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).
I studied ecology, and first semester maths was done by a professor who only accepted our homework if it was coded in GNU Octave.
That was a fun learning experience for most of us who went into it with no computer background.
His (as it later turned out, correct) reasoning was that Matlab is a standard tool in Geosciences, but he didn’t want to require us to buy it, so we’re using the free alternative that can be installed on any Linux system.It was my first Linux experience, and I got hooked. In my bachelor’s thesis I coded a 3D simulation of groundwater movement, and afterwards I ended up in IT instead of ecology.
Octave FTW. Matlab is such a corporate cesspool
We used Matlab in 3rd year of high school. Teachers sent us link to download pirated version. I installed GNU Octave.
My uni provided a complete license for the entire MATLAB suite, but this piece of software is genuinely a nightmare to use. Every time i has to touch it, i wish i just had python instead
My uni also provided MATLAB, but I just used Octave instead for all assignments that required it and was never asked about it or told I couldn’t.
I was actually quite surprised using Linux in technical university’s is not the norm in west, in india it’s the norm, every technical university atleast all the CS related departments use linux, my university uses cent os everywhere
I hope they don’t use CentOS anymore. It’s been discontinued 3 years ago.
Like, the dead CentOS?
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.
It is the norm in the West. See other comments. I don’t know why OP is surprised.
I study in a technical university in the west. Apart from my own laptop, I’ve only spotted one Linux computer, which was an IT student’s laptop. Though I don’t study IT myself
That’s abnormal.
Universities have been running Linux since the very early versions. Slackware was pretty common back in the 90s and 2000s and universities had labs full of them not least because there weren’t really laptops so they had to have enough machines for all the students. Universities have been heavily involved in the development of unix from its inception and a lot of the tools were initially written by university professors.
Meanwhile my university has a large CS program yet uses Windows for everything, even the fucking Unix class requires Windows/macOS exclusive software. I have no idea how we are ranked top 100 for CS.
I turned down a professorship position at a uni in part because they used windows for the whole curriculum. It would have driven me crazy having to use windows given how annoying it is for dev work. I put value on my sanity and it wasn’t worth the modest pay bump to be driven batty every day.
I likely get to teach an IoT class next term. It’s going to be so much fun with SBC systems running Linux and Arduino sensor systems! That’s worth a ton to me.
Commendable. Not many people would have made that choice.
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Welcome to CompSci university! Hope you enjoy your stay. There will be lots of maths. When I did my degree, it was my first experience with Linux too, and it was great. They eventually taught me how to install it myswlf on my laptop, and all of the student network PCs ran Debian. I later became part of the sysadmin team as my internship work, and learned a lot there. Now, 11 years later, I’m still a Linux diehard and much prefer working on it, and have been transferring my gaming over to Linux too.
My cybersecurity course uses Linux… in a VM. We boot into Windows 10, then start Kali in VMware and do everything inside of it. I still don’t know why, I just bring my own laptop with NixOS and add whichever package we are using to my shell.nix for that course.
Especially as a VM cannot do a ton of things like aircrack, which requires full hardware access and a kernel module
It works with USB interfaces using passthrough. But yeah doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I don’t think coding in C is basic stuff, depending on the IDE, you can learn about using the terminal, compilers and if the course gets far, memory allocation, a really important tool in Linux programs.
I mean basic programming in general, as basic as it gets. It’s not guaranteed that every student has programming experience.
Plot twist: they code in replit or smth like that
Learning COBOL
Our physics department used KDE managed over network shares implemented by one professor in his free time, in complete defiance of the rest of the university which used windows.
Even now they’re still holding out strong, whilst Microsoft eats the rest of the university alive.
(sidenote: I get it, tech support in Linux is vritually non-existent, whilst tech-support in Windows is everywhere)Nice! I had one class where we had modelling and the teacher literally used some form of openSUSE Leap with XFCE (looked horrendous).
And they had a Virtualbox machine image, as that was most common to install, and everyone had Windows.
She used zsh and had a really strange program that was all over the place, I was not able to get it running on Fedora Kinoite, and still have no idea why.
That was crazy.
In the other classes, Windows everywhere and quite some windows only software. While we actually had Nextcloud and OnlyOffice but nobody uses it!
I feel like there is some cause to list CS degrees and their position on Unix and Linux. awesome-linux-cs repo?
My university’s introductory CS course has us using Java. It’s a web IDE within a textbook, but weirdly enough, I found it’s actually just connected to an AWS instance of Ubuntu.
My uni used Ubuntu in the CompE computer labs; unfortunately all other labs were windows. But the introduction to Linux was certainly nice!
Russian edu is kinda conflicted due to the push of leaving Microsoft (they stopped licensing openly by now) to alternatives, that’s not going well with anyone but IT students I guess. But if these institutions would switch, they’d pick some closed down and paid wreck like Astra Linux. Going from bad to worse.
