simlariver Science run on Linux. I recently visited the cutting edge AI research center in Montreal, it's Linux wall to wall on every machines. I asked about it and they mentionned scalability, performance and the fact that most researchers only use linux in university anyway. Cost (lack of) is just an added benefit.

Actually Linux is fairly expensive to introduce and support in an organization. You spend a lot more on training and even so some users never reach the same productivity they had on Windows.Things like "scalability and performance" are important in servers and computation clusters (where Linux clearly is more popular), but they have little to do with popularity on typical end-user machine. :)The reason why Linux is so popular among some scientists (mostly math and physics) is because it's beautifully easy to make semi-automatic workflow for scripting/coding/data analysis. That's because Linux is still basically a shell-driven OS and the graphical interface is somehow "forced" on a system that could easily work without it. Whenever you click something, a tiny command-line opens and does the job, so you can easily do the same thing just by writing the underneath command yourself. What's equally important: pretty much every application also has a text output.By contrast, there are things on Windows youby writing a command in prompt. And even if you can force a Windows workflow similar to that on Linux, it usually takes a lot more time.Microsoft has already surrendered in forcing their own shell standard - the Powershell (although it's actually excellent - quite superior to bash in some ways). It has never become the "default" shell of Windows, so we're still using the awful cmd. Windows 10 already includes bash (like the one on Linux) and at some point will be fully built around it.That said, Windows has a much better interface and is generally easier to use (because it is built to be operated using a mouse).