Which proprietary software do you prefer over their open-source alternatives, and why?

Honestly, its gotta be the MS Office suite.
Yes if you're just writing your own simple documents libreoffice/OpenOffice will work, but if you have to do anything more complex than a single page spreadsheet, text-on-white presentations, or 3 page MLA book reports.... or, even worse, have to interact with documents and spreadsheets created by basically any other person on the planet, I've just never had a good consistent experience with any of the free options.
- Disagree. Libreoffice is pretty capable for most use cases nowadays.
  Compatibility is also pretty good with Microsoft formats despite Microsoft‘s best efforts.
  OpenOffice is dead.
  
  it's pretty capable in term of most functionalities but you can't get the formatting, e. g. word docs, exactly one-to-one with its MS office version counterpart. So it would be difficult to share to multiplatforms users.
  And Microsoft intentionally introduce bugs in its files design so that certain functionalities will be extremely difficult to replicate.
  
  unfortunately "pretty good" is not "guaranteed", which is often what I need for both work and school. I tried to make myself use only libre options for like a week and just about every assignment I opened was broken in some way or another so I always ended up back in Word.
  I'll still use the libreoffice options if i'm, say, already logged into my Linux install and don't want to bother going back to Windows. But since I get Office for free thru work and school, and so does everyone else, well... I just use it.
  
  Not sure how it is nowadays, but back in 2018 Libreoffice Calc was struggling to handle even a single sheet of data entries, performance-wise, let alone multiple sheets.
  I'm not expecting it to have every feature imaginable, but I do expect it to not freeze when processing even a relatively small dataset.
  
  As someone that despises MS Office, LibreOffice is even worse. All I wanted to do was create a simple database of contact info, donation info, and reservation scheduling for a small nonprofit. Something I could do in minutes in Access. Let me tell you the database part of LibreOffice SUCKS. You can’t even import csv’s! Best you can do is copy paste cells into fields and Hope all the formatting and data types work. And connecting to other external data sources is an incredible pain. I found MS Office on sale for $35 and threw LibreOffice in the trash where it belongs.
- I hate Office365 with passion. It's extremely unproductive and alternatives like Quip are much better.
  
  I’m surprised to see quip here, honestly it’s never been for me (even with it’s salesforce integration). What do you like about it compared to gdocs / word?
  
  That's why I don't use any of the real "365" web apps, only their desktop apps which do keep the bullshit to some minimum.
- If you have to interact with documents created by others it would be better to use open formats not proprietary shit designed to be not cross compatible
  
  Unfortunately industry and academia does not view it in such a manner... those microsoft contracts are too appealing for them lol
- I've found OnlyOffice (not to be confused with OpenOffice) is very compatible with Microsoft's Office document format. I can open and edit docx files created by other people with no problem.
- I don't need office much but when I do, I hate that I can never find what I'm looking for in that stupid ribbon. I also don't know any good MS Access alternative.
- Disagree but collaboration is horrible. Online Office sucks too though, they dont even try. They want people to use Windows.
  
  Oh yeah 365 online simultaneous "collaboration" is absolutely useless. If I really need multiple people inside the same document I'll use Google docs and then export it to finish off the formatting.
- Eh, beamer is more than enough for most presentations. If your slideshow needs to be that flashy, you probably need more substance.
  git puts track changes to shame.
  You're absolutely right about compatibility though.
  
  If you're using git to track document changes then you're almost certainly in the tech industry and are quite familiar with the inner workings of your computer.
  For 90% of people using computers right now, asking them to use git to do version management on their day to day work flow would be like asking me to fly a rocket ship to work.
  I agree with the OP here, for what it does office is leaps and bounds ahead of any of the other software I've used to try to replace it and I always end up landing back on it.
  
  Git diff will look pretty terrible for docx or similar files. The thing with the builtin change tracking is that it'll actually show you what changed in the document view
  
  Imo using a text based tool for presentations is really counterproductive because presentations should use as little text as possible.
  For me currently, libreoffice impress is actually the best option because it has all the necessary features (wysiwyg style editing, svg support, latex equations, some animations).
  
  beamer
  I've used beamer before but honestly LaTeX is awful to use. It's the standard tool so I have to use it for my work but I hate every minute of it.

