Linux only has 0.3% market share in Antarctica unfortunately

Wierd, given all the penguins are there

I know right?, even though I post this as a joke but I'm genuinely surprised
Penguins are OS traitors.
- The Russian spy penguins all run their own homebrew OS developed by Putin himself.

I wonder how realistic that is; almost all of the science people I've met run Linux

what do you think the 17% unknown is?
- BSD/very outdated Linux kernel? XD
- TempleOS
- Whatever OS the space monsters living under the ice cap use
My guess would be that few of these machines are used for ordinary web-browsing, or not even online.
- How do you think they got these metrics? People aren't going down there to do science or tourism without being able to communicate back home. It is almost always just statistics from the identifying header information of web traffic. It's not at all uncommon for web traffic from Linux programs to not identify the operating system. I know in my experience identifying as Linux in a browser would be more likely to cause problems than offer any benefit.
It's the cold. See comment: https://lemmy.nowsci.com/comment/10188718
Yeah I feel like especially for like data analysis equipment which you would think there would be a lot of there. Stuff like that probably just has no way to get counted

Apple devices make sense - how else are you going to deal with the overheating problems?

But you have a lot of cold air to cool it down, and on a side note it makes your room warmer which you might want in that cold region 😅

(But the energy savings is hard to argue with)
apples still have overheating problems? that was a problem with the first macintosh. All because genius engineer and giant among men Steve Jobs didn't think vents were trendy.

I guess the apples don't fall far from the tree.
- All joking aside, I haven’t had issues with Macs overheating in years, especially with the M chips. Last time I had an issue was when they tried to cram an i9 in a MBP.
  
  Now the Dell laptops we have at work on the other hand, I’ve had to down clock them in bios so they don’t run at 100% or they will literally overheat just running windows. One of my coworkers has to run his upside down or it doesn’t get enough air through the vents to prevent it from auto shutting down due to thermal issues.
- MacBooks haven’t had overheating problems since Apple switched to their own SOCs.
- I actually don't know! It was a meme a while ago, but they might have fixed it by now.
So this is why the globe is warming
- Macintosh heat sinking into ice-caps.

Strange because that's where penguins live.

This is because of the cold. Apple Laptops dominate because they are (were at the time, anyway), the only screens that would survive those temperatures.

Reference: I designed and led the build of the system used by the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium for managing equipment and rentals for scientists in the arctic back in the 2Ks.

One of the things I loved about Reddit was the super niche experts dropping into the comment section. I'm so glad Lemmy has this too.
- Woa.. I have become those whom I cherish. Haha
Wouldn’t you want something purpose built for it? Like a Panasonic Toughbook or an Intel 10850k?
- You'd think, but the macs held up great, and were easier to replace as they were often rented so needed to be sourced regularly.

I find that interesting. I would expect that many scientists are "nerds" and would lean towards Linux. Also would suspect the ratio of scientist vs population would be much higher.

Guess I've been proven wrong.

They are nerds who care about other things than their operating system. That’s like wondering why they also don’t build their own networks down there and self host everything. Those are particular hobbies that don’t interest the vast majority of people, nerd or otherwise.
- Yup. At work I manage thousands of Linux servers. At home? I run Windows. It’s a job, not a hobby for me.
mac was very popular in academia even before osx. It was like the only place you would find macs in the early aughts.
- Apple was popular in academia even before Mac OS.
  
  The Apple II was gaining a lot of popularity with colleges before the Mac even came out. And by the time System 7 was renamed to Mac OS 7 in the mid 90s Apple had gone HARD on getting Macs (and until the 90s Apple IIs) into all schools levels.
i feel like if you’re not sat stationary at a workstation (who is these days) what you want is a laptop that’s good at being a laptop. 99% of the software developers i work with (not a small number) use Macbook Pros. they are well built, have good components, have best in class battery life (we’ll see how things shake out with Qualcomm), and are BSD based and therefore Unix compatible. my servers and gaming/CUDA PC? Linux all day. my laptop? Macbook. i’m not ideological enough to have range anxiety every time i step away from my desk. plus any decent sized org is going to have to administrate these machines, from scientists to administrators, and catering to .4% of your users is not a good ROI if your software vendors struggled for 8 years to get their Windows 98 based specialty sensor software to run on Mac.

