"Good software is like a good tool; it should do its job efficiently and stay out of the way." - Douglas Crockford
My philosophy towards software is to use whatever works best for me. While I applaud those that stick to free/libre software regardless of the application, I think that proprietary software has its place in my workflow. Day to day I use a mix of both.
I believe Windows 11 is a great OS when de-bloated. Check out my Windows 11 installation/debloat guide here. I made my install as close to Windows 10 as possible, while still taking advantage of the new scheduler. Windows is still my preferred OS for desktop because it can run Adobe products, and most importantly, games. I also recommend installing WSL2 for development.
On my Thinkpad I run Arch because it is extremely lightweight and I want to maximize my battery life / resources as much as possible. For a computer science student a raw Linux environment is unbeatable in terms of speed, productivity, and learning experience.
The only web-browser anyone should be using to browse the web freely. Firefox is the only real competition to Chromium based browsers. It's the most customizable browser experience, comes with no bloat, and respects its user's privacy. For those that haven't don't care for the previous reasons, the most important "feature" to me is that Firefox isn't a crazy resource hog like Chrome and Edge. Firefox sync is a perfected feature, being able to send webpages between devices is amazing. What's not to love?
Microsoft's editor is light-weight, highly configurable, and offers thousands of extensions. I'm using it right now to build this website and type this thing out! VSCode works perfectly for me as its flexibility and ease of use give me no reason to try other text editors. Programming is about thinking and problem solving, not about typing; there's only so much a text editor can offer to persuade me to switch.
There isn't really one reason to use one over the other, both play all my media perfectly. However, the MPC-HC UI is much nicer than VLC's, but I keep VLC installed for nostalgia's sake. Hopefully VLC 4.0 releases sooner than later so I can safely switch over. I've installed the nightly builds in the past, but they are quite buggy.
Update: The next stable build of VLC, version 3.0.22 will have dark mode included natively! You can currently use it in the latest nightly builds, or patch your stable version here. I'll likely stick with VLC for the time being.
Spotify is great as an easy-to-use social music platform, but lacks Hi-fi audio. As much as the company teases Hi-fi, it's been years and most other streaming services offer it. Long before I had Spotify Premium, I listened to music locally. I'm still adding to my FLAC collection today, read a more in-depth article here!