Desktop open source applications is a broad category. I can list a few that are decidedly better than their commercial counterparts: VLC media player, qBittorrent, Firefox*, Calibre
In fact, their commercial counterparts are and were so terrifically terrible, it put teenage me on a journey to discover better alternatives and how I discovered FLOSS in the first place.
What you probably mean is 'Professional' desktop applications are provably never going to match commercial counterparts. In which case, at least for Software Dev work, it hasn't been true for decades.
For creative work, commercial vendors have a tendency to squeeze out more from their customer base after a while, and that provides an opportunity to sneak in. FLOSS can also keep on trucking under the radar and suddenly appear to be good enough one day. Blender is an excellent example.
In fact, their commercial counterparts are and were so terrifically terrible, it put teenage me on a journey to discover better alternatives and how I discovered FLOSS in the first place.
What you probably mean is 'Professional' desktop applications are provably never going to match commercial counterparts. In which case, at least for Software Dev work, it hasn't been true for decades.
For creative work, commercial vendors have a tendency to squeeze out more from their customer base after a while, and that provides an opportunity to sneak in. FLOSS can also keep on trucking under the radar and suddenly appear to be good enough one day. Blender is an excellent example.