For the third (fourth?) year we’ve collected some facts on software tool usage from the students during the oral exam of the project Industrial IT and Embedded Systems at Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University.
Question 1. What was your primary IDE/Editor when developing code?
| Gedit | 15 |
| Eclipse | 12 |
| GNU Emacs & clones | 21 |
| Notepad++ | 6 |
| Vi | 1 |
| Xcode | 3 |
| Genie | 1 |
| Visual Studio | 2 |
| Intellij | 1 |
| Notepad | 1 |
Question 2. What was your primary OS when developing code?
| Windows | 17 |
| Mac | 11 |
| GNU/Linux | 48 |
The above lumps together all GNU/Linux distributions. Looking separately at the these we get:
| Fedora | 1 |
| Ubuntu | 40 |
| Mint | 6 |
| Gentoo | 1 |
Question 3. What was your primary OS when not developing (write documents)?
| Windows | 38 |
| Mac | 12 |
| GNU/Linux | 26 |
hesa's Weblog 
Thanks Henrik for the Survey , my reflection of your results is that in the near future i see GNU/Linux tools dominating the next industrial revolution.
Reason: Based on your statistics most scholars today are using GNU/Linux tools in classrooms and there responsible for the next industry revolution.
I guess that a small tool I developed (Searduino – http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/searduino/) which is best/easiest run on GNU/Linux played in to some extent. But Searduino does run on Win/cygwin and Mac too.
Need to add a note here: I neveer teach anything but general knowledge. But I do make sure that no student has to buy a certain OS or tool or be locked in by the same.
Very interesting: do you think they are mostly dual-booting, or are they switching to lab computers for one task or another?
Interesting, I don’t know for sure but my guess (from the oral exams) that half of them dual boots.
I find it a bit odd that they go through the hassle of booting up a new OS just to fire up a well known word processor. Or perhaps they simply use some virtual environment. BTW: I usually write my own docs in texinfo (http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/).
It’s interesting to see the stats from GNU/Linux distributions. Apart from one they’re Debian based.
I personally i was using Vitual Machine so it was just so easy to do all my tasks in parallel incase I needed windows, However a good number of the students used google docs to share and write documents though it was noted in the survey , so this really reduced the demand for Windows to all Linux Users.
Interesting ….. nobody used latex for docs this year
Yes, and who is influencing which distro they get, or how they hear about GNU/Linux? Do they hear about it in class? I got all the way through university without anyone mentioning it to me, but that was ten years ago.
I use Debian (since 1999 when I switched from RedHat ) so I am not to blame. I released Searduino for Ubuntu since it was the most common os ……. and Ubuntu and Debian is the ‘same’
When I studied you hand to be rather brave to use Gnu/Linux…..and have a lot of patience. Now it’s as easy or even easier to install Gun/Linux compared to the other.
I could pretend I had an influence when the students made their choices…… but I think I don’t. Hopefully it’s common sense getting them to choose a free os
Correction to previous comment: Though it was not noted in the survey
@Joel, No one influences the usage of GNU/Linux e.g When a teacher gives a development assignment he clearly indicates with instructions how to use all available tools for windows,Mac ,GNU etc .And in the end GNU wins due to its Technical simplicity.(In this I mean the more what you are developing becomes more technical the more GNU/Linux tools makes it easier for you unlike when it comes to windows the more technical the the task becomes the more Problems and difficulties arise).
I am not sure all teachers make it, or even tries to, possible to attend a course with no requirements on certain tools. It is also my impression that more and more education is focused on tools rather than more general knowledge.