I use Arch btw
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This is because of the cold. Apple Laptops dominate because they are (were at the time, anyway), the only screens that would survive those temperatures.
Reference: I designed and led the build of the system used by the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium for managing equipment and rentals for scientists in the arctic back in the 2Ks.
One of the things I loved about Reddit was the super niche experts dropping into the comment section. I'm so glad Lemmy has this too.
Woa.. I have become those whom I cherish. Haha
Wouldn’t you want something purpose built for it? Like a Panasonic Toughbook or an Intel 10850k?
You'd think, but the macs held up great, and were easier to replace as they were often rented so needed to be sourced regularly.
Wierd, given all the penguins are there
I know right?, even though I post this as a joke but I'm genuinely surprised
I wonder how realistic that is; almost all of the science people I've met run Linux
what do you think the 17% unknown is?
BSD/very outdated Linux kernel? XD
TempleOS
The long nights demand the holy light of TempleOS
My guess would be that few of these machines are used for ordinary web-browsing, or not even online.
How do you think they got these metrics? People aren't going down there to do science or tourism without being able to communicate back home. It is almost always just statistics from the identifying header information of web traffic. It's not at all uncommon for web traffic from Linux programs to not identify the operating system. I know in my experience identifying as Linux in a browser would be more likely to cause problems than offer any benefit.
Apple devices make sense - how else are you going to deal with the overheating problems?
But you have a lot of cold air to cool it down, and on a side note it makes your room warmer which you might want in that cold region 😅
(But the energy savings is hard to argue with)
apples still have overheating problems? that was a problem with the first macintosh. All because genius engineer and giant among men Steve Jobs didn't think vents were trendy.
I guess the apples don't fall far from the tree.
All joking aside, I haven’t had issues with Macs overheating in years, especially with the M chips. Last time I had an issue was when they tried to cram an i9 in a MBP.
Now the Dell laptops we have at work on the other hand, I’ve had to down clock them in bios so they don’t run at 100% or they will literally overheat just running windows. One of my coworkers has to run his upside down or it doesn’t get enough air through the vents to prevent it from auto shutting down due to thermal issues.
Strange because that's where penguins live.
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.
mac was very popular in academia even before osx. It was like the only place you would find macs in the early aughts.
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.
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...
Wise Mac users move to Antarctica to prolong the life of the badly cooled devices.
You'd think with all those penguins...
Scientists using macs connecting to servers and other machines running Linux.
Unknown share is high too; Linux usage on desktop in Antarctica could be as high as 15%.
Year of the Antarctic Linux desktop is here
I read the title and was like that can't be right. I know that the South Pole base runs a data center so I've always just assumed that ran Linux. Then I looked at the graph and realized it's desktop usage and it makes sense now.
Maybe it's not about the scientists but about the tourists. What kind of people go on vacations in Antarctica?
Tourism visitor numbers in Antarctica have risen to over 100,000 a year
Maybe they disable tracking because Internet is a premium up there?
Where do you live that Antarctica is "up"?
Because earth is round, technically Antarctica is above every countries on the planet if you go the long way
At least it's not windows, amirite?
Sitcom laugh track
Joke aside, this still make feel bad for spoofing my user agent to the classic chrome windows combo...
So out of the 345 computers in Antarctica, one is Linux.
comeon .4%!! YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP
That includes me. Or at least my geospoofed location for the sake of google search (when I need to use it - I'd rather use DDG but... meh), so Google stops trying to sell me local shit.
what those penguins doin n osx
