At work I often see my colleges stuck with the fact that they do all the same things with the computers, day after day. Going to facebook, see some youtube videos, reading some news, chatting and of course working. When they see I don’t use Windows or Mac they ofter say: “oh, you are one of those” – that make me think… one of what, am I sick or something? No. the fact is for most of the heads ot there GNU/Linux equal “Complicated”. 
Often I see the same persons around and around because the “computer is again with problems” or with the fact that, nothing more exist except safari. When those computers break, the normal reaction is “I’ve to get a Mac, Alfredo has one and he never has problems with that. Have to spare some money”. Normally I respond, you don’t need that, your computer is perfect for the use you do, and, it is a software problem.
I can Set you free brother!
That ends on talking about the alternatives, standards, how companies try to get their users stuck with the software they produce and really don’t care about interoperability, they just care about market share. If user won’t make them profit, they would also don’t care about them 
Normally the harder part is Office tools: because people like it just like that, and Libreoffice, Calligra and Openoffice (etc..) just can’t make it exactly like that when we open a file… in the end it works for them and the rest won’t – of course we know, that most of it is just because they don’t use it. But there are tools that are quite successful in OS changing arguments, mainly because people already use them. At work we often use R for statistical analysis and, in fact, it work much better in *ǹix systems that in windows. So this is the kind of software that is easy to install, maintain and use. In OpenMandriva we have the version 3 of R available. You will need just some additional packages to make it work like a charm, maintain and create some packages. Also you can install one of available GUI for it, if you don’t like the default one or the to use the terminal. (Rstudio is quite hype nowadays, just download the rpm from rstudio.org) First we will need to install R, and some packages needed to compile, update and create R packages. Open a terminal window (for example konsole) and after getting the root permissions with ‘su’ command just write down: 32 Bits: urpmi R-core R-devel make liblapack-devel libblas-devel 64 Bits: urpmi R-core R-devel make lib64lapack-devel lib64blas-devel After the install is done you are ready to start. In the menu you will find the shortcut for R. If you prefer terminal just type ‘R’. 
At the beginning just update all the core packages in R, by typing ‘update.packages()’ in the R console, choose a mirror and wait. Personally I use Kate for R coding and markdown, but there are good alternatives. You can find more information on R in the manuals available (get them from the menu in default R GUI) and in the following links:
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