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

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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.
- I found paint.net a much better experience than GIMP. Now, I'm not that into photo editing, but it's a much easier user experience for me.
  An example being that you don't need a 7 step solution just to deselect something. You can just click outside of the canvas.
  Does it have all the bells and whistles of GIMP? Eh, not really, but there is a forum where people make individual packages for it, and there are a lot.
- MS Office breaks interoperability betweem different versions, so it can go off the cliff.
  I don't use GMaps, but for driving Waze with traffic warnings just can't be beaten. Hiking with OSM is great.
  
  If I had a dollar for every time waze tried to save me time by taking a side street to avoid a light only to have me try to turn left without a light onto a major street at 7am in Los Angeles I wouldn't want to kill those devs.
  
  I don't get your first statement at all. I have no problem opening anything in office 365 and I'm the only one in my office with 365, everyone else has a version of office suite that you could buy outright (which is my biggest complaint about 365, personally I'd rather own it) and we have 0 issue transferring documents back and forth.
  Including our insanely complex payroll excel sheet that should be a database. We pay people on 7 different pay schemes, from hourly, to commission, to peice rate, with base rates and bonuses, to special pay programs, using insanely complex macros and external sources, most of which are Google sheets. And that workbook functions from 365 to 2003
  I always get warnings that I can break, but it never actually does
  What are you doing in office that causes it to break between versions?
  
  My sister-in-law sent her bachelor thesis, edited in i-dont-know-which version, but in 365 was utterly misaligned. It was barely ok in 2007. It took some trial and error to see it in the same way she was.
  
  Weird. We pass word documents back and forth all day and formatting is no problem. Even Adobe pdf to year conversions come out fine across the board.
  
  I was just as suprised, as I was expecting it to work flawlessly on Windows Word, regardless of the version.
  In any case, I will use sqlite before opening Excel. But usually Postgres.
  
  Fair enough.
  The
- Imagine the day when using Ms Office is identified as the reason for breaking compatibility, instead of the inverse.
- MS Office > LibreOffice
  Photoshop > GIMP
  why everyone should learn to pirate (for legal reasons this is a joke)
- Photoshop > GIMP.
  Mandatory mention of Krita.
  MS Office > LibreOffice,
  TeX >>> XXOffice.
- OSM for day hikes and Avenza for anything more serious.

655 comments