It does not stand upon a ‘reason’, unlike everything else in conditioned existence.

                to exist before it does

                You’re assuming it is subject to the laws of linear time and causation, and point out how that assumption leads to a contradiction. But Liebniz’s God is not subject to the laws of linear time and causation. Which is the whole point of positing it: because if it were subject to those laws: infinite regress.

                and no evidence that one does in the real world.

                Well the world exists, so all this existence must have some cause. That was the starting point of the conversation: Why is there something instead of nothing?

      • lemmyvore
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        29 months ago

        Bold of you to assume Ubuntu was a recent version.