FWIW Figma is quickly becoming a great replacement for Sketch. And I think Adobe is working on cloud equivalents for many of their offerings, so when those are ready at least some of your concerns will be removed.

1Password definitely has replacements that aren't inferior. Alfred is OS specific tuning and you can easily get settings you enjoy on your Linux desktop.

And yet Linux is missing a lot of high quality commercial software.

Even if all my software ran on Linux I still wouldn't have the peace of mind that walking in a store and buying an Apple laptop offers. I would have to research models or order and wait for an XPS to arrive in order to have a machine that is sure to work.

I find it difficult to believe that your livelihood depends solely on the specific combination of apps you mentioned. It doesn't even seem like you've actually tried any of these apps yet call them inferior? Inferior how? That's quite an elitist stance to portray without the specifics to back it up here.

Have you tried any of the apps they're claiming are superior? I would argue Sketch is compared to Inkscape, and Pixelmator is compared to Gimp. For someone who is mostly messing around casually and just for fun, Inkscape and Gimp are great. They give you most of the tools you need or want, but not always in a straightforward way, and their UIs are lacking compared to their commercial counterparts.

Sketch and Pixelmator, to me, operate in a significantly smoother way, and make doing basic tasks substantially easier. The biggest thing that comes to mind for Sketch/Inkscape is exporting sections of the larger project file into individual assets. It's a breeze in sketch. It's integrated in the main UI, it operates in a predictable way, and it just works. Inkscape pulls you through a series of menus, and doesn't have any way to remember how you've previously separated up your assets (unless there's some way to do that deeply hidden in the UI that I could never find).

So yes, Sketch and Pixelmator, and most well-known creative software (anything in the Adobe suite, the Affinity Suite, etc) is generally significantly ahead of the open source options. Would I prefer it otherwise, sure, but the open source options aren't used by that many professionals, and are generally swimming upstream to implement features the commercial ones already have, instead of creating the next great feature (whatever that is) or streamlining their UI to make easier to use.

My livelihood doesn't depend on Lightroom but I don't want a laptop that only does a subset of my computing.

I've tried darktabke and the UI is a mess, same with Gimp. A lot of open source software is unpolished and lacking in documentation. If that is elitist so be it.

I can vouch that Lightroom is 100x better than Darktable. The UI is better, and the application crashes less. Lightroom is basically the reason I switched back to a windows desktop (along with Photoshop, Solidworks, MS Word, etc.).