Any college students use F OSS only for their school work and papers?

[JacobRogers]

Hey guys!

Any college students here that exclusively use FOSS for school work and papers. I do and it's been frustrating at times because sometimes papers with lots of footnotes will crash in OO if I do something that makes it so a lot of the footnotes have to be rearranged or bumped down a page.

So what say you?

[anandanbu]

I do for about six months or so. Before that i was forced to use the proprietary software at my lab for the exercise and now i am free from that :)

[darth_indy]

Well, for my normal GenEd classes, yes. I use OpenOffice for all my documents, even making sure to either bring my laptop of PortableApps to school for in-class work (They use Office 2007 *shudder*). However, for my web design (which isn't in class so much... as I said, still working on GenEd) I can't help but use Dreamweaver Suite or Photoshop. Yes, yes, I know about - and use - Komposer and Gimp. I use them in a pinch. But it's far easier to use Dreamweaver and Photooshop, more options, and Dreamweaver's a lot better at WYSIWYG-ing. Besides, both work in Wine, so I can use them without Windows. Those are the only two non FOSS programs I have installed, if I recall.

[Afkpuz]

I use completely FOSS for my school work. I use OO for papers and I've written tons of papers with lots of footnotes. No crashes here. I use basket notes for note taking, Bibletime (I'm a Bible major) for research, and compiz for showing off.

[FuturePilot]

All the time.

[D-EJ915]

I use open source at home and proprietary at school because that's all they have.

[barbedsaber]

I even use open office portable, and gimp portable when I am at school


http://portableapps.com/

they will rock your world! :guitar:

[perce]

I'm not a student anymore but I still write papers. I use XEmacs, LaTeX, xfig to draw pictures, and LaTeX/Beamer/Evince to make presentations. All free software.

[LaRoza]

I even use open office portable, and gimp portable when I am at school


http://portableapps.com/

they will rock your world! :guitar:

I had over 50 portable apps (not all on that site, I used Opera as well), and never used the school's apps (not counting the OS).

I never used MS Office either.

[barbedsaber]

where else can you get them?

[LaRoza]

where else can you get them?

Many applications can work portably.

Finding them is a matter of googling in most cases.

http://www.kejut.com/operaportable

[mcsimon]

openoffice and gnumeric rock my world:KS

[quanumphaze]

At the moment one of my courses uses MS Project. Only used on the lab PCs.

Other than that there is no need for proprietary software and I can easily get along with portable apps.

[rudihawk]

I only use OSS - mostly portable apps stuff.

[corney91]

where else can you get them?
I found loads of portable apps here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_portable_software). It's a pity my school's now blocked executables to nearly all users :(
Rumour has it, that some students installed a 'Chinese virus that unblocks all websites' but I'm sure it was from Firefox/OperaPortable :p

(These BTW do not unblock all sites)


EDIT: I chose FOSS for all work, but at school I do use MS Word - can't really use much else =/

[zachtib]

I'm a Junior in my engineering program here at Speed, and I've always used FOSS for my assignments

[regomodo]

Really really hard to use FOSS for my degree but the apps i use are Kicad, Gnumeric, Abiword, scilab. There aren't any FOSS replacements for what i need

[rax_m]

I use FOSS to do all my papers, research etc. The only time I've really had to use proprietary stuff is when we've used some stats programs like SPSS. The course actually wanted us to make sure we know how to use SPSS so I couldn't use/learn an alternative like R.

The nice thing is that at work (i'm studying part-time) I also use FOSS :)

Rax

[blu3ness]

Hmm, let's see.

Latex with Emacs + Auctex, or Vim + Latex-suite (I use both, albeit popular belief that emacers hate vim) for research reports, essays, and note taking.

perl and php for quick scripting and parsing.

Xfig, inkscape, dia for diagrams and figures

Octave, R for statistics and matrix operations

OO suite to read other documents in MS format.

So yeah, I'm mostly proprietary free now, but at school in specific courses, I have to use windows, for example, Aspen HYSYS, Pro Engineer etc.

[spupy]

I study Computer Sciense and use only FOSS. But it's not like we use computers alot! It's mostly theory, but i still use only FOSS for any projects i participate in. Except for work, we use Vista there.

[dmitrijledkov]

I do engineering and the only proprietary thing I have to use by my choice is MatLab. Apart from that LaTeX + Emacx + AucTex =D.

[Samhain13]

I'm not in a student but my girlfriend is in school currently. I occasionally help her with her presentation needs. Since August last year, I've made for her one slide show presentation (done in Open Office) and a 4ft x 3ft science poster (done in Scribus + Inkscape + Gimp), which impressed her classmates. We're actually planning a small poster-making gig at her university to get her some extra Dollars. :)

[macogw]

I do everything using FOSS-only. My papers are all done in LaTeX. I've done one presentation in Impress and one in LaTeX/Beamer. Just make PDF output and it'll all transfer dandily.