I regularly comment on the Internet on my views on most schemes proposed to fix FOSS problems. They are mostly negative. I think that most of these schemes cannot achieve any meaningful impact. It seems that most of these disagreements come from the fact that I seem to work on different models of how FOSS work. Over the years, I have tried to share parts of my model. This is part of this endeavor.
Fortunately, there are plenty of foss projects with nice and intuitive UIs! (Okular, the PDF reader, Lutris, Firefox and its derivatives, Thunderbird, all the various Material You Android apps like Breezy Weather and AntennaPod, all the various SwiftUI Apple apps that are open-source like mLem and NetNewsWire, the bazillion apps that use libadwaita, all the Qt-based apps that fit really well with KDE Plasma, but work well in other DEs, Prism Launcher is nice to use, super easy to install Fabric mods, i could go on…)
NetNewsWire started as a closed source app.
Well it’s open-source now! Good for them. If you want more examples, you have a bunch of the self-hosted stuff (particularly Immich and Nextcloud, there’s plenty of great Jellyfin clients, loads of neat Navidrome/Subsonic clients, etc), LibreOffice/OnlyOffice (depending on whether you want separate office apps or integrated), you’ve got the Linux desktop environments (GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, etc.), etc.
NextCloud is pretty meh. Worst cloud storage I have used so far. A hosted NextCloud with just a few users is also surprisingly expensive. Self hosting is only an option for people with too much time.
Linux actually has a couple usable DEs.
Nextcloud works really well for me. You don’t need to use all the functions, I just use it for file sync. Of course, you have stuff like Syncthing if you want something simpler (and peer-to-peer!)