#Windows vs mac for college free#
#Windows vs mac for college windows#

It's kind of like leasing a mansion vs owning & living in a workshop they're suited to different purposes.Īcademics often choose macOS when they're looking for a bit of a compromise between the dichotomy. You can adapt it to your needs or to suit any specific purpose, and you're not stuck managing a giant, stubborn monolith that forces you to adapt to it, instead of the other way around. It's constantly being developed, and kind of open-ended you can add or remove anything you don't need or want. most people) try a Linux distribution for the first time, often their first impression is that it's ugly, unpolished, even 'un-finished' or incomplete - like it's still in development.Īnd they're not wrong. When people accustomed to well-funded, proprietary products like macOS and Windows10 (i.e. These kinds of operating systems are particularly well suited for distributed & parallel computing, supercomputing, rapid development, prototyping, experimentation, computer science, and science & engineering in general.(like Linux) aren't funded by high volume sales (like Microsoft Windows), so their development largely depends on contributions of knowledge and labour from postgrad research teams, and the academic & intellectual communities at large.

#Windows vs mac for college free#

Non-proprietary, free and open-source systems, software, projects, etc.

Mach (utilized by macOS, iOS, XNU, Darwin, GNU Mach, Hurd, et al.) was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

Founder Richard Stallman has something like 20 honorary doctorates and professorships.

GNU (typically utilized by most Linux systems) is also heavily rooted in academia.

BSD subsystems are utilized by macOS, Darwin, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, et al. the BSD Sockets API), was originally developed at University of California, Berkeley. There are a lot of reasons, but a few things worth noting that might not have been covered yet: It's not just Linux and macOS, it's UNIX (and derivatives) in general. In my view this is the biggest reason that very compatible Unix-like systems like Mac and Linux are far more prevalent. And high-level computing is very dependent on Linux. In all, science is very heavily dependent on computing. If you want to just use that cluster, it's far less hassle to SSH in with a Mac or Linux computer with SSH built-in, than having to use something like Putty and fiddle around on Windows. These things make the development of custom code, especially for scientific, computational, or instrument-interactive purposes, a lot easier than on Windows.Įven if you're not using custom code, I'd venture to guess that absolutely any computing cluster worth its salt is being run on some kind of Linux.

#Windows vs mac for college windows#

Keep in mind that Linux, especially if you include Android, is almost definitely the most prevalent operating system (kernel) in the world in terms of number of devices.Ī lot of academic institutions, especially in more computing-related fields, are big supports of open-source/FLOSS communities, and Linux is obviously a very big underlying part of such communities.Īnd, most key in my experience, for academic/scientific environments, Mac and Linux have enormous computational advantages over Windows - the underlying Unix architecture model and the inherent support of very useful shells like bash, very useful device handles (eg. Keep in mind that 100% of the TOP500, a list of the 500 most powerful computer systems in the world, are on Linux. While this is generally accurate in Desktop and Laptop computers, keep in mind that the vast majority of web (and other) servers are Linux-based. It's not entirely accurate to state that Windows 'dominates' in the commercial world.