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Comment by nop | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised by the operating systems graph, I didn't think Mac OS would have gone up that much and I especially thought "Other" would be much higher or at least increasing by any amount.

I wonder how that relates to what type of school University of Virginia is as I know nothing about it. It would be interesting to see how that compares to Stanford, MIT and the like.

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As a student who is in that dataset, I think it makes sense. Basically, UVa is a pretty preppy school and Macs are really trendy right now. From my friends and what I see on grounds, I'm surprised that the Mac ownership is not numerically higher. We also focus on the liberal arts, which helps Mac. Linux is a real pain to get to work on the network. The decline in "other" is probably in a large part the result of Mac OS providing a very decent Unix/programming environment. I do see CS professors pretty split between Mac and Linux.

I'd imagine that schools that are more engineering focused schools would probably use more Linux, but I would not be surprised if Mac has converted a lot of them as well.

For the record, I had three computers windows, linux, and mac for most of last year, and I was one of the 8 "others" on that chart.

"UVa is a pretty preppy school"

I'd give you +20 karma if I could.

Also a member of the dataset.

I think you're remiss in not mentioning that UVA has very strong science and engineering programs.

(This is a bit surreal, as I did my undergrad at Virginia Tech, my Master's at W&M, and now my PhD back at Tech. I've never cared for the rivalries, but I didn't think I'd ever feel compelled to defend UVA to one of its own students.)

The business school isn't too shabby either http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=7870

Yeah, I am a former linux laptop user who switched Mac a while back.

Kudos to those 8 kids with "other" OS.

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