I will be going to college as an intended physics major and will be getting a new laptop. I’ve been reading around about computers for colleges and a lot of people have been suggesting installing Linux. What are the advantages of Linux over Windows or Mac for science and technology majors?
Well… I don’t think there’s a universal advantage for physics specifically. Your typical math software is going to be available either on both (for the open-source stuff) or exclusively on Windows (if it’s proprietary).
However, if you wanted to do programming for math, Linux is generally the best platform for programming due to availability of tools (compilers and so forth), a sensible file system and a powerful terminal (though the last point is true of Mac as well).
The more general advantage of Linux is tweakability and reliability (unless you tweak the wrong thing), as well as generally being fairly lightweight.
There’s less and less software that’s Windows-only, and you probably won’t encounter much of it in physics. But you will probably end up doing quite a bit of programming (in some form or another). Linux or Mac is best for programming; trying to do typical programming in Windows quickly turns into a horrific mess because everything has to be installed separately and it’s very disjointed/fragmented and counter-intuitive. In a lot of research labs, they use exclusively Mac and Linux. Also, knowing Linux well can be a resume boost, depending on what type of career you end up going into.
I started using Linux in high school and used it all through college (just graduated) with no problems. I kept a dual boot with Windows, but the only thing I ever used Windows for was occasional games. (And with more Steam games coming to Linux, I can’t remember the last time I booted into Windows.)