On Wed, 25 Aug 2010, Adam Morris wrote:

> Using Linux does not make you better than anyone else.  Some of the 
> brightest people I have met use Windows for the sole fact that it suits 
> their purposes.  Having to learn a new OS would simply interfere with 
> other more productive uses of their intellect.  At the end of the day, 
> It comes down to personal choice and needs.

Right.  I do a lot of work that requires GNU/Linux.  When I started 
getting into statistical genetic work, I found that most of the software 
was being made available for SunOS (later called Solaris) in binary 
format.  So you needed a Sun computer to do the work and you had to have 
some UNIX skills.  Scientists with big collaborative projects also were 
using UNIX systems and doing their statistical analyses on those big 
machines.  Now, 15-20 years later, things are much better.  Most people 
are using GNU/Linux, it runs on PCs instead of big iron, and the source 
code is usually available, almost always, for stat genetics programs. 
Most programs also will run on Windows.  Still, because of Windows 
limitations, I do not encourage students to do their work on Windows 
machines.  Most of what we do requires more power and we use 
supercomputers to do the work -- all of those are running GNU/Linux.  So I 
still think GNU/Linux skills are required for people who want to do the 
kind of work I'm doing.  I don't know how else I'd work with files that 
are sometimes 100 GB in size.

That's just me, and people like me.  For academics who mostly read and 
write and don't do really serious number crunching or large-scale data 
management, why not use Windows?  They might fire up a web browser, run 
Microsoft Word, and that's about it.  It doesn't matter what they use and 
they can just as well use any OS.  Windows comes with the computer, 
usually, and it's cheaper than getting a Mac with OS X.

My son wants to do scientific work, and he is still young and not set in 
his ways, so I think he should learn GNU/Linux.  Also, from my experience 
of the past 10-15 years, GNU/Linux is making amazing strides and Windows 
isn't, so I think the future of GNU/Linux looks brighter.

Mike