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.

None.

X-Plane comes close to FlightGear. It has far-superior visuals. fully functional glass cockpits like the Garmin G1000, and simulated ATC, but the vast array of community-made planes available in FlightGear still kinda seals it for me, despite the jank.

FreeCAD has its pain points. Software like Creo Parametric is much more robust in a lot of ways, but I literally cannot run it on Linux (no mouse-wheel zoom in WINE, slide show in QEMU). Fundamentally, they are similar enough, and my work primarily takes place on a component level so I can live without the streamlined assembly workflow. Also, FreeCAD doesn't cost >$2000, and can still do FEM analysis and computational fluid dynamics. Maybe I could find a crack for SolidWorks and try that out, but it takes a long ass time to learn a CAD system proficiently.

Everyone who learned on Photoshop says the GIMP interface is weird, but I learned on GIMP and can say the same for Photoshop.

Games are the only exception, but games aren't fungible. Minecraft is not a substitute for Dwarf Fortress. CS:GO is not a substitute for Unreal Tournament.

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).

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

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.

Maya. I just cannot get used to the Blender UI

Pixelmator for macOS blows GIMP out of the water and is a one-time purchase of $50. I've used Photoshop a lot at school and Pixelmator does 99% the same.

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