I know it’s popular with professionals and scientists, and of course there’s MacOS, but I don’t know why. What makes it better or more preferable than something like Windows?
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I’ve been doing computer stuff for quite awhile. While other posts have some good points, the big reason has been stability. Windows machines have been notorious for crashing or having degraded performance (dubbed Windows rot) which is tough to diagnose or fix. This was years ago and windows is much better these days, but trust me when I say that there is probably some Unix machine that hasn’t been restarted in thirty years in some closet somewhere and it’s fine. Not secure, but humming away. Windows machines had to be rebooted a lot. So, if you’re a company building software that does something that takes a week to calculate, where do you want it running? Not on Windows.
So software that was mission critical just didn’t go on Windows. Windows was a consumer product – not professional grade. In recent years, windows has become much more stable. Microsoft has made a HUGE effort. If you look closely, you’ll see that windows has become much more like Unix under the hood, but the paradigm of using a mouse is still king. (Not for long, I wager. Voice and eye tracking are getting close!)
Unix isn’t popular because it’s a loosely assembled set of keyboard driven tools. You need to know what you’re trying to do. It’s not intuitive. Before you get too confused: the “black screen” is Unix, the clicky interface (on Mac or on Windows or on Ubuntu) is an overlay. This is sort of true of windows, too, but Windows is very tightly integrated- maybe even to the point of that NOT being true.
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