Some members of our department started using Debian in 1997 and after a few years of experience, Debian became the official operating system of the department. Today, the majority of our computers run on Debian, performing tasks as serving web pages, electronic mail, webmail, and other more sophisticated tasks related to research. Even the department's secretary works on a Debian machine, doing all the administrative work secretaries do.
We have a computer lab with a dozen computers where students, starting freshman year, receive their e-mail, browse the web, write reports and develop software to solve their physics home work. We also installed a parallel cluster of 20 computers using Debian and Mosix. The cluster is continuously run by our scientists to solve complex physics problems. Due to all this experience, and the need to update the systems continuously, the department assigned resources to maintain a Debian mirror, which later became the official Debian mirror of Chile.