True. HPC definitely plays a big role in the field, and essentially all compute clusters run some sort of Linux distro. Even though clients that can also be run locally then often have Windows binaries too, I’d say software support on Linux is at least as good as on Windows, probably a bit better.
A lot of my professors of meteorology (and IT courses, of course) also use either Ubuntu or Kubuntu! Love to see it
They certainly do, at least to an extent. In many fields where you have to work with a lot of data people will use R or Python to handle/transform/perform calculations.