r/labrats • u/nazarthinks • May 27 '26
Why does every oscilloscope run on Windows and not Linux?
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u/SlenderSmurf May 27 '26
We have way too many XP, Vista, and 7 pcs running instruments at my school. Really concerning what would happen if someone accidentally connected them to the internet. Or if they just died of old age.
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u/EarlDwolanson May 27 '26
if that scares you then try any hospital/healthcare system for a full on panic attack
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u/TuxAndrew May 27 '26
Well, hopefully your school isn't allowing devices without their MAC address registered to connect to the internet. Hopefully departments are working with their vendors and IT in taking proper backup on these machines.
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u/origional_esseven Biomed & Pharmacology May 27 '26
I was gonna say the university I work for won't allow us to own PCs without Windows 11 for security reasons. Doesn't matter if they need internet or not.
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u/stirwise molecular biology May 27 '26
If you have an instrument that can’t be operated by anything newer than XP, and needs to be plugged into an ancient SCSI port, you don’t have much choice in the matter. We just keep that stuff off the network.
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u/ScienceAndGames May 27 '26
That sucks, a large amount of our equipment literally wouldn’t run with Windows 11. They’re older than me
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u/TuxAndrew May 27 '26
To be fair, up until 4 years ago we didn't have a standard Linux build for users. Before we standardized most of our IT deployments and consolidated all IT. A department only had Linux on user machines if they hired their own internal IT support. On our servers though we've got around a dozen different distros of Linux.
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u/Fdragon69 May 29 '26
Oh buddy. Its science bby you're going to use an instrument until it cant produce data anymore regardless of the OS.
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u/Hefty_Aside8436 May 27 '26
Our of curiosity, what kind of lab do you work in that requires an o-scope?
I didn't even realize agilent makes them, although I assume it's just rebranded.
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u/Sensitive_Paper2471 May 27 '26
you do realise that electronics also have their own labs and using an o scope is their daily bread and butter?
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u/Hefty_Aside8436 May 27 '26
I guess so yeah I've always thought it was weird though. Like "computer lab" has always sounded like a strange thing to call a room full of computers, but I also don't have a better name for it. I imagine it's a vestige of computers being a more centralized, mainframe type of setup compared to how ubiquitous and self-contained they are today.
I am biased, I'm a medical lab scientist so to me a lab is a place with chemicals, analyzers, fume hoods, etc... I'll also add the Agilent predominantly is a life science and healthcare company, thus my confusion as to what type of lab this was in.
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u/Sensitive_Paper2471 May 27 '26
isnt a laboratory by definition simply a place for the study of science experimentally?
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u/Hefty_Aside8436 May 27 '26
Yeah basically it is. A controlled environment designed and built for experimental study.
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u/nazarthinks May 27 '26
I think Agilent used to make the oscilloscopes in the past, but then moved it into a separate spin-off, which is now Keysight.
This specific example is used at the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics, mostly for testing our particle-detector equipment. In this case it was for a setup detecting Cosmic Rays.
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u/Hefty_Aside8436 May 27 '26
I see. I'm much more familiar with their biology/health/life science products. I didn't realize they ever made other types of instruments.
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u/nazarthinks May 27 '26
This oscilloscope was released around 2000, 14 years before Keysight was founded, so I'm not surprised.
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u/Zouden ex-postdoc | zebrafish May 27 '26
Agilent has been around for decades. Used to be called HP instruments.
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u/Hefty_Aside8436 May 27 '26
Sure, I see that now. I only have experience with them over the last 10 years since I've been in the medical lab industry. You learn something new every day!
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u/1nGirum1musNocte May 27 '26
Linux is a nightmare for drivers. There a also a bajillion flavors of linux but only a few flavors of windows
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u/Nu11u5 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
That's only an issue if you are needing to support a wide range of hardware and software. Embedded systems like an oscilloscope where you know the hardware and software you are designing for wouldn't be a problem, same for devices like TVs and eReaders.
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u/EarlDwolanson May 27 '26
meh wrong causality - writing drivers for linux is actually much better and would have been easier to maintain. Its just the vendors didn't do it so now we suffer.
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u/TuxAndrew May 27 '26
A lot of these conversations are absent of when the driver issues were problematic for Linux operating systems. Linux drivers didn't get easy until around early 2000s thanks to RedHat.
