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
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?
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
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?
TempleOS
The long nights demand the holy light of TempleOS
BSD/very outdated Linux kernel? XD
Whatever OS the space monsters living under the ice cap use
Linux is the only interplanetary OS.
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.
Apple devices make sense - how else are you going to deal with the overheating problems?
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.
Dell
Well there’s your problem, I’ve instituted an IT purchasing policy with a whole section dedicated to banned brands, HP is first and Dell a close second lol (power is nice sometimes lmao)
Would love to hear your thoughts on HP. I had an internship at a IT company doing general setup and maintenance for businesses IT and since each consultant managed their own customer they often stuck with their own brands.
Having setup some of these I often felt like Lenovo was hot garbage, I’ve had a lenovo laptop with terrible manufacturing issues and the company I was at too and some of my friends. I would feel lucky if I get a Lenovo laptop without errors. Dell I haven’t heard anything bad of in general, one employee usually preferred buying them and then one other preffered HP. There was one or two people there who ordered Lenovo simply because they were so much cheaper for the specs but build quality and other components are just so garbage.
Of course, I’m not speaking about their budget 300 euro to 700 euro laptops now. The ones I was able to handle and setup were all 1300 to 3500 euros.
Interesting and sad to hear. Personally I’ve gone with Lenovo if I’m not going with Mac. Heck, My wife has a 2011 Lenovo which has been running flawlessly. The only thing I did was bump the RAM and put in an SSD when Win7 upgraded to 10. Maybe I just skipped the crappy years?
How long ago was this?
Many years ago, HP was actually pretty good even on their budget lines of the time. Then those got shitty to keep costs low, and it just creeped up from there until shitty cost cutting was evident throughout all their other lines up through premium business class laptops
Also, HP’s bullshit on other areas like Printing is what earned them the top spot
Dell suffers the same enshittification on their laptop lines that HP did, just a bit behind. I cannot tell you how many batteries turned into spicy pillows in just MONTHS after being opened even on their supposed premium business laptops
Lenovo used to be shit, but I’ve noticed they’ve stepped their game up the last few years while OTOH Asus is the opposite being good at first but now starting to show signs of enshittification.
Basically, brand loyalty is BS any brand can turn to shit at any time and any brand can go to being a diamond again (Except HP, they’ve become irredeemable in my eyes) and those business contracts to get bulk discounts serve no purpose other than to lock in IT departments to that specific brand instead of being able to be flexible when the times change
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)
The one place where MacBooks having terrible cooling is a feature.
Macbooks would not survive the antarctic outdoors…
Me either
Must be a design flaw, maybe you should try a refund.
I keep messaging the devs but no response.
You’d think with all those penguins…
Wierd, given all the penguins are there
Penguins are OS traitors.
The Russian spy penguins all run their own homebrew OS developed by Putin himself.
I know right?, even though I post this as a joke but I’m genuinely surprised
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.
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
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.
i haven’t personally had trouble with that since early 2023, but it depends on your dependencies
Yeah it’s much better now. Things have mostly settled. It was more of a knee jerk reaction tbh. But it did get more people interested/exposed to Linux for dev machines. Which I think is good for the long run.
We need good options as devs. Mac/Linux are still my gotos for that reason.
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.
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.
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
comeon .4%!! YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP
Maybe it’s not about the scientists but about the tourists. What kind of people go on vacations in Antarctica?
Tourism visitor numbers in Antarctica have risen to over 100,000 a year
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…
at least unix is well represented.
