Technology

With GIMP 3.0 it's a bit better at least, they've finally added non-destructive editing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfaq-Cm1ZkA

Full changelog here:
https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.0.html

I'd dare say that unless you've already learnt Photoshop (and have to unlearn it) then Darktable+GIMP works fine for home photo editing.
If you're used to Photoshop and your skills with it is what puts bread on the table... then I completely understand not switching tools.

I use krita way more than gimp

Yeah I really like what they’re doing and I applaud their efforts, but they are a solid decade behind PS when it comes to feature parity.

I love love love GIMP!!!

But yeah it's not a PS alternative, and tbh that's not really what it's supposed to be or what its developers want out of it. it's different

The same with Lightroom sadly. The open source alternatives are either too buggy or have UX designed by very "opinionated" people, making them painful and frustrating to use. I currently want to get rid of Lightroom but can't.

Firefox can do basic annotating, adding text and adding pictures but it can't make a new PDF from scratch.

You may be confusing Adobe Acrobat Reader with Adobe Acrobat? Full Acrobat is the proprietary tool to make a PDF file from scratch including some of the more complex functions.

PDF is an open standard and has been for a while, so there are now plenty of alternatives for most of the functions. LibreOffice Draw and Inkscape can do a lot of PDF creation functions but not all. There are also "print to PDF" options to create basic PDF documents too.

However some of the more niche functions are not widely supported or well supported; and there isn't really any opensource dedicated PDF maker that I'm aware of. Layout tools are abundant but I think it's things like building forms and document signing that is less easily replicated. There is Master PDF - a fully functional PDF maker which is proprietary and available for Linux; it $80 for a perpetual license. I'm not aware of any other alternatives myself.

Xodo and Xchange are both feature rich, lightweight, and easy to use programs. Browser view is fine for a peek but quickly feels clunky.

Browser is nice. On Linux though, Okular is superb (except for its occasional problems with forms).

A few years back Audacity got acquired by a commercial entity. They then proceeded to cause some controversy regarding user privacy.

I think they walked back some of them, and changed the installer to allow disabling the data collection; but by that time, a few forks have started popping up. Tenacity seems to be what many people eventually settle on.

Enshitification by owners of Audacity including telemetry. They eventually backed down, but that was after Tenacity forked off it and people started using and improving it.

What about Krita? Not sure exactly what Adobe product it would be an alternative for though. I know a lot of what people use it for used to be done with Photoshop, but I think Photoshops core demographic is a slightly different use case. Also Inkscape as an Illustrator alternative?

Well, on the other hand, it's by far not always the case that the program one person is currently using is already the best choice for their use case. For example, in the process of degoogling, I've begun using a lot of programs that are actually better for me than the ones I previously used.

Of course there's friction/effort involved in finding the best replacement, but there's just no way around that if the goal is to get away from the defacto standards.

Also udemy has some fantastic courses to learn the whole suite, each can be purchased for lifetime access for $10-15 USD. The instructors I bought from are still actively updating their courses and I get all the new stuff, even though I bought when AD was still on v1.3.

If you're looking to learn it's a really affordable way to do it.

No Linux support though, which is a bummer these days.