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.
We used Matlab in 3rd year of high school. Teachers sent us link to download pirated version. I installed GNU Octave.
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
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.
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.
