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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

I used to work at a C.S. research institute in California. Every machine there had GNU/Linux installed as their sole OS. I also worked for a German research institute - when I started in the 90's it was a bunch of Windows machines, some GNU/Linux, some Solaris. Today with a new generation of college graduates, virtually no-one uses GNU/Linux any more, it's almost exclusively Windows, although a few people have Mac Books. There are a few GNU/Linux compute servers, but they're only rarely used.

What are other people's experiences over the last decade? Any apparent changes in the usage of different OS's?

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At my workplace, it's about 40% Windows, 40% MacOS, and 20% Linux. Those who use Windows generally use it to ssh and/or VNC into our general-purpose Linux compute servers.

I personally have a Linux desktop as my main machine and a Linux netbook as my portable. I could see Google going the same way with its own employees, since the only things my netbook has to do is connect to the vpn and ssh to my desktop, where I connect to my existing screen session and keep going right where I left off. A Chromebook could do that sort of thing relatively easily.

What programs do the Windows devs use as a terminal? When I'm using my windows box I use Console 2 - which is great. But still doesn't compare to Mac OS X or Linux terminals.

Of course using a Linux VM or VNCing into one is the easy solution but it's heavy weight in comparison to having a great terminal app :)

There is PowerShell (which I use) but if you thought cmd.exe was slow, its got nothing on PowerShell, which takes slow text rendering to a new level.

On a Core i7 clocked at 3.5Ghz with SSD :)

Getting home to work on a Linux terminal or Terminal.app is like heaven.

PuTTY seems to be the most common.

[edit] Oh, wait, I guess you mean for a local terminal? I'm far too ignorant about Windows to know why a Windows user would even want a local terminal. All the Windows users I polled just log into Linux machines and do their work there.

I was at Clojure Conj last October and in a room of 200 or 300 Clojure programmers, it looked like probably 70% of everyone had a MBP running usually OS X, sometimes Ubuntu, and the other 30% (myself included -- although I dual-boot Windows) were running Linux on a PC laptop. I would be surprised if more than 10 people were running Windows as a primary OS.

However, it's worth noting that the average age of the crowd there was almost definitely above 25.

Do MBPs dual boot into ubuntu well? I've mostly seen people using parallels and the ilk for linux booting, as the laptop was mostly unsupported according to them.

In the classes I taught this past semester it was roughly 70:25:5 Mac:Windows:Linux. It was mostly international students still using windows.

I was in CS undergrad 2001-2005. I remember first day of class Fall 2002 or 2003 suddenly a quarter of my classmates had macs. That's when I knew Apple was back.

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