Happy I love free software day! It snuck up on me while I was doing other projects, but here's a silly drawing I made today in Krita!
There are so many incredible projects out there which help countless people be empowered in their computing. Many thanks to all of the developers and web hosts, which allow folks like myself to stay away from proprietary and predatory corporations.
I don't have nearly enough characters, but here's several projects I've been using often. Thanks to everyone on the Fediverse (particularly Lemmy, Mastodon, and Peertube for me, as well as apps such as Voyager and Fedilab), KDE (especially Krita and Kdenlive), the mountain of people responsible for several GNU/Linux distros, GrapheneOS, F-Droid, Freesound, Matrix, LibreOffice, instruments using the SFZ standard (especially VCSL keys), and DAWs (LMMS, and Zrythm).
Proprietary DAWs? By that I have to imagine you mean FL Studio, I don't think anything really holds a candle to that, especially because I'd also have to include the myriad of propetary plugins too (even if you can technically use them with free software). I've used it to make a few simple jingles and whatnot for myself, and also to just jam on my MIDI keyboard, which is really all I need anyway. Zrythm is a bit more robust with plugin support, but the 1.0 release is certainly rough around the edges at the moment.
I do largely just install things, but I like to go to source pages, about pages, try and get a feel for the vibes, and ensure it is actually free software before I use it. It just set off a red flag and I wrote it off; maybe the software is great and there's nothing to worry about, I dunno.