When shopping, the products pushed forward are usually bad value. You have to dig a little to find the good stuff. In software, even more so. Here's a summary of what works for me.
I started on OG Windows 98. I discovered Fedora in my first internship at university, in the Windows 7 era. I adopted Ubuntu on my dual boot laptop, then only used ubuntu, then got tired of the snap apps taking forever to start.
I'm currently using Debian. Always using old-ish sofware can be a bit annoying but I enjoy the stability and quick apps startup. I use i3 as a window manager.
I've tried FreeBSD for Desktop computing and I'm considering doing the switch eventually, to have a simpler OS that I better understand. The documentation is great and it's a chance to finally learn standard Unix tools from scratch.
I used to be a big fan of Chrome. I now avoid it like the plague.
I switched fully to firefox on both desktop and mobile when I realized that firefox mobile supported ublock. My ad blocker works well, firefox syncs my passwords and the web is fast. I use duck duck go for search.
Firefox has been going in the wrong direction though. I'm looking at ways to extract the password management with pass, to be able to use a browser that dislikes ads as much as I do, something like LibreWolf.
I've started with Dreamweaver, notepad and notepad++. I relied on github to host my code.
Nowadays, I'm a happy paying user of sublime text and jetbrain products. I host my git repos on my VPS (hetzner). I edit my translation files with BabelEdit. I'm still using trello for some project tracking, but more and more I use the Readme of the project as a todo list instead.
I'd like to use Fossil for versionning and project tracking but I haven't made the jump yet.
I used to recommend wordpress for websites, then moved to heroku for web apps, then discovered that my apps ran much faster on DigitalOcean. I used to host my websites on github pages, then cloudflare pages.
All my project are now hosted on hezner heroku instance. I have set up nginx to automatically serve folders in my www directory to [folder_name].lecaro.me. Some Docker containers are managed by mup and run node and meteor apps. SSL certificates are provided by LE, wich has been a bit troublesome as they broke compatibility with devices running android 7 and older in the default browser.
I'm very happy with that setup, then only thing I might change would be to switch to FreeBSD for the OS and use a VPN to connect to the machine's private web services instead of exposing their interface publicly.
I used to rely on google mail, google keeps, google photos and google drive.
I switched my email to hostinger and Syncthing takes care of the rest : notes are now a bunch of md files edited with QuickEdit+, photos are synced between my computer and phones whenever both are on wifi, and my "travel laptop" gets synced to my main workstation before every trip, which also serves as backup.
I will self host my email server because the service i currently pay for is disappointing, constantly interrupting me to push more features I don't need. For backups, I'd like to setup a server offsite with encrypted backups.
I used to dual boot for games, then game on linux, but now I have a dedicated windows 10 mini pc just for gaming.
I get my games from GOG and itch.io. I mostly play old offline games, but a few of them are only avaliable through steam, so I have installed that bloatware, I just try to start it as rarely as I can. On mobile,
In the future, once windows becomes too pushy, I'll probably disconnect that pc from the net, load DRM free games using a usb key, and remove steam entirely.
Whatsapp is sadly still needed, but I try to use signal whenever possible. I only use facebook to have a presence there for ciboulette.net, same thing for instagram. I've got a mastodon account and I read my news using Feeder.
I'm considering building an E2E encrypted social network at some point, as a toy project, and I also have a syncthing / markdown based news reader project that I would like to improve.
I've flashed a LineageOS rom on my Redmi Note 7, and enjoy a very clean and responsive system. I look for apps on F-Droid when I can and my Text Launcher is super nice.
I'm still using some google products though. I pay for youtube premium because Nebula doesn't have enough content. I'm still using google maps and calendar. I moved from ChatGPT to Mistral.