I often recommend people using the "100 searches" trial of kagi to see if it might be worth it for them. I tried it and for me the price is worth it because of the custom filters and weights for results. It's really nice to search for something and all results on the first page are relevant content (no ads, seo-bait pages or stuff like Pinterest).

For me it's Adobe After Effects. Yeah, I can do most of what it does in a combination of blender, natron, gmic, etc.. but I really like the workflow of AFX. Not having that tool was one of the hardest parts of cancelling my Adobe subscription. Nowadays I would even settle for a non-foss alternative. As long as it's running on Linux. But so far, that has not happened (I use other non Foss tools that work great, like resolve/fusion and Houdini.. but I still miss AFX)

Edit: yeah, I missed a detail in the question: I do not currently use AFX but used it a lot in the past and am now trying to replicate workflows I based on it with other tools.. still miss it a lot and would give a lot to have a solid alternative...

1 for kagi. I tried it out with their trial offer and liked it enough to stay with it. Used DDG before that.

Names from various Final Fantasy titles. Playable character names for workstations. Names of summons for servers. Names of cities and locations for networking devices. Names of Moogles for some services that I wanted to give a unique name.

I generally like to take a whole "universe" for naming schemes. Star Trek is another favoured one, since you get a variety of names in different categories. Characters, Ships, Places, etc.

Thanks to your question I tried it out and found that there are some fundamental issues with getting yabridge to work with flatpak. Most of them described on these issues: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge/issues/135 https://github.com/bitwig/bitwig-studio-flatpak/issues/24 so yeah. I might also have to switch to a different bitwig distribution or wait for a new solution to use windows vsts in bitwig.

Oh wow. I did not know about that project. Will try that one out soon. Thanks a lot.

Oh, and regarding the affinity tools: So far I have had no luck with getting them to run on Linux (tried different wine and proton configs, but I'm still learning). So far I've managed to do most of my gfx tasks with open source tools (Krita, natron), but I definitely miss the Affinity suite.

I use Bitwig on an Arch Based distro. It works really well. Thanks to the flatpak package of bitwig, your choice of distro should not matter that much (in regard to running bitwig). So far I've only used bitwig and vst/clap plugins with a native vst version (vcv rack for example) those also work great. So far, I have not tried to get windows plugins to work. But that's a Todo item for the future. I plan to use yabridge for this, but as you have read yourself, current NI plugins are a hassle and hardware specific plugins especially. I face similar issues with overbridge for my elektron machines...

At least when it comes to native Linux audio software like bitwig and reaper, my experience is highly positive. But the landscape is a lot smaller then on windows and some things do require more reading and tinkering so I'm not recommending it to everyone but certainly encourage it if one can live with some downsides.

1 for Caddy. It's my default webserver and reverse proxy. Built-in Https and the fact that I can get it up, running and configured in a matter of minutes are the main reasons.

Obsidian is great. I'll also throw https://logseq.com/ into the discussion. I just switched from obsidian to it because it better suits my workflow for taking notes.