Education is pushing to incorporate more technology into classrooms, and the truth is that both Linux and open source software in general can cover most of its needs. A good example is AIMS Desktop, an operating system based on Debian 9 and developed by the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in South Africa. AIMS Desktop includes high-level applications like SageMath and GeoGebra, and all the classic tools we find in other distros.
A recurring criticism is that governments spend a fortune on licenses and special contracts to use proprietary software, when FOSS can take that place. While some agencies are not prepared to face the transition process due to backward compatibility issues, one of the best candidates for adopting free and open source software is the educational environment. Companies repeat until boredom that the computing of the future will need more programmers, but we don't see students receiving the appropriate instruction. In fact, there is simply no technology in most classrooms, and we don't see its incorporation into annual programs, although at least we are lucky that software is not the weak link in the chain. A good proof of this comes through AIMS Desktop, a distro developed by the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in South Africa.
Exploring AIMS Desktop
At first glance we find a distro based on Debian 9 with GNOME dominating the desktop. The installation is handled by the universal framework Calamares, and of course, if you want to evaluate it first, you can run it live from a USB drive or a DVD (the ISO image occupies 3.1 GB).
A Mathematics-Focused Tool Suite
The included software package confirms that AIMS Desktop's priority is mathematics. At the top of the list is SageMath, seen as an equivalent to MATLAB or Wolfram Mathematica, version 4 of GeoGebra (due to certain points in the license, an older version is used) focused on interactive algebra and geometry, the TeXstudio editor that replaces Texmaker, and the GNU Octave platform for numerical computation. It also provides copies of GIMP, Inkscape and LibreOffice, several games, and both Chromium and Firefox.
Besides the size of its ISO image, another technical detail to keep in mind about AIMS Desktop is that it only offers a 64-bit build, so it won't work on computers that lack that support.
