Adobe Suite. As much as I loathe Adobe, as a graphic designer there is no way to bypass them.

Affinity is making some headway on individual apps and there are a few others, but as a whole suite it just can’t be beat.

I do my absolute best to avoid proprietary software. I can only think of three I use consistently. Those are Obsidian, Steam, and the Nvidia drivers.

Obsidian is a weird one; there are loads of note taking/pim/personal wiki options out there. And don't get me wrong, stuff like Standard Notes, Joplin, and Trillium are great. But for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, Obsidian is the only one that clicks for me.

Steam isn't so much an "I prefer," it's more of a "I have a huge game library I'm not willing to abandon." Without Steam, I can't play Terraria, Hades, Core Keeper, and more than 200 others. It might be a sunk cost fallacy thing, but I'm not giving up my Fallout New Vegas.

The Nvidia thing is an extension of the Steam thing. My next computer will have an AMD card, though, so that's kind of a "for now."

Premiere Pro. It's industry standard and DaVinci just isn't the same.

It's a shame adobe knows this and jacked up their prices to ridiculous levels ON TOP OF removing the one-time purchase to a SaaS model.

DAWs - LMMS is cool and was my gateway to music production but it lacks so much compared to Studio One, FL Studio, Ableton, etc.

Active directory

Honestly? Visual Studio. Like I am an Emacs user through and through. When properly setup with LSP, ccls, etc. it offers a better editing experience, and when it works its similar to, if not better than VS--even on huge codebases. But I would rather go live in a dumpster than have to use GDB over the VS debugger again. Its so slow, its a nightmare to use with multithreaded code, it just isnt capable of handling a large, GUI driven application.

Maybe there is some GDB config guidebook that I'm missing, but it better be something more than 'lmao just write a python script to pretty-print std::vector'.

Adobe Illustrator over Inkscape. I thought I'd save some money and learn Inkscape but it's just too weird an un-intuitive, sometimes buggy too. Key combinations couldn't be mapped to work like Illustrator which I was used to, so it's frustrating to work with because you know what it should be able to do, but now to have to figure out what Inkscape calls the feature and what menu that might be in.

Same for Photoshop over Paint.NET or anything else. Photoshop is still the master at layered image manipulation for all sorts of things. I use it for Web/UI mockup designs, and for photo editing in some cases. Nothing else can do this as well, and again it's because I'm so familiar with it and it's key combinations and features. Plus, now the new AI features are doing way more than I ever thought possible, it's pretty impressive stuff really!

FL Studio. I've been using it since the late 90s. I know it like the back of my hand.

Jetbrains IntelliJ is a big contender, but I get along just fine in other, FOSS IDEs. I prefer GIMP to Photoshop, actually, but that may just be a case where I learned photo manipulation on GIMP and didn't touch Photoshop until far later.

My final answer has to be in image processing/photo editing software. CaptureOne Pro is leagues ahead of anything FOSS I've ever tried. DarkTable, RawTherapee, ART, none of it can come close to comparing right now. No matter how much time I give it, I just... Can never make the transition. Which sucks, because CaptureOne is not available on Linux and it's pretty well impossible to get it running. 🥲

None.

X-Plane comes close to FlightGear. It has far-superior visuals. fully functional glass cockpits like the Garmin G1000, and simulated ATC, but the vast array of community-made planes available in FlightGear still kinda seals it for me, despite the jank.

FreeCAD has its pain points. Software like Creo Parametric is much more robust in a lot of ways, but I literally cannot run it on Linux (no mouse-wheel zoom in WINE, slide show in QEMU). Fundamentally, they are similar enough, and my work primarily takes place on a component level so I can live without the streamlined assembly workflow. Also, FreeCAD doesn't cost >$2000, and can still do FEM analysis and computational fluid dynamics. Maybe I could find a crack for SolidWorks and try that out, but it takes a long ass time to learn a CAD system proficiently.

Everyone who learned on Photoshop says the GIMP interface is weird, but I learned on GIMP and can say the same for Photoshop.

Games are the only exception, but games aren't fungible. Minecraft is not a substitute for Dwarf Fortress. CS:GO is not a substitute for Unreal Tournament.

by now i'm almost fully switched off of directly using google products other than an android phone (pinephone was unfortunately not usable when I tried it) and google maps (when i'm delivery driving i just need it to work smoothly, don't have time to troubleshoot like i would with other software)

it's been a few years since i did a foss deep dive so i imagine pinephone and/or osm have made progress.

edit: also invidious instances kept breaking so i finally just went back to regular youtube in browser. newpipe on mobile

Microsoft Excel - I tried a lot of the FOSS office suites but I always come back mainly due to familiarity but also compatibility (which I know is not much of an issue lately).

Google Photos - I have Immich setup and use it but my wife and people around me use Photos and so I have to conform.

"Pixel OS" - I can't move to Graphene or similar due to banking apps.

Skype - Like Photos, due to relatives

Petal Maps/Google Maps And Waze navigation.

Petal is my favourite, it has some features that google and Waze don't have, like free drive mode. The open-source map alternatives unfortunately dosn't even come close. And being able to have the navigation app on half the screen and Spotify/Jellyfin on the bottom half is just golden.

I know that the CCP owns Petal, and I'm not proud of using it, but the experience is great. Google is also ass when it comes to privacy, but being able to quickly check the reviews of nearby restaurants/parks is amazing.

Waze isn't great either, but checking if there are any traffic jams before jumping in the car is also cool. (I know that both Google and Petal have this feature but Waze is just superior).

Additionally, I haven't found a Bluetooth tracking alternative to Tile.