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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

Plenty of software developers use Linux for their work.

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.

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’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.

From what I’ve heard, it’s more common in Europe and parts of Asia. I’ve personally never seen significant Linux use of any kind in the IT environments I work in, sadly.

It’s all Microsoft product stacks, the servers, the endpoints, the cloud environment, all MS. Sometimes their Hypervisor would be VMWare, and their NAS was a Synology. But other than that, basically all Microsoft garbage.

I did work at one place that had a fair bit of Linux infrastructure. The lead network architect was a hardcore Linux/FOSS grognard. Really smart guy and was fantastic at his job, I learned a lot from him. But the only reason that company had Linux servers and a few FOSS implementations was because that guy insisted on it and managed all of it himself.

I also worked at another place where one of the older IT guys had installed a handful of SUSE thin clients at various locations for employees to clock in with. But right after I started there, management wanted me to switch them out for Windows thin clients. I pushed back but they insisted, so there went the tiny bit of Linux at that company.