Photoshop is easier to use than gimp. I don’t pay for photoshop, but if I needed something like that I would.
- Krita is closer to Photoshop than Gimp, although still not up to it. Just in case you ever need PS, try krita first.
  
  Thanks I’ll remember that just in case!
  
  Krita has g'mic and it's open source. It's photoshop that is still not up to there
  
  Krita is a drawing program not really a photo editor like PS/Gimp. Paint.net was a pretty good PSlite last time I tried it
- I wouldn't say Photoshop is easy but Gimp is horrendous.
  
  It's usable with photogimp, but Photoshop still has better tools and filters.
- Hard to compare.
  The two apps just have a different workflow..
  
  Well yeah I was answering for me though, not the whole internet.
  Gimp has a work flow that I can’t get into, photoshop clicks better. For you, it could be the opposite and that’s great.
  I’m not selling photoshop, I don’t even use either anymore. It would be stupid not to try to make gimp work for you first.
  
  Well yeah, that’s the whole point. It’s harder to learn another workflow when you’re already in the mindset of the other.
- If you're talking about general ergonomy (as opposed to functionality), you may find Affinity Photo to be a breath of fresh air. It's close to Ps (on purpose) but it is so much better thought out, the way you interact with your documents. Really worth trying
  
  Same with Inkscape vs Affinity Designer.
  I really wanted Inkscape to work for me, though I was constantly fighting the UI and some weird artifacting Inkscape produced exporting SVG files.
  Affinity Designer was, and still is, especially since their licenses are perpetual/non-subscription, well worth the price and is a dream to use.
- Same with Lightroom vs Darktable.
  
  Darktable is pretty much a Lightroom replica in terms of the workflow. Its main issue is that Darktable reacts to slider changes in an unpredictable way. Small value differences lead to overblown changes to the image. Fine tuning the result is near impossible.
- Photoshop is one i cannot shake too. If I need to make a graphic to post on social media for my shop, Photoshop does it. If I need to edit a picture, Photoshop.
- I’ve had a pretty good experience using photopea as a photoshop replacement. Definitely not quite as powerful, but it has more than enough features for your average user
- Consider Photoshop Elements for a similar UI and one time payment to use forever.
  
  Thanks for the tip I didn’t know about that.
- Also Photoshop, along with DxO PureRaw.
  My camera supports 10 bit/channel color. My monitor does too. GIMP only supports sRGB, so 8-bit color. It's unsuitable for editing, and even worse for printing.

Steam. The support they have for multiplatform almost feels open source and they have been invaluable for the adoption of desktop Linux

The Jetbrains suite of IDE's. Particularly Jetbrains Rider. The platform ~~they are all ~~ many of them are built on is open source though, and you can get free licenses for all of their products if you are using them to develop open source software!
- DataGrip is the one JetBrains IDE I can’t work without and continue to pay for. I’d love to find a pure OSS alternative, but there’s nothing else like it.
- It's fucking open source?????? Does that me we can build from source to have it for free?
  I have the last version you can use free forever (and I'm the reason they fixed it, by the way)
  
  The underlying intelliJ platform is, not the entire IDE. I did edit the post though, as I realized not all of them are built on that platform.
  If you are working on open source, you can still grab free licenses. You just have to renew them each year (completely free, just requires proof of FOSS contribution)
- Why do you find jetbrains better than VS Code?
  
  VS Code is not an IDE. There's no comparison.

The most recent one is, of course, Sync for Lemmy. It may just be muscle memory at this point, but I find the experience a step improvement in browsing.
On my home server front, I would mention Plex despite Jellyfin's massive improvements over the past 2 years. Plexamp is just a magical piece of software.
For the most part, though, I think I'd reverse the question. Most of the time, I prefer OSS.
- Try reiverr, its a jellyfin ui made by a lemmy user that integrates with the arr suite and tvmd so you can easily find new things to watch https://github.com/aleksilassila/reiverr
  
  It definitely looks promising, but I still don't think Jellyfin and Reiverr are quite ready to compete with Plex yet.
- I agree about Plex. But I don't get the love for Sync.
  It feels kind of clunky and it lacks some features many of the other apps have. Personally, I'm liking Thunder right now, but I'm excited for Boost to come out.
  Sync has ads unless you pay, it's not open source, and I haven't actually found anything superior about it.
  
