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.
Yeah I feel like especially for like data analysis equipment which you would think there would be a lot of there. Stuff like that probably just has no way to get counted
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Apple II was gaining a lot of popularity with colleges before the Mac even came out. And by the time System 7 was renamed to Mac OS 7 in the mid 90s Apple had gone HARD on getting Macs (and until the 90s Apple IIs) into all schools levels.
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.
I agree quite a bit. One thing to note is ever since the m1-3 chips and breakage with brew, my local circle is going other machines. I know brew eventually fixed things but some packages never got updated/broke permanently.
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...
They use Apple. And then bitch that its update process is so bad, it can't restart where it left off when the connection breaks, it can't use caches/mirrors properly, blabla. Bitch, don't use it then.
these reports are very flawed. a lot of websites are only capable of identifying windows or apple computers. tons of them mis-identify linux as windows.
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.
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.
Got to speak with a guy who was stationed there over the winter. He said of the ~15 or so winter staff it was mostly engineering types, with the majority of the scientists there just in the summer months. Seemed like a pretty cool (heh) gig, but not too surprising that there's a dearth of linux machines imo.