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Libreoffice and other FOSS alternatives just simply don’t come close
I really only use Word and Excel, and I find the FOSS alternatives just fine. I can understand if power-users might find the newer features worthwhile, but for basic word processing and spreadsheets the FOSS options are good enough.
Writer in Libre Office is fine if you install the correct fonts on Linux. Calc needs some work people that know how to use power pivot in excel use it all the time. So not having that makes the switch hard.
Microsoft Access. I have one database that I need that's written in Access, and although I suppose I could convert it to some other system it would be a chore and I'm not that driven to make the change.
I've moved almost everything else onto Linux.
One of the most frustrating programs for me is digiKam. On paper, it's the perfect DAM/photo manager. But it's kinda slow for day-to-day use. The user interface is janky in a lot of ways. It doesn't see constant refinement either. It doesn't even speak to me as a metadata nerd because I don't want to turn my metadata into a janky mess. Yeah, you have a powerful metadata editor. It's like a welding torch without any eye protection.
I'm using ACDSee on Windows, because it's operating on pretty much the same principle (image file metadata is canonical, app database is just for indexing), but it's faster and smoother to use. Not perfect, it has its mild limitations (like why the hell doesn't it support OpenStreetMap - Google Maps kinda sucks for nature trails, you'd think photographers would have pointed this out), but it's just so much more efficient. If digiKam ever gets a huge UI overhaul, switching over will probably be fairly easy though.
Also about a decade ago, I would have said that as far as novel writing software/large structured document word processors go, nothing beats Scrivener. Scrivener is still probably the best software in its niche, but it looks like a bunch of open source word processors in this niche have come a long way. Currently looking at novelWriter, which seems really rad.
I have to ask you about metadata nerd status..
I have a bunch of exported Google Photos and icloud Photos.. photos.. what's the best way to fix the metadata as the "date taken" keeps using export date.
My immediate thought was that there's some inconsistency with various types of metadata. For example most software will pull the date from the Exif DateTimeOriginal field. But there's also XMP tags that have the same purpose. Or similar purpose. These standards have plenty of date fields for various uses, and while they serve a noble purpose, the software just craps all over them. (Don't ask which software. All of them.)
My guess is that at some point of time, one of those tags got updated, but not the other tags of similar purpose. So the program you're using could be pulling the date from one field, and when you update it, you're actually changing some other field.
Of course all of this is wild because usually no one needs to touch the datestamp anyway (unless you, like, have to correct daylight saving time or clock drift or something). Software changing this to a batch import time? That's weird and silly.
I guess it depends a lot on what you think of as "an alternative". I'm really happy using FOSS because I generally try to find a different angle on things, and it allows me to do that.
Luckily I'm not dependent on using common office software, the few spreadsheet tasks that I need can be done with online tools, either open or proprietary. For documents I usually use markdown and pandoc. For music making, I use my own software or Ardour for mastering, etc. For modeling and 3D printing I started using OpenSCAD.
There's also many things that proprietary software just can't do. Like, my day-to-day workflow is based on a minimalist approach to computing, with the most common operations being very easy to perform (browser, editor, terminal) ... MacOS is always hailed for their great UI but honestly, it seems slow and clunky to me even though I used it daily for a long time ...
Screenreaders.
The one half-decent libre screenreader is Orca, and it only works by hacking X into doing things X was never intended to do. Wayland is much cleaner and more sensible, which means that Orca doesn't work on it at all. This means blind and visually impaired users are physically unable to use modern Linuxes or BSDs.
And Orca was only half-decent.
Not as in "FOSS alternative", as it is already open, but simply a Linux version: Tortoise SVN, the file manager integrated UI for SVN. That is actually one of the two things missing in the Linux portfolio. The other being a native port of Notepad++, although this at least runs fine under wine.