  It feels kind of clunky and it lacks features many of the other apps have.
  Care to mention some? I've used Thunder but I find it unbearably ugly and not as visually customizable as Sync.
- That’s funny because I switched off of plex to Jellyfin because of how bad the experience on plex was.
  
  Same here. And especially for watch parties Jellyfin has been great.
- I'm glad I used Infinity for Reddit, which was always FOSS, and there is now a new fork Eternity for Lemmy.
- I use Navidrome over Jellyfin for music hosting. The open source music clients for the subsonic API are a little more varied.
  If you're happy using closed apps, Symfonium supports both Jellyfin and Subsonic.
- So i bought plex pass a while ago and i keep hearing about plexamp, I dont really understand why is it considered so good, could you elaborate on why you like it? Does it do more than play music from my home server?
- I just switched from Plex to Jellyfin. Aside from a few minor features like intro skipping, I don't miss it.
- I love Jellyfin and mainly use it and recommend it where possible these days, but man, the download situation sucks. Hate having to download files without compressing them, especially since I keep my media lossless. Its the main reason I've still kept Plex running on my server. Also sometimes the clients can be wonky, I've found Jellyfin works best for me with Kodi as the player for most things, which is interesting. But overall I do like Jellyfin and support it and its mission, hopefully gets better in these aspects in time.

Microsoft Excel
- Hah, with no attempt to explain because it's very self explanatory.
  
  Ha yeah but to explain, without my excel vba scripts the place I work at would fall apart. Too many systems with varying formats from our clients and excel is the middleman, for better or worse. Nothing else does the job, only excel.
- That’s what I came here to post. People always think that other software are actual options. If you are using drools rules then other software can’t even follow the xlsx standard properly enough to even allow drools to compile correctly. It sucks because I’d rather not have to get licenses for my whole team to use excel when there’s plenty of free options and we don’t even use it that much, but it’s just so far into another league it isn’t even close.
  
  What are drools rules? All the pages I'm reading are very high level "bueiness rules" what does that even mean?
- Why excel? For most things I wouldnt say Libreoffice is worse. Impress though is something to learn.
  But now I can use Impress and Writer, Calc too but the graphs are shit. Thats fair to say, graphs in Calc are horrible. The rest should be pretty much the same... I guess, havent used Excel in years

Whatsapp. Everyone in India uses it. Its like the imessage situation in the US. So widespread.
Schools, college, friend groups, family groups all are on whatsapp.
- Can second this for Germany, too.
  I tried to degoogle and to only use FOSS apps and services, but ditching WhatsApp would throw me in a black hole.
  
  Same here. I wonder if there is an easy way to leave an old phone with whatsapp at home and forward the messages to my daily driver. Would prevent the zuck from reading out my contact list at minimum. I know he still has everybody else's but still.
- Cool instance you are on.
  
  Thanks. May I ask what is so cool about the instance that I am on? ;)
- there's a kerala lemmy? thats neat
  
  telegram is used a lot in slav countries, i feel like its pretty decent
- Same in the Czech Republic. My whole family communicates only through whatsapp.
- Same in France. Even (this is insane) for work coordination...
- So you prefer it because everyone use it? This doesn't sound smart
  
  How am I supposed to message people when the only messaging app they use is whatsapp and facebook messenger (which I don't use)?
  I guess the only easy alternative is to use SMS and email since everyone use it. But it is not safe.
  I am always open to alternatives like Signal, Element,etc. But no one use them. I am not going to force people to use a messaging app.

There are no good open source CAD systems at all.
- For electrical engineering there is KiCad, which is pretty good overall. Only reason I'm still using proprietary software is because I'd have to recreate my libraries and it will be a huge pita.
  For mechanical design there is FreeCad, which is usable for simple geometries, but if you come from a proprietary CAD software you may find it lacking.
  
