GIMP, Inkscape, and LibreOffice aren’t competitive with their commercial alternatives.

Which leaves Blender, which is the exception of a high quality open source tool that’s not for developers. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I think they’re two reasons it exists: 1. The comparable commercial tools are very expensive, e.g., thousands of dollars per year, versus a bit over a hundred a year for something like Photoshop. 2. Developers have a particular affinity to 3D modeling, e.g., it’s the biggest gatekeeper to various types of development like games programming and AR/VR.

But I agree 100% that Blender is a fascinating exception, and I’d love to hear more theories about what’s made it so successful.

Libre Office is simply copying features from MS Office, and is rarely used in commercial settings anyway.

Chrome is open source (well, Chromium, Chrome is not), but it is basically 100% developed by a commercial company which does not generally accept community contributions.

I don't know enough about GIMP, Inkscape and Blender to give an opinion on how well they can be held up as examples of Open Source community tools that can replace commercial tools.

Edit: actually, thinking more about this, Firefox and other browsers are much more a tool for web development than a tool for users directly - the functionality that users use is much smaller in terms of implementation than the functionality that web developers use (the layout and JS engines, and the debuggers, profilers & other development .

Both of which are known to have notoriously unintuitive UI's, especially when compared to their commercial competitors.

> Libre Office

Literally just copy & paste M$ Office UI, and honestly still manages to screw that up putting things in different places.

and perhaps not coincidentally, GIMP is infurating trash from a UX perspective.