[laserphysicist_]

We managed to get away from proprietary software for our simulations needs and moved to oss that runs on both Windows and Linux. But we have not been able to get rid of Labview & Windows in the lab. I'll be happy to hear about your experience here...

[fsh]

In my field, labview has been mostly replaced by python for building experiment control systems. Some groups manage to run their labs on Linux with maybe one dedicated Windows machine for stubborn hardware. In my setups we use quite a lot of Windows-only hardware, to Linux is not really an option.

[laserphysicist_]

OK, do you have any reference for the python modules they use? I must admit that for GUI, nice interactive plots, motion control & DAQ, it's a bit difficult to be on par with Labview. In particular, it's usually quite easy and fast in Labview to hack together a small VI to do something like move, grab data, plot, repeat with the ability to zoom, change scale, etc while the acquisition is running. Do you know of any example combining all or part of these functionalities?

[fsh]

I like using PyQt5 for the GUI and PyQtGraph for interactive plots. Using matplotlib as a Qt widget is also possible, but it is quite slow and tends to leak memory when dynamically updating the data. On Windows I use the NI VISA library with pyvisa for most hardware access. There are open source alternatives for Linux such as pyvisa-py and linux-gpib that work quite well for most devices connected with Ethernet, USB, and GPIB.