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

FL sucks on Linux. I'd recommend Bigwig studio.

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.

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.