No that's very much the point, because what happens is that the experts tweak it for their own benefit and entertainment. Sometimes they're even condescending and dismissive of users who aren't part of the community of experts who understand how to compile and edit the software for their own use.

So development becomes an end in itself, not a means to an end.

There are historical counter-examples which prove the point. When Windows 95 it was a disaster from the point of stability, but it still was stable and standard enough to create the proverbial level playing for developers.

This meant there was an explosion of commercial user oriented products developed by back-bedroom one man band start-ups. This is not a small thing - it's part of what persuaded ordinary people that PCs were worth buying.

That's also how Photoshop and some of the other commercial apps started - from an earlier wave of development which happened once the Mac environment stabilised.

After ten years there has no been no equivalent development in the OS world at the user level. It's happened to some extent at the commercial level, but not on the desktop.

Because OS is a developer free for all, there's no stable environment. There's no guarantee that any piece of software will work with any particular Linux variant. And even if you do your own compilation, you can waste hours in development hell trying to track down dependencies and essential libraries.

So OS doesn't work in user space for two reasons - it's not actually open in any practical sense, and it's primarily designed by developers for developers as a developer exercise, not as a product which end users can work with. This means stability and consistency don't happen, and there's no real interest in keeping non-geek users on board.

I don't think the OS people understand how essential this is for development. Most people would rather pay a credit card fee for a product they know they can use than try to fight their way through a user-hostile developer environment like Source Forge to download it for nothing.