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R’s data visualization capabilities are heads and shoulders above Matlab’s, and it’s free and open source.

Yes, once you understand the idea of a "grammar of graphics", ggplot is really the best and most flexible plotting system available. There's a reason that people have tried to clone it (with varying degrees of success) as libraries for python and Julia.

For what it's worth there is a "grammar of graphics" library for Matlab as well, called gramm

Can you zoom in and out on the R plots? I've used ggplot2 and it didn't seem heads and shoulders above any of the other major tools (Matplotlib and the other Python plotting libraries or Matlab) and was way behind what you can do with .NET.

For publication, sure. For research, no chance.

I see no distinction there.

sigh I hate the modern era of recurring software payments because my immediate reaction was "wow, SolidWorks is under $10/mo?"

God damn Adobe for getting everybody onto the subscription model for professional software.

> I wish there was some CAD software that had such a reasonably priced hobby use option, but SOLIDWORKS is $99 per year, Alibre has a cheapish option but they slightly annoyingly shift a lot of features into the £1000+ versions. Probably the best option at the moment tbf (other than piracy).

FreeCAD as a general purpose CAD software is not that bad. I've used it in combination with KiCAD that we use at our company to design PCB and for our needs is more than enough and works fairly well.

I've used FreeCAD. It's pretty terrible.

If you dont have MATLAB or octave, you just have to check out of some math classes though sadly