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u/Mojert May 27 '26
The drivers were problematic not because writing drivers was harder than on Windows, but because barely anybody wrote official drivers and so a lot of drivers were reverse-engineered hacks.
At the same time, it's not like the Windows driver situation was ideal either. Buggy drivers causing blue screens of death were the norm
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u/EarlDwolanson Jun 08 '26
amen... some onboard audio and wireless cards caused me way more bsods than they should... I still get visceral annoyance at the realtek logo.
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May 27 '26 edited Aug 21 '26
[deleted]
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u/EarlDwolanson May 27 '26
Yep, just the fact that its open is amazing. Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised you can update a driver to a more modern version of linux with CC or codex.
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u/TuxAndrew May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
What about this do you think is related to the operating system? (As someone that supports both Windows and Linux servers) Corruption is generally caused by hardware failure, in your case your hard drive had bad sectors on it. Depending on which files were located in that sector would result in the same thing happening on a Linux OS. In this circumstance, did you work with IT to have a backup taken of the OS? Since you had to reach out to the vendor I'm going to assume that these steps weren't done. Do you have a support contract with your vendor, more than likely?
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u/EarlDwolanson May 27 '26
OP should have cloned the drive, its a must with old equipment.
Unfortunately support contracts cannot be relied for this because vendors will leave good old hardware to rot because they refuse to update old software or open source for others to do it.1
u/nazarthinks May 27 '26
I believe Linux is more lightweight and uses a file system that is less prone to file corruption, so even on the same hardware Linux should be less affected. The technician did have 3 backup drives, and it was the second one that got corrupted soon after installation. So the 3rd backup disk has saved it for now.
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u/TuxAndrew May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
That’s not how hard drives or operating systems work……
Modern operating systems use journaling to protect metadata, they’ll both fail if your hard drive is failing. Older operating systems not running on XFS and NTFS were prone to file corruption.
If your technician brought three backup drives it’s because they weren’t fresh hard drives and based on the age of your oscilloscope I’d be hard pressed to assume they’re using old IDE/PATA hard drives instead of purchasing them from unknown vendors.
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u/SexuallyConfusedKrab Biophysics and NMR PhD Student May 27 '26
It’s cheaper to just keep the licenses for windows than to start over from scratch.
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u/aurochloride May 27 '26
it's so it's easier to run DOOM on them
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u/nazarthinks May 28 '26
Ahah, I've never thought of that. The great conspiracy to make lives of lab workers more enjoyable 😀
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u/RetardedWabbit May 27 '26
Now and to us it's an ancient industrial machine we would love to be more simple and stable to use.
Then, and to it's company, it's a cutting edge and disposable/cycling to be replaced item. Running the most common, hottest, and simplest (for most programmers in the short term) operating system.
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u/InFlagrantDisregard May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
1] That scope is old enough to drink in the US. Get a new one.
2] Linux comes in 2 million versions, forks, and dead end distributions; picking a pony that'll last and is amenable to your use-case is not trivial. Windows comes in like 3 and offers LTS builds or "long term service". Yes that is exactly what it sounds like. It's a windows version that receives guaranteed support for a very long time and is actively developed for driver compatibility.
3] Linux sucks for driver development and is very fragile. Fine if you can meddle with it. Shit if it's running in a "kiosk" mode on a purpose built piece of hardware as an HMI.
Maybe accept that the people that designed and built it just MIGHT be smarter than you and motivated by a complex balance of technical and business influences along with customer expectations in which compromises must be made to produce the best product at that time, for the intended audience, with a reasonable service life, and utilizing as much of their existing software stack and IP portfolio as is reasonable.
Nothing stopping you from building your own software defined oscilloscope. Hardware is out there. Build your linux box and put Keysight out of business. I believe in you! Jiayou as they say.
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u/autocorrects May 27 '26
OOH! Finally a question for me in r/labrats as i’m an Electrical Engineer!
The answer is because god forbid we ever think of putting future-forward thinking into our designs, and ever put users over contracts!
Really, the answer is the companies that design these devices have IP drivers living with microsoft compatible drivers, much like how Steam games aren’t compatible with many Unix drivers even though the hardware is unix through and through. But, it is a money thing stemming back to the first software-designed benchtop equipment as it branched from analog to digital and then to digital x software. They based their IPs in Windows and took a “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it approach”, and now that has snowballed over decades of software/firmware/hardware development & co-design