Right now my main objective is to move academic staff (and students) away from MATLAB. I think that Octave may drive them off Windows (it works better with GNU/Linux) and thus off Office as well. It’s a long-term possibility. A professor who’s my neighbour recently moved to Ubuntu, but his students who use Office give him a hard time. We need to get rid of OOXML and Microsoft Office to break the network effect. Microsoft keeps signing ‘special’ deals (gratis lock-in) to derail such efforts. They last signed such a deal about 2 months ago.

For research and publication, I recommend you look at Kile and Kbibtex. Kbibtex organizes references with an efficient database so that it is easy to find useful articles. I used these as KDE 3.5 applications. They are available in testing.

I usually use apt-get/yum when I can. Failing that I run the GUI in KDE, just because of speed. Fedora’s repos still seem somewhat lacking compared to Canonical’s I’m afraid to say….