“My employer supplies me with an excellent office computer. It
has a Microsoft Windows operating system operating system, and the
Microsoft Office suite with word processing, spreadsheet,
presentation, database and mail programs. I have added various
scientific programs for statistics and graphing, and a few
programming languages for data analysis.“If I were to duplicate this computing environment at home, it
would cost me a small fortune. Instead, I have the equivalent
functionality at no cost beyond the cost of the computer itself. My
home computer uses the free Linux operating system and free
application programs…”