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Ventoy as "perfect travel-ready productivity toolkit" and SageMath as Mathematica replacement
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Make Use Of ☛ I finally found the perfect travel-ready productivity toolkit—and it fits on a USB stick
Since my laptop is loaded with all the tools I need to get work done on the road, I try to bring it with me always. But there have been times when I left it behind, thinking I don't need it, only to be stuck with a borrowed machine that's missing half of the tools or struggles to run Windows 11. That's when I discovered Ventoy—a handy little utility that lets me pack my favorite ISOs into a USB and boot into them without installation.
With Ventoy, I no longer have to be stranded, wishing I had my setup with me. It helps me account for Murphy's Law whenever I decide to leave my PC behind. The best part is that it's quite easy to use, pairs well with several Linux distros, and allows me to install the exact tools I need. With a few tweaks, I even managed to get the sessions to persist, so I don't always boot into a fresh environment.
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HowTo Geek ☛ I replaced Mathematica with this free and open-source alternative
Mathematica is well-known for its ability to solve all kinds of math and science problems. It's also notoriously expensive and closed-source. What if there was an open-source program for Linux that let you explore math for free? There is, and it's called SageMath.
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mathematical programs, SageMath is built upon Python. Other systems use their own languages. Since Python is already widely-used, this flattens the learning curve. If you already know Python, you largely already know SageMath. If you don't, Python is already easy to learn, and you can probably understand the code examples even if you're not familiar with Python.
SageMath is also built on top of a a large number of open-source packages that have become popular in the scientific computing community, such as NumPy, SciPy, and SymPy. It's similar to how a modern Linux distribution is built out of existing open-source components like GNU utilities, X11, Wayland, and others.
As with other open-source projects, it's even spawned a fork called passagemath. This project is intended to establish "first-class membership in the scientific Python ecosystem," according to its GitHub page. Since this is a pretty new project, it's difficult to recommend just yet, but it will be interesting to see if this pans out.