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The European Union's interoperability page reports:
Using open source in school greatly reduces the time needed to troubleshoot PCs, [as indicated by] the case of the Colegio Agustinos de León (Augustinian College of León, Spain). In 2013, the school switched to using Ubuntu Linux for its desktop PCs in [classrooms] and offices. For teachers and staff, the amount of technical issues decreased by 63 per cent and in the school's computer labs by 90 per cent, says Fernando Lanero, computer science teacher and head of the school's IT department.
[...] "One year after we changed PC operating system, I have objective data on Ubuntu Linux", Lanero tells Muy Linux [English Translation], a Spanish Linux news site. By switching to Linux, incidents such as computer viruses, system degradation, and many diverse technical issues disappeared instantly.
The change also helps the school save money, he adds. Not having to purchase [licenses] for proprietary operating systems, office suites, and anti-virus tools has already saved about €35,000 in the 2014-2015 school year, Lanero says. "Obviously it is much more interesting to invest that money in education."
[...] The biggest hurdle for the IT department was the use of electronic whiteboards. The school uses 30 of such whiteboards, and their manufacturer [Hitachi] does not support the use of Linux. Lanero got the Spanish Linux community involved, and "after their hard work, Ubuntu Linux now includes support for the whiteboards, so now everything is working as it should".
[...] Issues [with proprietary document formats] were temporarily resolved by using a cloud-based proprietary office solution, says Lanero, giving the IT department time to complete the switch to open standards-based office solutions. The school now mostly uses the LibreOffice suite of office tools.
[...] "Across the country, schools have contacted me to hear about the performance and learn how to undertake similar migrations."
As I always say, simply avoid manufacturers with lousy support and FOSS is just the ticket.
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:25PM
You can interface with an FPGA over SPI or even I2C to upload a bitfile. An arduino with the proper library could upload bitfiles from an SD card or even over BT or wifi. Uploading bitfiles on the fly from a Rpi is not big deal either. But, you can't compile the bitfiles on a Rpi simply because there is no ARM port of the dev tools, yet.
The only instance when you might need Windows is if the dev board manufacturer did not release a Linux driver for their boards integrated serial/jtag adapter. That is just laziness and those boards should be avoided if you need Linux support. Sometimes, they also have Windows only tools for peripheral configuration like writing a binary image to onboard flash. Worst case, you can use a VM running Windows for those tools.
I have developed for both the Digilent Nexys 2 and the Terasic DE0-nano on Linux.