Mathematica is one of the two pieces of proprietary software I use, but I no longer have a free (academic) license so I haven't used it in a while. But it's ve

Mathematica is one of the two pieces of proprietary software I use, but I no longer have a free (academic) license so I haven't used it in a while. But it's very buggy on Linux, and did not work out of the box last time I tried it. It somehow violates the X11 protocols (some window managers have Mathematica-specific workarounds) and in my case the windows were all over and mouse clicks didn't hit the correct positions. I can't justify buying $300 worth of software I need twice a year and I can't trust to work correctly. I've used SymPy and Maxima but they are not as easy to use. I managed with SymPy to get some results but they were not as well simplifies as Mathematica results. Maxima was nearly impossible to use for me as I have no background in symbolic computation and the documentation expects you to understand the algorithms (e.g. different methods for simplification). The biggest plus of Mathematica is the docs. They have tons and tons of examples and every function is thoroughly documented. And it is easy enough for me to understand without a lot of math background.