Asklemmy

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

• ~~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

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.

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

Plex’s Plexamp over any of the Jellyfin FOSS music apps. Bought Plex pass just for the amp.

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

As much as I love to hate ESRI, Arcpy just works and has solid documentation. Sure I could use a strictly geopandas solution but when the customer wants to have the product in a file geodatabase, noting beats the built in export method.

I guess I am stuck in error 999999 land for life.

Maya. I just cannot get used to the Blender UI

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.

Nvidia GPU drivers, Noveau is generally fine but for some reason it bricks Deep Rock Galactic which is enough to make me switch.

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).

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

Substance Painter has no equal and neither does SpeedTree. And maybe JIRA if you have to pay for it as a business