Another org-mode user here. No longer in studying in a formal environment, but eternally a student.
Learning Emacs was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I could never fully commit to my knowledgebase when I knew my data was in a proprietary format. Moving to Emacs was not only an earth shattering upgrade over the proprietary tools I'd been using, but it gave me confidence to really put my soul into creating a distributed cognition system that will grow with me into the future.
I'm not quite at django's level of using Emacs for email, but it's definitely on the list. I do use Emacs for my task management using GTD which I wouldn't have been able to do without Rainer König's excellent course.
I personally use the following packages: pdf-tools - view, editing and link to pdf documents helm-recoll - fulltext search across my entire knowledgebase from within emacs, including pdf search org-transclusion - inline display of linked content from other locations in org-files (still integrating with my workflow)
I make liberal use of org-refile, org-store-link and org-insert-link. In order to keep the cross linking robust, I've added the following to my dotfile
(setq org-id-link-to-org-use-id t)
(setq org-id-track-globally t)
The learning curve is steep, but once the basics have been learned, the power is really unmatched.
Does anyone know how much the ability to upgrade a Framework machine in the future depends on the company?
Are third parties free to manufacture compatible parts?