Asklemmy

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

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.

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!

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

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 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."

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.

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.

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.

Games, Steam, firmware, fopnu, darkmx, "Skype" (relatives), WhatsApp (relatives), Telegram (relatives and work, I don't care if the client is open), Opera Presto (sometimes for nostalgy).

Word and Excel, tried LibreOffice it lags and has some weird graphical glitches and OnlyOffice has bad Arabic support

Pixelmator for macOS blows GIMP out of the water and is a one-time purchase of $50. I've used Photoshop a lot at school and Pixelmator does 99% the same.

Duolingo, I guess? There's not many libre language learning aids, except LibreLingo which only has Spanish.

Google Messages over QKSMS, but only because Google is gatekeeping RCS

For CAD and 3d design in general, I oreger Rhino. The grasshopper addition is phenominal,.and I've been using Rhino for almost.. 20 years now. I really enjoy the look and feel if it, I know basically every relevant command line input and input option etc. I use Revit and AutoCAD at work, but convinced them to get my Rhino for developing 3d models and converting them to 2D.

The only truly free program that competes with Rhino is Blender, which is an amazing program in a whole bunch of regards, but I've never liked the GUI at all.

Speaking of things Blender can also do, I prefer Photoshop to popular free alternatives such as GIMP or Blender. I'm very familiar with the tools and how they work, and the Beta improvements are mind boggling. I do however prefer Inkscape for vector work.

Speaking more about things Blender can also do, I prefer DaVinci Resolve as a free movie editor. However, I did purchase the basic license becuase I thought the program was that good. I'm blown away that they make it free with so many things enabled still.

Speaking ...Blender.. you get the idea.. digital sculpting is much nicer in Zbrush, to me. Took me forever to not hate the GUI (cough -- ok I still Hate it), but I really love some of the tools and plug-ins. It's also phenominal at mesh repair in general. Which is a subtasks I prefer Netfabb Basic for, which I think is also paid for now, but I think suspect it's included in my Autodesk license package..

The moral of the story is if you like to do any of these things go check out blender before you get used to a paid program, and save yourself decades of costs lol.

Ynab it works on every platform I care about and easily pulls info from all my accounts

If I still did book design, it'd be InDesign unfortunately; Adobe is the devil, but I haven't seen a text layout program that compares.

As a free software supporter, I don't use properietary software. Sure there are some inconveniences but I won't trade my freedom for all proprietary software in the world.

• ~~WinSCP, for the transfer-then-delete function. It's the only thing I run under WINE.~~ also open source
• ~~Calibre, for doing everything I need with ebooks~~ edit: Calibre still does everything I need but is open source

Edit: thank you to everyone who pointed out my incorrect info

Active directory

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