Asklemmy

Ouff, a fair few of the big players:

• MS Office > LibreOffice, it's not even remotely a contest. This is not because of any personal preferences, nor because of functionality. I'd just be an asshole for being the guy who breaks interoperability, which we have long established. Since this is squarely a work-first product, and everyone is just trying to get through they day and go home to their families, I won't make their day worse. Hence, MS Office preferred.
• Photoshop > GIMP. The latter is good for simple edits, but anything even moderately complex is not only far easier in Photoshop, it's also flat out faster, owing to far better hardware utilization.
• Google Maps > any alternative really but specifically OSM, for cars and public transit (I don't hike much but I heard good things about OSM for hiking though there are of course specialized apps for that since you want to bring specialized hardware for serious trips). While I can make OSM work, it's just such a hassle, and often so buggy and wrong I might as well just wing it entirely without navigation then. In particular for public transit.

For me personally there is no open source calculator on android that even comes close to Hiper Calc Pro. Having actual expressions and physical constants makes things so much easier and makes the app better than most physical scientific calculators.

Adobe Acrobat. I have tried at least 5 other PDF readers and editors for windows, and none of them are remotely close. Either they don't have any document editing at all and are just PDF readers, or their editing capabilities are VERY clunky, not feature rich, or just don't work.

I haven't ever found another program that let's me directly edit text in a PDF that already exists.

I don't need to edit PDFs much but when I do it's usually quite important, and Adobe is by far the easiest and quickest to do it in.

I hate that that's the case, because I really don't like Adobe as a company and would rather not have to use their software, but there it is.

I really care about my privacy. But I just can't break from SwiftKey keyboard. It's just so good. It's really unfortunate that it's owned by Microsoft.

Fusion 360. I'm sorry, but FreeCAD just can't compare.

Microsoft Office. I write a lot of documents that require contant citation and updates of sources, comments, etc. I have to review documents, create tables of content etc etc. Even though MS Office is far from perfect in many of these, free alternatives such as Libre or Open Office are just terrible.

OSM over HERE/Apple/Google maps. It has much much better mapping of footpaths, which makes it much more useful for planning runs/walks/hikes.

Affinity suite over any of their open-source competitors. I love Krita for painting, but for image editing, Affinity Photo is just so much better-suited and unlike Gimp, it's modern, actively maintained and has a much more thought-out workflow. I heard that Inkscape was fine, but I personally didn't like it either (but then, I also didn't really like Illustrator all that much, it's really a fully subjective opinion). But even if you did like Inkscape, you don't have the seemless integration between the products as Affinity does. You can create pixel graphics in Photo, import them in your vector graphics in Designer, and can seemlessly embed any of the two into your documents in Publisher. And each program has a special mode ("persona") that gives you the basic functionality of the others, and the UIs and workflows generally feel very similar and unified between them. For the hobbyist who doesn't want to pay for an Adobe subscription, it's truly unbeatable and the only reason I still need Windows every now and then.

Sync for Lemmy, JetBrains IDEs, and Sublime Text to name a few.

Games.

Other than basic things like Tetris (Quadrapassel) and minesweeper, I've not yet found an open source game I've enjoyed nearly as much as the countless proprietary games I own and play.

My operating system.

It's not that I prefer it per se, rather I have better things to do then e.g. spend 2 hours messing with my font rendering to end up with a result half as good as Windows is out of the box.

I prefer paint.net for asbuilts in underground construction. I use GIMP when I'm on Linux / MacOS but paint.net is a nice simple in between from basic paint-> photoshop.

GIMP is a lot closer to photoshop. Don't get me wrong - it's a great software but paint.net fills that role a little better for what I need to do.

I paid for and use parallels on my apple silicon laptop just for oaint.net

Zbrush is better for sculpting than Blender. (Although Blender is not sculpting specific, so it's really good as a general 3d suite tool, capable of things ZBrush can't do).

If you know of a FOSS 3d sculpting tool that is as good as Zbrush, let me know.

My really obvious one, and a huge source of problems for me, is Discord. But the biggest one was a wild one:

Irfanview

It is a super-fast image viewer and simple image editor. Supports every format I've ever thrown at it. Bulk conversion and resize works like a charm. Hell, it's half the reason I haven't moved to Linux for my daily use.

For now, REAPER for Linux over Ardour. REAPER is cheap, and while it is absolutely not free software, it is about as close as you can get while still being proprietary. You can use the trial for as long as you want without paying, and other than a nag screen, it is fully functional. You can rewrite some of the built-in effects, and there are several options for writing your own audio plugins and extensions.

Frankly...I vibe with REAPER, and I don't vibe (yet) with Ardour. I'm still reading the manual, and I'm still going to try keep trying it out, but there are a couple choices REAPER made that I prefer. For example, REAPER doesn't distinguish between MIDI and Audio tracks. This is really useful to write lines in MIDI before I know how to play them on a real instrument, then seamlessly use the original signal chain after the MIDI instrument. According to what I've read and worked with so far, Ardour has a few different track types.

I've been using REAPER for several years. It's been rock solid, it has all the options I ever needed, and Cockos has stayed out of my way as I transferred my license to almost a dozen computers. I wish they would open-source the software, but it's one of the few software purchases I don't regret.

What I need to clarify is that it is good in spite of its proprietary-ness, not because of it!

As much as I dislike Adobe, Photoshop is something I can't get away from.

Shazam, because there are no open source alternatives

1Password - password manager with cross platform sync.

I've used Bitwarden but it's very barbones. In the past I always used 1Passsword because it's full featured but I was on Mac at the time and 1Password was Mac only.

I then moved to Linux and used Enpass, then Bitwarden. At last 1Password realised they needed to go cross platform and they have a native Linux client. So I moved back to them

Easily the best and most secure and full featured password manager that's ever existed. I highly, highly recommend it if you haven't tried it.

https://1password.com/

Steam and Spotify, I just can't get rid of them. I tried to download some music from YouTube, but the way to discover new songs is just way easier on Spotify than doing it yourself. Steam seems obvious, to play games, you should buy it, to thank the dev's.

Steam and Spotify

Probably DaVinci Resolve. Back when I was on Windows I used HitFilm, but since I moved to Linux I moved to DaVinci Resolve

Windows over Linux based OSes. The support (albeit via mass adoption) is much better. I can run almost any old software, including games. Plug in anything that's plug and play and not worry about driver compatibility. Things tend to just work and I'm not one accidental sudo away from wrecking the whole OS.

I just disable ads, put a custom start menu in place, and I'm golden.

I'm not saying Windows doesn't have issues, but for me personally it's likely far less than a Linux OS.

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.