Too bad the open source world has consistently failed to create a good UX... not because it can't but because the OSS community is still full of people who have a fetish for complexity and who actually look down on good UX.
When "good UX" (highly subjective, btw) means limiting your ability to control and optimize your own workflows, yes, some people reasonably choose control over a low learning curve pre-baked option.
Catering to people who want a super easy streamlined experience is hard. They want rigorous QA, tech support, and broad compatibility, all of which are very expensive goals to chase with diminishing returns.
I don't think the core of UX is really that subjective. It's all about consistency, polish, and most importantly cognitive load. Eye candy is highly subjective but that's not what I'm talking about.
I think you're being downvoted because there is an ambiguity in what "subjective" refers to here. The core criteria of good UX are not subjective, as you say. But whether a certain UX qualifies as good under those criteria depends highly on the audience.
A good video-editing UX for amateurs looks completely different from a good video-editing UX for professionals.
Long-time users of vim or emacs love their editors because of their UX, while many new users hate them for the same UX.
I think it’s more a result of lack of cohesion and direction. Open source companies with strong purposes and great lead produce good results. Projects that aggregate lot of contributors each with their goals wishlist and wants tend to be more disgregate not because love of complexity or because they look down good ux but because each coder work at the feature they need and cram it somewhere on the existing ux.
Doesn’t help that there are relatively few desiners that are contributing into open source projects compared to devs. It’s rare to find a designer contributing a cohesive ux to a project and when they do it’s hard to find someone that understand every piece of the program to actually swap out the interface.
Project with a good lead can at least mitigate that by gating new contributions and fixes to adhere to some general design, at least improving the app invrementally.
I actually find the opposite problem these days, at least in GNOME. Every release is less powerful, less customisable, and more filled with weird theory-driven bits of UI that just take up space on my screen and slow me down in the name of user friendliness.
Don't forget the parts of UX called "don't make users despise and fear you" and "don't spy on your users and sell their data". My user experience on Linux is more relaxed because I'm pretty sure there's nothing on my laptop I need to fight (besides systemd, lol).