  I got into the 3D printing hobby a few months ago and FreeCAD is pretty much useless. I can be more productive by writing JavaScript code with Three.js library, lol.
- I wonder, what makes a good CAD system?
  I had this idea for a while to build a Frankenstein monster of a 3D software that uses real time graphics and has a multi step build process covering CAD, wireframe manipulation and voxel workflows. If I ever actually make it, your concerns will be heard despite being probably not the best softwsre to do your work in :)
  
  CAD system must be reliable. It is simply unacceptable to have math issues which cause unpredictable geometries.
  CAD system should have a good UI. This is a big issue for open source software in general as UI and UX is usually an afterthought.
  CAD system should be fast and use hardware acceleration. Running single threaded python scripts on CPU to do complex computations kills the productivity. Designing real life objects is already a mentally taxing task, the whole purpose of CAD is to remove the computational bottleneck of a human.
  CAD should be object aware. If I draw two gears and put them next to each other, I should be able to rotate one and see the other moving accordingly.
  This is a bare minimum, I'm not even talking about computational modelling, stress testing, etc.
  
  Proper math and an intuitive interface, the opensource alternatives really struggle with some basic functions
  
  Modern day, proper parametric modeling with robust and intuitive constraints.
  
  That is a question too hard to answer in a comment and one that depends on the use case of the software. Few users need the power and features of CATIA or NX, but those who need it can't accept anything lesser. SolidWorks is a good spot in terms of flexibility and features if it could be easier for the average person to use. You need proper accurate parametric modeling (e.g. a NURBS kernel) for solid models and surfacing. Hearing things like wireframe and voxel indicates it isn't suitable to me.
- I got a maker sub to solidworks. I couldn't keep up with 360's oddities and feature changes.
  
  Maybe some day.
- Blender ;)
  
  Blender is not CAD.

DaVinci Resolve is much better than any open source NLE. Generally, most closed source media production software is better than their open source counterparts except Blender. Blender is incredible and it gives me hope that other open source software can be just as successful in the media industry.
- DaVinci is better, but it also provides licence for life. So it's proprietary but have a good relationship with the customers.
  'Generally' is a really wide word. Better for what? For who? When? That's the all question...
- Huh. DaVinci is OSS isn't it?
  
  No. It's free to use for the standard version with most features available for free. There's a paid "studio" license which unlocks all the features. Neither have their source code available for the public.
  
  Lol you will find out its not when trying to install it on Linux. They only support CentOS, which actually doesnt exist anymore, and there is nearly no info about needed things. A Flatpak? No way. Appimage? Dream on.
- Don't get fooled by what's popular, open source it's better by design and it's there to stay. You can do color correction on Blender too
  
  Dude, you’re completely ignoring the entire point of the post.

Youtube, it just has way more content than any libre platform
- There why we use ReVanced YouTube and YouTube ad block extensions.
  
  ReVanced? I used to use Vanced, but I guess it was shut down. I've been looking for an alternative (but clearly not very hard).

I still donate to Inkscape each month (please do the same at https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate/), but it became unusable for me on macOS, unfortunately. I now use Serif Affinity.
Inkscape is fantastic on Linux. I’d highly recommend it!
- Inkscape works good on Windows too, but its UI... It's like it was made by monkeys for dinosaurs. I'm not sure that Inkscape devs ever tried to use it themselves.
  
  The UI isn't the best, but is it really that bad? I've used some adobe software as well, and I don't really find Inkscape's UI that hard to use in comparison. Whether it's pretty is another question.
  
  Idk about you but I thought this was the case as well, since the last time I used Inkscape was probably like 6 years ago, and at the time, the UI was super dated looking (don't get me wrong, it was still functional).
  The different is night and day now, I honestly couldn't tell that it was the same software. UI looks super clean and modern.
- gf
  
  Version 1.3 has introduced a shape builder tool, always nice to have that. Overall, it seems that is has improved quite a bit in the last few years, so that's good to see
- Yeah they are full GTK now, on Windows it looked weird too
- Inkscape is my go-to for creating decals for 3D assets.
- What issues have you run into on macOS? I use inkscape on my quite new mac very often, and don't have any issues. The command line tools for inkscape are also pretty good I think, and work without any issues (I get some critical warning's every now and then though, but nothing has affected output yet).

