Summary
If there was anything in college that could help you succeed in your courses, and even beyond, it could be learning Linux. Here are the ways that Linux can help you, even if you’re not a computer science student.
Linux Could Help Your Future Career
Learning about Linux now can help you in your career after you graduate, no matter what your field of study is.
If you’re studying computer science, learning about Linux is an obvious boon. Linux is the lingua franca of computer science, building on the heritage of Unix. Most programming languageinterpreters, compilers, debuggers, IDEs, and editorscome out for Linux first. Many servers also run Linux. You’ll be prepared for a career in IT if you become familiar with Linux in college.
If you’re in another STEM field, you can also benefit from getting familiar with Linux. Linux and open-source programming languages are already popular in fields like biostatistics, physics, math, and other scientific fields. It helps that Unix has already been popular for many years in the sciences.
Even if you’re not in the sciences, learning about Linux is helpful. Even if you’re not directly involved in IT, Linux and open-source software is ubiquituous in business, although not as obvious to the public. You might find yourself managing people who do work with Linux and programming every day.
Knowledge of Linux has led to the technical writing gigs I’ve had over the years, including here at HTG. It might not seem like it, but I don’t have a STEM degree, but a communication degree instead. I joke that I did an unofficial minor in college learning how to bring up Linux systems and write small scripts. Knowing about Linux can help you stand out from other applicants, even outside of technical fields.
No matter what you study, you’ll gain experience in how computers really work if you use Linux enough. Linux has tended to be more in-your-face about its inner workings while other systems try to bury the complexity. It’s this developer-and-techie-friendliness that might make Linux seem intimidating at first, but if you stick with it, you can acquire an education in computing that will give you confidence to solve your own problems.
Linux Has Lots of Free Software
One thing that I value in Linux is the wide availability of software available free of charge. College students tend not to have a lot of money, and the wide availability of free (as in beer) software is valuable.
Don’t want to spend money setting up a Microsoft 365 account if your college or university doesn’t offer you one? Justinstall LibreOffice. If you’re running a desktop Linux distribution, you likely have it installed already.
Don’t want to install Microsoft tools? There are lots of native programming tools mentioned earlier. Again, some of them will likely be installed on your Linux system by default.
If you want to blow off some steam after a hard day of coding orwriting papers, there are alsolots of free and open-source games you may play. You can scroll through the package manager listing for something new to try with Linux.
You Don’t Have to Give Up Your Current System
For me, one of the best features of Linux is its ability to run alongside other operating systems. Of all of the computer operating systems, Linux seems to have pursued interoperability the most.
The traditional way of running Linux alongside other operating systems, including Windows, is to set upa dual-boot system.
In my college career during the 2000s, another solution emerged that had been associated with the mainframe world: virtualization. I couldrun Linux distributions in a VMwithout having to reboot the machine.
I also spent a lot of time on macOS, which used the FreeBSD “userland” utilities in the terminal application. It was similar enough to Linux that I could go back and forth.
Years later, theWindows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL, became available, which let me run full Linux applications right within Windows.
In college, you might find you have a class that requires a certain Windows or Mac app that doesn’t have an easy Linux substitute, such as Adobe Photoshop. you may run these apps alongside Linux using the methods mentioned above. A lot of open-source apps have native Mac and Windows ports in turn.
Lots of Research Already Runs on Linux
If you decide to pursue graduate study, you’ll find that Linux skills could also pay off.A lot of scientific research already runs on Linux.
The main reason for this is that a lot of programming tools are Linux-based. Even if you were a softer subject like sociology, Linux underpins a lot of quantitative research. R and Python are widely used for data analysis and data science. TheJupyter notebookhas become a de facto standard for exchanging data with other researchers across disciplines.
Apart from the availability of programming tools, a lot of the impetus for using Linux is the very low cost of support. Most Linux distributions are available free of charge. This is good for cash-strapped academic departments. A grad student can deploy a Raspberry Pi to interface with some custom lab equipment for the fraction of a cost of a Windows workstation.
Linux’s open source code dovetails neatly with the academic impulse to share information. Look at most scholarly journal articles, and you’ll see that many of them have multiple authors. The ease of sharing programs and data in Linux is likely one reason.
If You Can Use Linux, You Can Use Anything
I still think with the right end-user support, Linux could be successful.
When I attended California State University, East Bay, the library had an unusual setup. In addition to the fleets of Macs and Windows PCs, there were a bunch of Sun Ray thin clients that connected to servers running Solaris, Sun Microsystems’ version of Unix. The desktop was the Java Desktop Environment (everything from Sun apparently had to be “Java-this” or “Java-that”), a modified version of GNOME.
What amazed me was that ordinary students majoring in all kinds of subjects could easily use a real Unix system. If colleges got serious about deploying desktop Linux the way somegovernment agencies in Europe are, I think desktop Linux could succeed among ordinary users once they got a taste of it.
It helped that there were dedicated IT staff who could help students with any issues that came up on the Sun thin clients.
If you ever used desktop Linux seriously, you soon realize that the user interface abstractions are just that, abstractions, and that you can adjust to anything if you want to. You may not use desktop Linux or even touch a terminal in your ordinary career, but you may have to deal with unfamiliar intranet applications. You’ll be in a better position to weather user interface changes if you know how the underlying system works.
For all of these reasons, learning about Linux can help you in your college studies, no matter your major. It can also help you when you leave by broadening your computing horizons beyond Windows and macOS, into the tools that professionals rely on.
