So, for a budding math student ...

[debrouxl]

Quote:PS I recently purchased a used ThinkPad and will keep a small Windows install on it so that I can do updates to HP calcs, etc. Previously the Prime was not an option because I am an all Linux/BSD house.

Indeed, libhpcalcs does not implement firmware upgrade mode, even though we gathered firmware upgrade dumps a while before performing the initial reverse-engineering of the normal mode's protocol...

Being an old-timer from the TI community, I'm not very familiar with the whole range of possibilities offered by the Prime's CAS, so I'll leave detailed comments about the Prime to others
Out of the box, the Prime's CAS can do a number of things that the Nspire's CAS doesn't do; both CAS engines can be expanded through user programs.
Other topics from this section show that the Prime's CAS has its share of bugs and limitations, the Prime is still a young platform... However, the Nspire's CAS isn't bug-free either. All Nspire OS versions released since April 2011 have CAS bugs that the earlier Nspire OS versions, or even the TI-68k OS versions (the Nspire's CAS is a continuation of the TI-92's CAS from 1995, same core data structures and functions), didn't have.

The math possibilites of Casio's offerings, i.e. the Classpad 300/330, or the horribly overpriced, underpowered '2013 fx-CP400 "Classpad II" (barely an upgrade over the CP300/330), are not on par with TI's or HP's offerings, AFAICT.