MacOS instead of some Linux distro. Mostly because of the hardware that comes with it, making a neat integrated product.
- I agree, love the intervonnectivity with iOS, especially AirDrop. And it’s still more comfortable to use than Windows IMO (no forced updates that slow down the shutting down process!).
  
  I agree, love the intervonnectivity with iOS, especially AirDrop.
  To me, that sort of “feature” is nothing more than a security vulnerability waiting to be exploited.
  Maybe I just think that because of past trauma from Microsoft products and IoT devices being blatantly insecure, but…

Jetbrains suite
- Though IntelliJ and Pycharm are both open source. But if you use the rest of the suite then yeah
  
  Those are the two inside the most anyway. My work pays for the advanced license for all of them, but I don't even think I have any other installed.
  
  Is the ultimate version open source too?
- Can't imagine working without PyCharm Pro. Some may say I'm a shitty dev, but it just makes thing so much easier for a lone developer.
  
  What’s bad about using the tool that is the most productive for you?

Photoshop, Fences, Plex, Steam, Unraid. I just highly prefer them to any alternatives I have tried. And believe me, I have tried every alternative to Photoshop and Fences that I could find. They just don't do it. And because of those two in particular, I have to add Windows to the list.
Oh, and I guess Sync for Lemmy. The only reason I even know what Lemmy is, is the fact that the Sync for Reddit app stopped working and basically said, "Yeah, move to Lemmy, idiot."

Discord over Matrix. The range of features plus the style of the client. I like soundboard and emotes. its easy to setup a server and invite people.
- At the start of the pandemic Discord had the killer feature unmatched: active voice room discovery. You could see where people where, and how many were talking at a glance before you joined a room.
  That's the single most useful feature of discord, but recently element integrated jitsi rooms and showed active participants. I think matrix is now good enough "enough" to replace discord.
- I find a lot of admins forget or neglect bridges which can be frustrating
- Yeah I feel the same way. I just can't get any matrix client to give me the same experience I get with discord. I know they're two different programs, and that if I started with matrix, discord would be weird, but still. It's annoying
- You cannot setup servers on Discord.
  https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord
  
  While that is true, that's also not what people mean when they say 'servers' in this context. No of course they're not actual servers, but that's what they're called and I don't think anyone is under the impression they're actually servers

Sync for Lemmy. 🤷

Youtube, newpipe doesnt feels good to me No playlist No comment replies
So no🙁
- newpipe definitely has playlists
- You might like LibreTube!
- I use revanced can i count it as open source?
- Try youtube revanced
- No playlist? Wdym? There's a fork called PipePipe which has comment replies.

Affinity is the best non Adobe image editing suite. The Foss stuff just doesn't compare, imo. Even if feature parity, the UI of Foss image editing softwares is hotshit.
FL studio is beating out LMMS. However, I pirate FL, so it's still free to me.
- I've been using https://photopea.com and it does 99% of everything I would've done in Photoshop, in your browser. The only thing I've found that's not up to par with Adobe is the content aware fill... it technically works, but it's just not very good at it. And it of course doesn't have any AI assisted features. It's also free and ad supported, or you can pay $5/month to remove ads.
- Absolutely, Affinity Photo is really good. Publisher is okay (buggy and slow, though, at least in 1.2 it was, haven't tried 2.0), but Designer is miles behind Inkscape in my experience. It has just so little functionality. I'm not exactly a heavy vector user so I could be wrong too.
- The only real problem with affinity is lack of Linux support. Otherwise I love it.
- FL sucks on Linux. I'd recommend Bigwig studio.
- I've tried with open source DAWs but audio software is still decades behind in the open source world. I'm on Reaper and Ableton but I would love to ditch them. Toontrack products on linux is a pipe dream too. I've had nothing but issues over the years so still need to dual boot.

