FOSS favourites

Step

Part of the KDE Edu bundle, Step is a physics simulator. You can place particles, springs, motors, all kinds of things, then hit Go and the situation evolves according to the laws of physics. This teaches you all about Newtonian mechanics and soft bodies in a manner much more mesmerising than lists of formulae.

Gcompris

An educational suite, Gcompris was originally for Gnome, but is now rewritten in Qt. There are over 130 ‘activities’ (games) aimed at 2–10-yearolds, but some of them are fun for grown-ups, too. It teaches all manner of things, from basic computer proficiency to jigsaw-style puzzles involving Van Gogh paintings.

Scratch

Developed at MIT, Scratch teaches programming visually by connecting blocks together. This is a lot more friendly than having to manually write code (and saves much shouting at syntax errors), but also teaches you how to do this implicitly. It works very well on the Raspberry Pi, but can be used on all flavours of Linux.

FocusWriter

Some people are easily distracted, and that’s OK, but FocusWriter can help them just sit down and write. It has a delightfully minimal interface, which hides everything but your document until you touch the edge of the screen. It offers advanced formatting, provides live statistics and enables you to set daily writing goals.

LaTeXila

Formatting formulae is frustrating, and

LibreOffice’s equation editor doesn’t always cut it. The alternative is the LaTeX markup language, but it has a steep learning curve. LaTeXila for Gnome will help you learn the language without the tears, and provides a smooth workflow. Your Einstein summations will never look so good.

Thonny

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Python, Thonny is bundled with Raspbian. Switching between a text editor and a terminal gets old quickly, and an IDE offers a much smoother way to work. Thonny provides syntax highlighting, a built-in Python shell, and a powerful yet easy debugger.