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).
Universities have been running Linux since the very early versions. Slackware was pretty common back in the 90s and 2000s and universities had labs full of them not least because there weren’t really laptops so they had to have enough machines for all the students. Universities have been heavily involved in the development of unix from its inception and a lot of the tools were initially written by university professors.
I turned down a professorship position at a uni in part because they used windows for the whole curriculum. It would have driven me crazy having to use windows given how annoying it is for dev work. I put value on my sanity and it wasn’t worth the modest pay bump to be driven batty every day.
I likely get to teach an IoT class next term. It’s going to be so much fun with SBC systems running Linux and Arduino sensor systems! That’s worth a ton to me.
Commendable. Not many people would have made that choice.
Meanwhile my university has a large CS program yet uses Windows for everything, even the fucking Unix class requires Windows/macOS exclusive software. I have no idea how we are ranked top 100 for CS.
Welcome to CompSci university! Hope you enjoy your stay. There will be lots of maths. When I did my degree, it was my first experience with Linux too, and it was great. They eventually taught me how to install it myswlf on my laptop, and all of the student network PCs ran Debian. I later became part of the sysadmin team as my internship work, and learned a lot there. Now, 11 years later, I’m still a Linux diehard and much prefer working on it, and have been transferring my gaming over to Linux too.
I don’t think coding in C is basic stuff, depending on the IDE, you can learn about using the terminal, compilers and if the course gets far, memory allocation, a really important tool in Linux programs.
I mean basic programming in general, as basic as it gets. It’s not guaranteed that every student has programming experience.
Plot twist: they code in replit or smth like that
Learning COBOL
Our physics department used KDE managed over network shares implemented by one professor in his free time, in complete defiance of the rest of the university which used windows.
Even now they’re still holding out strong, whilst Microsoft eats the rest of the university alive.
(sidenote: I get it, tech support in Linux is vritually non-existent, whilst tech-support in Windows is everywhere)Russian edu is kinda conflicted due to the push of leaving Microsoft (they stopped licensing openly by now) to alternatives, that’s not going well with anyone but IT students I guess. But if these institutions would switch, they’d pick some closed down and paid wreck like Astra Linux. Going from bad to worse.
I study electeical engineering and my Uni runs Debian on the Workstations and in general, all the Profs give either programms which natively run on Linux or alternatives.
My university’s introductory CS course has us using Java. It’s a web IDE within a textbook, but weirdly enough, I found it’s actually just connected to an AWS instance of Ubuntu.
I myself have been daily driving since my sophomore year of high school.
