(30-01-2018, 09:46 AM)Houseoftea Wrote: Something worth noting is that apple products have become a status symbol among college students in the states.

This applies to a degree in Sweden also, especially in humanities and art as you pointed out. It is unfortunate because Apple products are much more powerful than that the student probably needs unless there is a lot of rendering to be done; I've managed the last four years with a Thinkpad L430 which I bought out of HS for ~50EUR — although, the lab assignments I've done have never been heavy on the computing side.

On the topic of reports and the like: I found out about R Markdown just the other day and it seems like a decent substitution for LaTeX feature-wise. From clear-text files it can generate HTML, PDF and Word documents via pandoc after interpreting the source .Rmd. Has anyone here worked with it?

(30-01-2018, 03:04 PM)Tmplt Wrote: Houseoftea Wrote:
Something worth noting is that apple products have become a status symbol among college students in the states.

This applies to a degree in Sweden also, especially in humanities and art as you pointed out. It is unfortunate because Apple products are much more powerful than that the student probably needs unless there is a lot of rendering to be done; I've managed the last four years with a Thinkpad L430 which I bought out of HS for ~50EUR — although, the lab assignments I've done have never been heavy on the computing side.

I've noticed that with the undergraduate students thinkpads are becoming pretty popular, probably running windows on most of them, but then some of their modules (in engineering) require them to use Solidworks and other windows only software :/
But there's a definite trend away from macs here in the UK, at least in Physics / Engineering

When I was taking an IT degree no one in a class had an apple computer, most of them used HP, Asus and Toshiba computers, me and a friend had (and I still have) a Dell laptop. None of them used Linux except for me.

It's really hard to fight against the school using proprietary file formats when you are the only one who cares about freedom. If your school has a lot of people using Linux or simple care about free software simply go to the "Students Association" and request them to push the open standards by default, but it's not gonna be easy.