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I do my absolute best to avoid proprietary software. I can only think of three I use consistently. Those are Obsidian, Steam, and the Nvidia drivers.
Obsidian is a weird one; there are loads of note taking/pim/personal wiki options out there. And don't get me wrong, stuff like Standard Notes, Joplin, and Trillium are great. But for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, Obsidian is the only one that clicks for me.
Steam isn't so much an "I prefer," it's more of a "I have a huge game library I'm not willing to abandon." Without Steam, I can't play Terraria, Hades, Core Keeper, and more than 200 others. It might be a sunk cost fallacy thing, but I'm not giving up my Fallout New Vegas.
The Nvidia thing is an extension of the Steam thing. My next computer will have an AMD card, though, so that's kind of a "for now."
Maybe it's old enough that some people never had to deal with it, but before Steam, being able to play a game on a different version of Windows than what it came out for was a crapshoot. Playing on Linux was even MORE of a crapshoot. I remember when I got Team Fortress running on Linux for the first time (at like 10 FPS) and was ecstatic.
Linux gaming existed before steam, but Steam (and Valve) brought Linux gaming to the masses.