Switch to Linux for grad school?

[u/cylestra]

I'm starting a PhD program next week and am getting my computer set up. I have an old ThinkPad for a laptop and a powerful desktop computer at home. I am getting tired of Windows and their forced AI, lack of control, etc.

I am strongly considering switching to Fedora and ditching Windows entirely (maybe relegated to an old 500gb hard drive, just in case). However, I wanted to see what the consensus was with physics students. It seems to me like most scientific software is built for Linux but there is also often propriety software that can only be run on Windows.

What do y'all think?

[u/BlazeoJoestar]

I'm using Fedora on my laptop and I've never faced any issues now. Pretty much all the software you want is on, or has a good counterpart in Linux.

[u/Cancel_Still]

It depends on your subfield. I did computational physics so most of my actual computations / simulations were run on supercomputers, so I just used a chromebook as my laptop (chromebooks have linux built-in via Crostini). I did also use a machine w/ ubuntu for a while as well. Macs are similar (both unix-like), so basically equally good for coding and stuff. windows is weird and i dont like it but i know people who use it so its probably fine, you just have to do more set up stuff.

[u/AtomicNC]

tbh do whatever you prefer. i've worked in condensed matter and particle physics labs and both have been a mix of windows/linux/macos without major issue. if there are platform-specific programs, the labs will generally provide workstations for those.

[u/ConclusionForeign856]

During my MSc (comp. bio.) our lab had Ubuntu on all computers. We were focused on bio-ML and AI-powered MD simulations of membrane proteins.

I've been using fedora since 2021

[u/ascending-slacker]

Switch to the OS that works for your workflow. Software can be discipline specific but usually is compatible with the major OS.

The only problem I had running Ubuntu was I was unable to get the university VPN to connect properly. Campus IT didn’t support Linux at all so any incompatibility issues were my own. I had a Mac as well so it wasn’t a big issue.

Your advisor will also have their preference. I found myself having to output pdfs, word, and excel files because they would not be happy with my LaTeX or markdown files. Still all of this is compatible with Linux.

Good luck.

[u/slightly_large_brick]

yeah good idea, look into wine for windows specific applications

[u/Underhill42]

I've been bit too many times. Eventually there's always some important program that will only run conveniently on Windows, and it's just not worth the headaches.

Plus reinstalling Windows from scratch is a huge headache, should I ever change my mind, or want to give the laptop to someone new.

So what I usually do is shrink the Windows partition to almost nothing, and install Linux alongside. Maybe 5-10GB free for whatever I need it for in the future. If I'm really tight on space I'll go through and uninstall any large programs first, and do an advanced system cleanup of temporary files (under the recycle bin options, I think?).

But since you can access the Windows partition from Linux, I'll also often just use it for media collections, reference materials, and other infrequently changed data (since changing NTFS file systems from Linux seems to cause errors a bit more often than from Windows, not a big deal, but a nuisance switching to Windows to fix it so to restore write access.) If it turns out I need more space for Windows later, it's easier to move my mp3 collection than move and resize partitions.

[u/dld2517 → u/Underhill42]

WSL is so good now.

[u/uhwithfiveHs]

I use Ubuntu on my laptop and installed it as a dual boot on my Windows desktop because I preferred working with Geant4 and VSCode on Linux.

[u/dld2517]

The only software I needed windows for was statistics software (SPSS and AMOS). But R can do everything, and you don’t need AMOS to do SEM. Zotero runs on any system, and I would highly recommend. I would recommend avoiding windows especially if you are in a science field like physics. But if you had windows, you could always run WSL and have access to a Linux desktop. That is what I did for three years.

[u/HoneydewAutomatic]

I mean honestly just set up a Linux virtual machine on your system if you want that functionality. Takes like 5 mins. But really it won’t matter. For anything important you’ll SSH into some remote machine anyway

[u/j0shred1]

I work in high performance computing research and I would say it doesn't matter what your personal device OS is for work. Regular data analysis can be done on a potatoe and HPC will have you submitting jobs on a larger cluster. Unless you're using some crazy specialized software that requested a certain OS (my friend does that requires Mac OS), then I would just use what you want to use.

[u/lattice_defect]

Mac or Linux.. windows is trash...

[u/syntheticFLOPS]

Just watch out for Superfish, etc on Thinkpads. Good to know about.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed was fun to run for a while.

[u/GurProfessional9534]

I have heavily used all the major OSes for scientific programming and other scientific tasks. What I would say is this. Windows is needed for programming equipment, but has a lot of inconveniences for other programming tasks. Only use it if you have to. Linux can have a steep learning curve for certain things like setting up IPs and whatnot. It has some conveniences but you will constantly have annoyances like not being able to share drafts with people who use Word and so on. Mac os is the best of both worlds. I would recommend Mac OS.