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by technion 2032 days ago
I've never dealt with this software but when I did my CS degree, several of the applications we worked with throughout the course were distributed as Windows binaries. If you'd ever done homework or study at all, you don't only have Linux.
5 comments

> If you'd ever done homework or study at all, you don't only have Linux.

Speak for yourself; at my school, even the class that used C# worked with mono.

I never need to use Windows or MacOS for any of my classes in college (although I initially did for the first few months of freshman year before I first started using Linux). For some classes, the students using MacOS or Windows actually had to jump through more hoops; one class required us to ssh into the school's Linux server for some assignments, which required Windows users to download extra software due to not having an ssh client by default (at least, not back then; I'm not sure if powershell has one now), and in another, we had to use Xilinx, a proprietary IDE for writing Verilog to design circuits for FPGAs, which only had builds for Linux and Windows, not MacOS. For the latter one, the TAs literally distributed flash drives with an Ubuntu VirtualBox instance for the Mac users (who comprised the majority of CS students at my university).
> several of the applications we worked with throughout the course were distributed as Windows binaries

Because most linux users use their distribution's packages and it is normally easier than hunting for windows binaries.

Need an assembler? `sudo apt-get install nasm`, etc. I am a math/cs undergrad and have not used a windows machine in over 6 years. (In my case it would be editing either editing my home.nix or creating a shell.nix for a course rather than apt/dnf/etc)

> If you'd ever done homework or study at all, you don't only have Linux.

If something applies to your low quality university it does not mean that it applies everywhere.

Your experience does not match mine at all. I earned a CS degree with a computer that only had Linux installed and I never missed Windows.