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.

Photoshop is easier to use than gimp. I don’t pay for photoshop, but if I needed something like that I would.

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!

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.

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.

There are no good open source CAD systems at all.

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.

MacOS instead of some Linux distro. Mostly because of the hardware that comes with it, making a neat integrated product.

Youtube, it just has way more content than any libre platform

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!

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.

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."

Jetbrains suite

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.

Youtube, newpipe doesnt feels good to me No playlist No comment replies
So no🙁

Sync for Lemmy. 🤷

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.

!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.

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...

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.

Tbh just normal YouTube + Premium is great and feels reasonable value to me.

TickTick is a better reminders app than anything FOSS ive tried

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.