Passion isn't a barometer of anything but whether the developer likes his job. It certainly doesn't translate into better or more user friendly software.

In OSS I tend to see the opposite. The more “passionate” developers tend to be passionate about some implementation detail (like respect for a particular standard, the Unix philosophy, Stallman-compliant licensing, etc) without giving a crap about the actual user experience in day to day usage.

I see more passion in paid software in macOS when I see a beautiful UI because it shows that the developer actually wants me to use and enjoy his creation day to day.

It is more that well run project has testers and analyst and manager that will open tickets for what you are not passionate about and missed. So, you have to fix it whether passionate or not, it is more about result then whether you feel like doing it.

Then, there are also badly run commetial projects, which are crap despite being paid for.

Passionate about making the installation process seamless on every distro? And all the other mundane, tedious tasks that are expected by users used to commercial software?

My OSS project, which I haven’t worked on in ages to be fair, I never made any effort to make it work anywhere but on Debian for example. I know some people used it in Suse and RHEL so it can’t have been too painful but I never had that as a goal.

This is the other issue with 'linux on the desktop'. The linux desktop is massively fragmented. Notably this goes for desktop environments and package managers.

This makes it hard to target 'linux' in general with polished software. The issue of package managers seems on its way to being solved by containers. However, the issue of desktop environments is much more thorny. As you can't really abstract away the metaphors with which a user communicates with his PC.

Depends on the individual I guess. :)

Years ago, I went through a phase getting the installer working well (cross platform) for a PostgreSQL replication project. FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, RHEL, ... there might have been others too, it was a long time ago. ;)

The problem with passion that it may not be focused to what the end users might most need.

Think about OSS software you've written and contributed to. 99% of time it is to scratch your own programmer centric itch.

Usability usually takes a backseat in OSS model as not many usability experts are working for free.

Same goes for documentation. It is autodoc or nothing.