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.
Steam. The support they have for multiplatform almost feels open source and they have been invaluable for the adoption of desktop Linux
Absolutely, making proton open source made me respect them more than any other major tech company
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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.
Microsoft Excel
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.
Youtube, it just has way more content than any libre platform
MacOS instead of some Linux distro. Mostly because of the hardware that comes with it, making a neat integrated product.
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!
Jetbrains suite
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.”
Same. I know sync isn’t foss but the features and how it’s presented got me into the lemmyverse. I use it more than jerboa or infinity. Both great but the sync guy has a good smooth app. I support that.
I used RIF for many years until the Spezzening. Jerboa is pretty good, but felt just a little shy of something. Sync felt great as soon as I tried it.
Decent list though I actually prefer Jellyfin to Plex.
I don’t get Steam really. I guess it could be Open Source but the whole concept is essentially commercial by definition. It is an App Store for games.
Totally valid to add Windows if it is the only things that runs the other programs you need. Photoshop is one of the few mainstream apps that has no true competitor on Linux.
Fair, but I don’t agree with the choices personally speaking.
Photoshop, sure. I’ve been in groups where you need it to open PSDs to collaborate.
Plex is up for debate. Jellyfin is not there yet, but it’s already a viable alternative.
Steam is proprietary because it’s a distribution platform for pay-to-play software, not sure why you’d want an open-source alternative.
Unraid, will never use it. Heck, can’t see the need to use any NAS-specific operating systems over plain Linux. Yes, it takes a whole lot more to set it up, but it’s just as worth as paying $130, or more if you live in a developing country.
Fences, just no. I’ve used them a long time before, sure they’re really useful, but the best alternative is to just not depend on it. I’m faster at typing the name of the application or the folder I want to access, so I use KRunner. Sometimes the best organisation tool is to NOT use a particular organisation tool. If you really need one when dealing with large amounts of data, you can definitely use methods like Zettelkasten, think of extended attributes or metadata.
Check out Affinity Photo. Doesn’t do everything Photoshop does, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and lighter.
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