that .4% is likely not 0 because they are nerds.

seriously tho if Qualcomm chips can make a Linux book that lasts all day i would happily make the switch
- Long time CentOS and Ubuntu user here. I switched to OSX because of the Apple Silicon speed and battery life. I still spend a lot of my day ssh into various Linux boxes, but running OSX on Apple Silicon has made my laptop use much more enjoyable since I'm not constantly worried about where I'm going to plug in to charge my laptop anymore.
- My sister got a tuxedo at work 😮 and damn are those nice laptops! Best battery life I ever saw on a laptop not running macOS.
- I agree quite a bit. One thing to note is ever since the m1-3 chips and breakage with brew, my local circle is going other machines. I know brew eventually fixed things but some packages never got updated/broke permanently.
Statcounter relies on web tracking to try to estimate the usage shares. Theoretically, there could be millions of science PCs running Linux, but one guy is browsing the internet with a Windows PC. Basically, take this data with a massive grain of salt...
Do you really believe that this is a real data?
They use Apple. And then bitch that its update process is so bad, it can't restart where it left off when the connection breaks, it can't use caches/mirrors properly, blabla. Bitch, don't use it then.
these reports are very flawed. a lot of websites are only capable of identifying windows or apple computers. tons of them mis-identify linux as windows.
It's the cold. See comment: https://lemmy.nowsci.com/comment/10188718

Wise Mac users move to Antarctica to prolong the life of the badly cooled devices.

You'd think with all those penguins...

The one place where MacBooks having terrible cooling is a feature.

Macbooks would not survive the antarctic outdoors...
- Me either

Scientists using macs connecting to servers and other machines running Linux.

Unknown share is high too; Linux usage on desktop in Antarctica could be as high as 15%.

Year of the Antarctic Linux desktop is here
Are theses scientists working on bringing back a dinosaur? 🦖🦕. It might be a movie 🍿.

Maybe they disable tracking because Internet is a premium up there?

Where do you live that Antarctica is "up"?
- Because earth is round, technically Antarctica is above every countries on the planet if you go the long way
- The South being down is a convention, Antarctica is actually sideways from you if you live on the equator

Maybe it's not about the scientists but about the tourists. What kind of people go on vacations in Antarctica?

There are around 66 scientific bases in Antarctica, of which about 37 are occupied year round, the remainder are open during the summer and closed down for winter. There are about 4,000 people through the summer months and about 1,000 overwinter each year.

Tourism visitor numbers in Antarctica have risen to over 100,000 a year

With all those tourists... let me guess: Antarctica is facing problems with trash scattered all around?
- You mean apple products?

I read the title and was like that can't be right. I know that the South Pole base runs a data center so I've always just assumed that ran Linux. Then I looked at the graph and realized it's desktop usage and it makes sense now.

At least it's not windows, amirite?

Sitcom laugh track

Joke aside, this still make feel bad for spoofing my user agent to the classic chrome windows combo...

They can handle the truth once they start serving us the same pages.

So out of the 345 computers in Antarctica, one is Linux.

comeon .4%!! YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

That includes me. Or at least my geospoofed location for the sake of google search (when I need to use it - I'd rather use DDG but... meh), so Google stops trying to sell me local shit.

I'm guessing their scientific software needs that system we shall not name...

Bsd?
- Hurd?
Always name and shame
I do wonder. I know of the opposite problem in other spheres (some areas in physics), where it is hard to run scientific programs under Windows, and some people resort to WSL, but many also just run Linux on the metal.

EDIT: With Mac, I do not know.

what those penguins doin n osx

What's wrong with these Antarctiti...a..n..s, ahm... Antartcti..n...s....

Anyway, what's wrong with them?

Got to speak with a guy who was stationed there over the winter. He said of the ~15 or so winter staff it was mostly engineering types, with the majority of the scientists there just in the summer months. Seemed like a pretty cool (heh) gig, but not too surprising that there's a dearth of linux machines imo.

at least unix is well represented.

Apple products have really great temp resistance

Username Checks Out

They probably use some toughened laptop running windows like this one.

I'm not sure but maybe they use specific programs that aren't available on Linux and the alternatives aren't enough ( or even don't exist )

Noooooooo