Thread: Unix Popularity
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Old 5th July 2008
DrJ DrJ is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
You do not know what are you talking about.
*sigh*

I do know what I am talking about, but this discussion is getting too personal. My initial response was prompted by the claim that Windows is for consumers, whereas *nix is for professional applications. My claim simply is that there are many more professional applications, on the desktop at least, on Windows than on *nix. That's true for OSX too, but it still does not have the penetration into many more specialized areas that Windows has. It is certainly true for the areas where I practice, and in spite of that I still use *nix for many things.

I grant freely that *nix can be sufficient for many endeavors, and if it is, more power to you. It simply is not for the kinds of things I do. And whenever I mention this, the chorus comes out of the woodwork, saying "you can too do this" or that, while overlooking the integration of the whole package.

For me, that is making 2D and 3D CAD drawings, solving rather large sets of PDEs (say, a few hundred) using the CAD drawings as the geometry input, optimizing the device through this, submitting the drawing to a clean room and to a laser fabricator to make the gizmos, obtaining real-time laboratory data (including photomicrographs and videos) to get the device performance, abstracting items from and rearranging PDF documents, writing the grants, and submitting grant applications through grants.gov. There's lots of other tasks involved, but this is the core of what I and my people do.

The software available for Linux can *almost* do the entire chain, but not quite -- there is nothing that I am aware of that is really comparable to SolidWorks or AutoCAD, its integration into PDE packages and acceptance by various fabrication shops. Solaris on SPARC is in the same boat, but not on Intel architectures. BSD has nothing that is native (well, the OSS stuff works, but that is not enough), and Linux emulation does prove to be a challenge (see the lists for constant references to getting Mathematica to run, for example).

And none of these other than Windows or OSX really work that well with grants.gov, though some have gotten the software to run in Wine (*ugh*). (The Citrix backdoor does not work that well, either).

I agree with the earlier post that one should use the tools one needs using the lowest-cost route. It is also important to keep in mind that time has value, something that anyone who is responsible for paying employees' paychecks knows all too well.
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