For me, that would be Secure CRT. I have yet to find a terminal emulator that matches its feature set. If you regularly manage hundreds of machines using various connection protocols (serial and ssh mostly in my case) It’s worth the $$$, and so far there hasn’t been any subscription nonsense. I liked using it at work so much I forked over the dough to have it at home.
None of the free alternatives do everything I need.
I’ll also mention a few iOS apps. One is Sun Surveyor. It’s an AR app that shows you the position of the sun, moon, and galactic center at any given time. The other would have to be Radarscope. It’s a weather radar app, but it’s a really good weather radar app.
I’ve never found any paid software to be better at what it does than a FOSS version if one exists, and almost everything one can do with a computer has a FOSS version to do it with these days.
If I really can’t find something I want that does what I need the way I need it done… I make it myself.
Datadog beats the pants off Prometheus, Grafana, and friends.
Every single major commercial 3D CAD suite is still better than FreeCAD. FreeCAD is not the unusable beast it used to be, in fact it’s very much better, but it has technical debt and structural limitations that just keep it worse.
And this infuriates me because the market for those suites is so oppressively terrible.
Like, hell, I don’t even need the full suite of simulation and modeling tools that they come with. Just give me a rock-solid parametric CAD engine, a decent rendering suite tacked on to it, and I’d really love it if anyone in this market could start investigating Linux compatibility! Hell, I’d even pay for that - just not the awful licensing regimes the current offerings operate under.
I bought Alibre Design, as it was a less oppressive situation license-wise, but these days I find I’m using it less than I might supply because I prefer staying in Linux for literally anything else. It was a bit pricy, but at least it was a perpetual license. I am hearing that while they don’t intend to support Linux, they’re moving away from some of the libraries that have prevented Proton from working.
The rest are varying degrees of oppressive lock-in and feature erosion. PTC/OnShape in particular has a huge “Fuck-You” attitude towards anybody who wants to consider throwing a design up on Etsy or selling a few trinkets without paying out the ass for a professional-grade subscription, and being the only fully mature web-based tool, it’s the only one that works properly in Linux.
If you’re talking functionality, I’ll introduce you to some:
Amost all paid audio production software is leagues better than the free alternatives. And beyond that, many VSTs don’t work under Linux.
The sad truth is that most Adobe products still beat their free alternatives in features. Those alternatives are definitely good enough for 95% of people but they aren’t better
Autodesk software. AutoCAD has some competition (for basic things) but there’s nothing for Revit. Actually a TON of construction/infrastructure software doesn’t have a better alternatives, not just Autodesk
Those were my 3 sticking points (I switched anyway)
AutoCAD was top of my list.
I fucking hate AutoCAD (I use it professionally) but there’s nothing better and I really doubt a free alternative can top it. AutoLISP alone makes it unbeatable
Almost all video game genres are overwhelmingly dominated by closed-source, commercial software. FOSS generally isn’t competitive there.
I’d give FOSS the upper hand in traditional roguelikes and playing card solitaire implementations, maybe. Maybe chess AIs. Purely-text interactive fiction of the stuff that one might find on The Interactive Fiction Archive isn’t mostly FOSS, but is frequently non-commercial.
That’s a pretty small portion of what game stuff is out there.
But, yeah, for most non-game stuff, I’d agree; I’d rather use the FOSS options.
FOSS music packages are lacking compared to their commercial counterparts. I like and have made a few pieces using LMMS, but I’m under no delusion that it’s better than, say FL Studio or Ableton Live.