On Friday 01 May 2009, Link,Todd M wrote:
> My home institution, in effort to cut costs, is making an effort to push
> those of us on Macs onto PCs. Up till now they have been very generous via a
> lease program for computer hardware, but that is changing given the current
> economics. The institution currently does not support Linux so we are
> limited to Mac and Windows OS.
I can offer one data point, for whatever it may be worth.
The web site I maintain as a resource for various crystallographics tools and
programs
logs the OS+browser of visitors to the site. The breakdown for 2009 to date is:
Windows: 46%
Linux: 32%
OSX: 20%
other: 2%
The breakdown for 2008 was similar.
As a side note, the breakdown of browsers is 60% Firefox / 24% IE / 8% Safari.
Various caveats apply. These are the machines people are browsing from, not
necessarily
the ones they are computing on. The Windows percentage may be inflated by
browsers that
falsely self-identify as IE/Windows in order to bypass badly-written
compatability tests
that limit access to web sites created by Windows tools. My site offers a few
binary
packages for linux and Windows but not for OSX. I don't have a good estimate
for the
fraction of 'serious' visitors as opposed to people who stumbled upon it (by
hypothesis
the latter category would be more likely to use Windows). Etc, etc.
Ethan
> We certainly make use of William Scotts crystallography on OS X (thanks so
> much!) so our main argument is that we would have far more support "out
> there" for crystallography on the Mac than we would have for on Windows. But
> to be fair (and hopefully bolster our argument) I should find out if that is
> true. I did not find an equal web support page for Windows.
>
> A volunteer survey will be distorted (probably by Mac fanboys like me) so I
> am asking for peoples best guesstimate as to what % use of Mac, Windows, or
> Linux is out there for data processing and model building. Our core programs
> are coot, o, pymol, cns, and ccp4 but we certainly make occasional use of
> other crystallography programs out there (solve, epmr...)
>
> Also what are the relative crystallography support for Mac vs. Windows.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Todd
>
>
> --
> Todd M. Link
> Assistant Professor
> MD Anderson Cancer Center
> Univ. of Texas
>
> (713) 834-6394
>
>