!syncforlemmy@lemmy.world
It's just plain better than any other alternative. Better UI, better UX, better features, better customization, support for Monet... I could go on all day.

Obsidian for note taking, Bitwig studio for audio recording and processing.

Visual studio code. There's nothing else that's anywhere near as good that doesn't cost money. Those annoying terminal text editors just don't do it for me. I need code autocomplete and do not understand how there exist people who have the patience to get by without it. I do not have the time to be switching tabs 20 times a second because I can't remember function parameter overloads. That intellisense autocomplete is just too good.

- I use klogg for browsing massive text files, it works pretty good for me
  
  I use lnav for this, it works very well and the search and filtering etc are great.
- Re: JetBrains - isn’t VS Code oss?
  
  He said full IDE. You ever used a full IDE?
  
  VS code isn’t an IDE.
- UltraEdit is probably the oldest editor which was designed specifically for editing super large files. It has no limits, but it is also proprietary.
- Do you mind expanding a little on Directory Opus ? I always have four or five explorer windows open and I am constantly annoyed with the clunkiness of Windows explorer. I know there are a few alternatives but not sure how they compare.
- I tried installing this new "Files Community", kinda shady software even though opensource, and it didnt even install due to some libraries missing I guess...

Excel. There's just basic stuff with LibreOffice and OnlyOffice that work like crap. Like why in LibreOffice when I type =sum then hit tab does it think I'm done with the formula instead of adding the ( and letting me put in the first input. It's awful.

Spotify. I've wanted to use Funkwhale since it's self-hosted and federated but I couldn't give up all that Spotify offers.

Spotify for music. I like the UI and the fact I can use it on all my devices.
Steam for games. I like that I can have progress synced across my Steam Deck, laptop and desktop.
Waze for maps and navigation. I like being able to report things on the road and update fuel prices etc

Steam and Discord, but mainly Steam.
If you told me I had to go 100% FOSS tomorrow, I could do it pretty easily, except for those two apps.
95% of my games are through Steam, and 95% of all my friends, family, and online community are in Discord. I could probably even dump Discord and convince some of my closest friends and FAM to switch to a Matrix client or something. But giving up Steam would mean I would basically be giving up nearly all gaming in my life.
And contrary to many other FOSS enthusiasts, I actually think Steam and Discord are great apps. I've rarely had issues with them, especially Steam. The UI is decent, the features are great, (Steam game join, Workshop mods, etc.) And Discord works really well on Linux for me, and GrapheneOS on my phone.
Of those two, I'd rather dump Discord. Valve is generally a very FOSS friendly company and pretty consumer friendly compared to most multi-billion dollar corpos. And what they've done recently for Linux gaming over the last few years with Proton, the Steam Deck, etc has has made gaming on Linux a wonderful experience for me.
Recently I have been trying to get into more FOSS games and GoG DRM-free games as an insurance policy for what I know is coming down the line one day. Gabe will either retire, pass away, or be bought out by a corpo/capital investment firm and Valve will become victim to the enshitification effect like all other proprietary software.
There is a small hope I have, idk if this is even possible, but what if Gabe chooses to open source some or all of the Steam code instead of letting it get bought out or taken over by somebody else? That would allow for the FOSS community to fork it and build a FOSS Steam.
Like I said though, a pipe dream for now. Long live FOSS!

DaVinci Resolve.
There is simply nothing that even come close.

Lightroom. There are lots of alternatives for editing some even FOSS but I haven't found any usable alternative to the library of Lightroom...
- That’s the one. Every alternative wants to compete with the Develop module, but the Library is really what makes Lightroom so useful and hard to quit.
- Yes I use Lightroom for my library and DxO Optics Pro for editing. Darktable isn't bad but it doesn't do the job nearly as well as those two softwares.
- Yep. I refuse to update my OS because I'm still hanging on to my non-cloud version of Lightroom 5. No way I'd pay Adobe for like the 5 times I use it per year
  
  I don't know if you really need Lightroom, if you only need it like five times a year?

