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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Current student here (CS, so sadly not in your field):

    In my case, college/university actually made sure, I and many others would be using Linux as their main system. The computer lab is using Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 mainly) although Windows machines (mostly for beginner courses) and Macs (for stuff like Final Cut Pro and other Apple exclusive software) are available and many courses are either requiring or putting mainline support towards Linux.

    Document wise - we were taught LaTeX from day 1 and are expected to have at least the knowledge to utilize the given .cls files. Sharing documents is rather a free-for-all: When LaTeX is required for the course, either Overleaf or the university git is the choice for group-work, otherwise there aren’t requirements for using .docx files or other files.

    Hope I could give you an insight, although not in your field.




  • My journey was very uneven:

    Windows (for many years) -> Ubuntu (for 2 months, dual-boot) -> Windows (for about 6 years, because of some very specific software + pre-Proton gaming) -> Linux Mint (for about a month) -> popOS (for almost a year) -> endeavourOS (now, but always on the look-out for new stuff)

    But in between the “main” journey, there was always some stuff trying out, like Void (on an old PC), Arch (inside a VM, now use that VM as a lightweight environment for testing some stuff out)









  • I personally have tried FreeBSD and some FreeBSD “distros” on the desktop, and have used *BSD-based stuff as servers/single-purpose machines.

    As a desktop system (user-centric use case), you notice how hardware support is sometimes problematic, especially on laptops. I personally had problems with NVIDIA GPUs, already a problem on Linux, being a big problem here as well, and don’t mention WiFi (FreeBSD doesn’t support 802.11ac and up currently) or Bluetooth. Software-wise, if your applications do not have a *BSD version, well, then you are relying on Linux ports, which for desktop use isn’t exactly great.

    But, in servers/headless setups, *BSDs are shining, with the most important things running rock-solid, stable and resource-friendly.