The issue with the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" is that he's right for an individual piece of software, but wrong for an integrated system. Can you get the best editor, best grep, best <insert technical tool> with FOSS? The answer is yes. Multiple implementations, and finally the best one "wins", at least for a while.
But you can you get the best system? No, because you land up with multiple incompatible implementations that don't quite fit together. OSX is the most similar option, and it wins because of consistency - consistency is forced on all developers by an overall authority. Keyboard shortcuts are a classic example, OSX has one set, on Linux you get different ones depending on the toolkit used GNOME, KDE, Xwin and a lot of other defunct ones! In the Linux world the desktop environments tried to define their own standards (GNOME and KDE in particular) and it didn't work because users run applications from other tool kits; then they tried through freedesktop.org but it just didn't get/have the buy-in. You've also always had the problem of the major distributions competing (wanting to differentiate) with each other and causing friction. And finally, these days there's just not that much energy in the desktop paradigm on Linux: there are very few "application" focused desktop developers now.
Agreed, that the creation of distributions is also a problem. It seems to be a test that every 'power administrator' does, a bit like every developer creates a text editor/irc client. Somewhere along the line Linux user/developers got the idea that creating their own distribution was cool. Distributions are easy to do at the beginning, and then increasingly hard.
It's a separate issue that you don't get the "best <insert consumer app>" because the people that develop open source don't understand 'consumer apps'.
But you can you get the best system? No, because you land up with multiple incompatible implementations that don't quite fit together. OSX is the most similar option, and it wins because of consistency - consistency is forced on all developers by an overall authority. Keyboard shortcuts are a classic example, OSX has one set, on Linux you get different ones depending on the toolkit used GNOME, KDE, Xwin and a lot of other defunct ones! In the Linux world the desktop environments tried to define their own standards (GNOME and KDE in particular) and it didn't work because users run applications from other tool kits; then they tried through freedesktop.org but it just didn't get/have the buy-in. You've also always had the problem of the major distributions competing (wanting to differentiate) with each other and causing friction. And finally, these days there's just not that much energy in the desktop paradigm on Linux: there are very few "application" focused desktop developers now.
Agreed, that the creation of distributions is also a problem. It seems to be a test that every 'power administrator' does, a bit like every developer creates a text editor/irc client. Somewhere along the line Linux user/developers got the idea that creating their own distribution was cool. Distributions are easy to do at the beginning, and then increasingly hard.
It's a separate issue that you don't get the "best <insert consumer app>" because the people that develop open source don't understand 'consumer apps'.