I think a lot of open source is better than the commercial stuff if and only if you're willing to put in a substantial amount of time learning it. For example,

I think a lot of open source is better than the commercial stuff if and only if you're willing to put in a substantial amount of time learning it. For example, I think LaTeX gives better results for documents than Word typically does. The spacing between letters is nicer, the fonts are nicer, everything just ends up looking better IMO, but LaTeX is a pain in the ass to learn. You have to kind of learn a bit of a strange markup syntax, you get a decidedly non-interactive means of writing equations, it can be hard to get pictures lined up correct etc. The end result might be worth it, but you had to work a lot harder to get there. Another example, ffmpeg is great for all kinds of video conversion and splicing and extraction and whatnot, but it requires learning a bunch of command line flags and details about bitrates and the like. It's great at nearly everything it does, I use it all the time, but it's definitely something that a lot of non-CS people are going to struggle with. I think this is partly why Linux and other open source has caught on so much in the infrastructure space; if you're someone who is setting up and deploying servers, you probably don't mind learning some of the minutia about systemd or bash scripting. I feel like proprietary apps win on user-friendly interfaces. Microsoft Word, in my opinion, is generally better than LibreOffice (and Excel is certainly better than Calc). Much as I love desktop Linux, I don't think I'll ever be able to get my parents to use for more than twenty minutes before they get frustrated.