:date: 2011-06-27 23:00:00
:tags: debian, neuroscience, survey

.. _chap_neuroscience_linux_paper:

Neuroscience runs on GNU/Linux
==============================

While everybody else is waiting for Linux to become the standard on the
desktop, in the field of neuroscience research we have made this step already
-- so silently that we haven't even realized it ourselves.

In the NeuroDebian project we were trying to figure out what software would
need to be integrated into Debian to have a maximum impact on enhancing its
utility as a research platform. So we ran a survey, asking people to tell us
what software they use in their research and what platform they run it on. We
also asked people to describe their personal preferences regarding a computing
environment and how that might differ from the computing platforms they are
institutionally provided with.

The main result of this survey was very simple and pretty surprising (even to
us): Despite common believe, GNU/Linux is the current standard computing
platform in neuroscience -- and that is both on the big compute clusters
**and** on the laptop and desktop.  It turns out that researchers on GNU/Linux
are not only the majority, they are also much happier with what they get, and
spend less time on non-research maintenance tasks than the guys who are still
stuck with Windows.

It was also nice to see that Debian-based systems are preferred by
neuroscientists among GNU/Linux distributions for their personal computing
environments and that even proportions of Red Hat and Debian-based systems
together represent the vast majority of GNU/Linux deployments in institutional
computing infrastructure.

Well done Debian!

The results have just been accepted for publication in the journal `Frontiers
in Neuroinformatics <http://www.frontiersin.org/Neuroinformatics>`_.  A link to
the manuscript, the original survey form, collected data, as well as
supplementary analysis results are available at:
http://neuro.debian.net/survey/2011/
