I have attended or been involved with five different state universities and a few different community colleges. For computer science, aside from one glaring exception, the default has been some flavor of Linux. The earliest for me at a school was Fedora 7. I think they had been running Solaris in the late 90s; not sure what was before that.

The only glaring exception is Georgia Tech. Because of the spyware you have to install for tests, you have to use Windows. Windows in a VM can be flagged as cheating. I’m naming and shaming Georgia Tech because they push their online courses hard and then require an operating system that isn’t standard for all the other places I’ve been or audited courses.

In Europe, there are companies that allow devs to use whatever they like (worked for some of those). Linux is more popular among devs than mac, but less popular than windows. I even have a friend working at a company that’s 100% opensource, much to their chagrin as GIMP and Inkscape are no Photoshop.

Linux at school might become more of a thing in Germany as Microsoft 365 office online (or whatever it’s called) is in a dangerous spot where it might be banned from schools. IIRC nextcloud and owncloud are positioning themselves to replace it and with that, maybe linux on the desktop might be considered. But since they have a problem with “Apple ambassadors” (aka teachers prostituting themselves for Apple), the real danger exists that schools will be more willing to spend money on fancy mac bullshit than linux. Only time will tell.

We spent 1 year negotiating implementation of secure Linux workstation, and now after endless meetings and agreements I can proudly say we have 5 people with fully GNU/Linux laptops! Dell XPS, to be precise.

When I worked in VFX it was mostly Scientific Linux. A few macs were around for concept artists using Photoshop, and editorial using a proprietary video codec with Final Cut. Most business folks (in vfx called “coordinators” and “producers”) used tools that were web-based and cross platform (for example, Autodesk Shotgrid, Confluence, and Jira). A lot of internal development is done in Python so no worries there, either.

In game dev unfortunately it’s exclusively Windows. If you bring up even using os.path.join, instead of hardcoding \\ into paths, devs who have never worked in another OS look at you like some sort of paranoid maniac.

Don’t be so humble. You know, I started out exactly where you are, and to be honest, you know, my heart is still there. So I see you’re running Gnome. You know, I’m actually on KDE myself. I know this desktop environment is supposed to be better but you know what they say. Old habits they die hard. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. I’m an executive. I mean why am I even running Linux? Again old habits. It’s gonna be fun working with you. I should join the rest of the group. Bonsoir, Elliot.

There was an interview with Dreamworks ( i think that was the Animation house) they use linux for everything.

In engineering CAD and large manufacturing corporations RHEL and SUSE are the two certified distros for running Teamcenter Product Lifecycle Management softare and Siemens NX CAD/CAM/FEA software (up to version 12) it is a smaller market than Windows versions, but probably took the place of the original unix versions prior to 2000

In two of my previous jobs (I’m a software engineer) I could officially install any Linux distro to the company laptop (which I did of course) fully replacing the wintoys. Could use the machine as I liked, no corporate mandated BS spyware or anything. On of the provides a SaaS product and used Linux server/virtual machines. Otherwise it was mostly MS bits + sprinkle a little Atlanssian horrors to it.

Unfortunately in my current job I’m limited a VirtualBox Linux running a corporate restricted wintoys machine in a MS environment. A long for the days when I was more productive with my Linux installation.

It’s just sad and funny how corporate world is that MS products it has to be (because reasons).

My past 2 jobs have been Linux Desktop. The one before that was WSL (ew)

Any web hosting company will use Linux for all servers, and many developers will use it as their workstation as they tire of kludging together dev environments in windows. The devops engineers will most certainly be on Linux as that is where their tool chains live.

There are government agencies that use Linux exclusively. The DoD used to have a mandate to use oss. I’m not sure if it is still the case.

Scientists, HPC.

I know lowes uses linux for there registers and help desks.

I’m lucky enough to be in a company where Windows is banned by the CEO. Granted, there are 4 (I believe) exceptions, but the vast majority of employees have an Ubuntu workstation and everyone has a macbook. A bit of a shame this macbook thing, really. A 2 grand thin client to ssh into my desktop when working remotely :D

The exceptions being client testing envs.

Plenty of software developers use Linux for their work.

Before Chromebooks, my towns school system had netbooks which were pitifully slow on Windows. They installed Ubuntu instead. The netbooks still sucked, but probably sucked a lot less.

I’ve set up Linux machines for a school that had ancient computers and $0 computer lab budget. Within 2 years, they purchased new Apple computers.

25 years ago I worked at a university computer lab that was Windows-heavy because Dell wouldn’t stop donating PCs. However we didn’t have enough UNIX workstations as we had to pay for Sun / HP / IBM out of pocket. Converting them to Linux workstations would be nice because the Dells had more grunt than the aging RISC workstations.

I proposed to switch a few desks worth to Debian and was given the go-ahead. After a few days learning how to preseed an installation image and getting a PXE server going I had 8 machines running CDE just like the AIX and HP/UX boxes. Users that didn’t need one of the commercial engineering applications tied to one OS or another didn’t notice any difference between the free (now as in both speech and beer) Dells and the proprietary workstations.

A couple of months after we got the pilot rolling, the university’s IT director came to check it out and told me we’re on the “lunatic fringe” for deploying an OS developed by volunteers, but otherwise offered approval as long as we could maintain security and availability.

Now every student in our local school district gets issued a Chromebook running Linux under the hood. Who’s the lunatic now?