Tbh just normal YouTube + Premium is great and feels reasonable value to me.
TickTick is a better reminders app than anything FOSS ive tried

Google Maps, there is not even 1 good alternative for maps osm is there but it will take a lot more users and volunteers to perform as well as google maps and i dont think thats gonna happen Google maps don't have any foss frontend too and i dont know if its possible to make one

This will get me loads of downvotes, but Windows 10 Mail and Calendar (not Outlook) is simple yet works flawlessly and is miles ahead of Thunderbird by usability, stability and user-friendliness. On the other hand though, Ubuntu Evolution is even better and is open-source.

iMessage unfortunately
- What do you like better about it over Signal or Whatsapp?
- Apple would get so much more money out of me charging $20 a month to use imessage on windows/android vs waiting for me to replace my iphone. I get I am the rare user but by golly I wish they would go multi platform.
  
  Im running a mac os virtual machine with the app/server called airmessage. I get iMessage for my family group chats now though it's tied to my email.

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.

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.

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 highly recommend pdf-exchange editor. It's not FOSS either, BUT it does offer a perpetual offline license, has a portable version and works even better. They do have a free reader version, so you can try out if you like their UI before you buy the full version.
- Bluebeam is the holy grail of PDF editors, I highly suggest "acquiring" it.
- I also just don't want to have different apps for literally everything I do. That sounds REALLY annoying. Having one application that I use for making, editing, and reading PDFs isn't really asking that much IMO. It's just like asking for an application to read, edit, and make text files. They might notve exactly the same task, but they're certainly related enough that having them all in one place is perfectly reasonable.
- I second bluebeam. Used it for work a lot. Especially doing redlines.

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.
- Join our community: !openstreetmap@lemmy.ml
  Also, you answered the question backwards, but I don't mind XD
- I think you misread OP's question
  
  True. Soz. Read it while tired.
- Photoshop over Gimp Krita, etc. Just too many features and years ahead nearest competitor

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.

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.

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.

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.
- I must admit that I cannot get used to blender.
  Might be that I'm an old fart who started on 3ds max back in the 00s, but I cannot get used to how different blender is from the normal modeling software paradigm.
  Don't get me wrong, I absolutely applaud and appreciate all that the Blender Foundation has done for 3d modelling and all the industries it touches, but it's just not for me.
  I'm lucky enough to be in a position where the cost of my software of choice (Modo) isn't a problem, but I get kind of anxious as the idea of being forced to really use blender to do actual work.
  
  I have a Maya background only, so I can't compare to Modo or 3dsMax. But I found bridging over to blender not as bad as I thought it would be. It just takes time to get accustomed to the interface and some of its quirks. UV tools seem weak and the outliner hierarchies still leave me stumped, along with their pivot points system, but I'm hopeful I'll get around those eventually.
  If you haven't tried Blender 3.5+ I'd recommend you give it a go, perhaps it is not as bad as you may remember. Or not, maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze in your case, I don't know.
- I recently tried coming back to sculpting and damn, zbrush honestly feels horrible, the thing doesnt even have proper HiDPI scaling so its all blurry on my screen (paid product BTW), not to mention the awful UX. Tried using blender for sculpting and honestly, I got suprised on how good it is. Some defaults are messy and it lacks layers but other than that its pretty decent.
- I'm the same vain, Houdini is better than blender for simulations.
  
  Ah, Houdini! I've heard lots of great things about it, I need to get into it sometime.

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

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!
- Same for all daws for me. I tried to get along with foss ones but they pale in comparison. Ardour crashed a lot for me, especially when the project got large with many plugins so I moved to reaper and had no such issues. On bitwig now and I can't really think of anything even comparable that's foss, let alone easier/better.
- Yeah, I tried Ardour multiple times but always endup back at REAPER. It's solid. Ardour isn't bad, it has potential, it just needs more support.
- Reaper is great. Fantastic dev team and great forums for support. And, most importantly, the license is affordable for bedroom shredders like me.

Shazam, because there are no open source alternatives

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

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.

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

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