mayflowerWhich proprietary software do you prefer over their open-source alternatives, and why?
Microsoft Office. I write a lot of documents that require contant citation and updates of sources, comments, etc. I have to review documents, create tables of content etc etc. Even though MS Office is far from perfect in many of these, free alternatives such as Libre or Open Office are just terrible.
Learn to use latex
Yes and no. For stuff like citations: absolutely. For reviewing stuff, the mode to suggest edits in Office (or even Google Docs) is great and doesn’t really have equivalent with a proper UI for LaTeX. Yes, you can use PDF comments, but then you need to change the LaTeX document manually.
But that’s the whole point. I started exploring it and learning about it and realized that it will take more time than it’s worth - by that time I completed it in Word and fixed it’s own citation issues manually. I really, really want these to be better than MS Word…but they just aren’t there yet.