Also, design by committee rarely produces good UI. You can patch little UI bugs, but if you really want to holistically improve the UI it's a huge undertaking.
Just because you're developer, doesn't mean you want to hack on every tool you use. Software has gotten way too big for that.
You don't have to fix every bug you find. Just fix the odd bug, and work around the rest until somebody else fixes it; many hands make light work. But the work doesn't get done at all if you run away to proprietary platforms.
You don't have to boil the ocean. Just do your civic duty from time to time. Once a year, even. If everybody on HN used desktop Linux and, once a year, invested an hour into fixing a minor, polish-level bug, desktop Linux's polish problem would completely disappear.
You mean like that crufty thing called homebrew?
Or the default versions of software shipped are out of date by maybe a long, long time?
https://www.reddit.com/r/bash/comments/393oqv/why_is_the_ver...
What kind of problems have you faced with Homebrew? Can you please elaborate?
I use Homebrew all the time and it just works for me out of the box without any issues. I never had to edit configuration files or customize anything to make it do the right thing. It just works.