this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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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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[–] someguy3 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago (3 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)

[–] someguy3 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 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 6 points 5 months ago (1 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.

[–] someguy3 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] SzethFriendOfNimi 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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 4 points 5 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 1 points 5 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 4 points 5 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Rstudio works perfectly, it's electron