On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 08:34:27AM -0400, Salim Shaw wrote: > Scott, > > I'll be sure not to give up my day job at DUKE Medical Center. We > have over 20,000 employees in this medical institution and we know > what works for desktops and we know what works for enterprise server > environments.
As an employee of the institution of similar caracter Georgia Regents University (formerly MCG+Augusta State) I am familiar with this attitude. Let me remind you the original question and my private answer were: On 05/13/2013 05:12 PM, Pau wrote: > on his/her laptop as *only* OS and uses it daily for scientific work? > please contact me off list. Thanks > I (dynamical systems and applications) run OpenBSD as my only desktop operating system. You are probably curios what kid of software I use for my work. Beside typical desktop publishing applications used in mathematics TeX, Xfig and developer tools Make, ksh, sed, AWK, CVS, diff patch, Unison etc, I run lots of numerical simulations mostly C (gsl) and Python (numpy, scipy, matplotlib, ipython, cython). I do sometime use FreeMat to cope with simple MATLAB code that somebody sends me. My kids use math/geogebra on daily basis. I do not know about the DUKE Medical center but one of the biggest challenges that I have as a faculty and a researcher at the similar institution is to communicate to our management and IT people that computing in our working environment has multiple components: 1. Infrastructural (firewalls, networks, DNS, portal and similar) 2. Administrative (Payroll, student records, e-mails, Learning Management System and similar) 3. Clinical (Patient records, and many other things I am clueless about) 4. Instructional (depends on the field of study and the level of students) 5. Scientific computing Expecting that a single OS will be the best choice of all five roles is as naive as expecting a single IT guy to be expert on all the above. As a matter of fact probably close to 50% of our University computing infrastructure is provided as a cloud service hosted by outside vendors (Payroll, Desire2Learn, E-mail and many others). As a researcher OpenBSD as previously observed fits my needs best as the operating system on my laptop. However, as a man behind my university Cloud Computing Lab I will be laying if I tell you that I do not have servers/services running other OSs. I do run Linux on our main cluster and on a GPU machine in part due to the lack of drivers (NVidia GPU cards) in part due to the lack of proprietary compilers and software ( PGI compilers, MATLAB, Mathematica and many others). We even have a Blade running Solaris due to the fact that a colleague of mine uses some software for seismology developed in early nineteens which has been never ported on anything else. I tried very hard to avoid using Linux but neither BSD nor Solaris could do the job. On the another hand my Lab's infrastructure runs mostly OpenBSD (firewall, DNS) but for example we use DragonFly for our file server and I hope that no OpenBSD developer will take offense from me saying that Hammer is awesome. Some of affiliated faculty run OpenBSD on a desktop like me, some run Linux some run OS X and we have Windows users too. As an instructor and user of administrative computing OpenBSD fits my needs best. Due to the lack of the native scripting language ( disclaimer I am not familiar with PowerShell) I am the least productive in Windows environment for any instructional/administrative work. I am of firm belief that we could save a lot and better instructional services by adopting Thin Client/Virtual Server model where OpenBSD would be best suited in the role of Thin Client OS but I understand when I need to keep my mouth shut. As previously noted I am clueless about clinical computing but seems that every doctor I know has an iPad so if nothing else interoperability with these devices seems important. Long story short from my point of view what a researcher runs on his laptop is nobodies business as long as the person is productive. Disbelieving that somebody is the most productive with OpenBSD desktop is little ignorant. Best, Predrag P.S. There are several desktop applications mentioned as "problematic" on OpenBSD (Flash, Skype) I will add two more that I sometime have to use Acroread and MATLAB. With the exception of Flash OpenBSD has enough Linux emulation to run the other three but somebody needs to do lots of work. For example Skype runs great on OpenBSD but somebody needs to plugins for sndio for sound to work.
