[amttc]

Maybe. It depends on if we're talking about individual applications or just the desktop experience in general.

The thing about people using applications like Photoshop and Word is that they have established workflows that its users have come to expect. From a design perspective, they're pidgeonholed because any significant UI change means that they would have to retrain the vast majority of its users. So Adobe and MS make minor tweaks to its UI instead. Admittedly, MS made a big change with the ribbons ui element, but you get the picture.

Open source stuff has the advantage (I guess you could call it that) of having a much larger volume of new users and a much smaller volume of old users, so there's more room to experiment with different UIs to solve the problem of getting people to interact meaningfully with the programs. I'd say for the vast majority of the projects, the UI is an afterthought so it ends up being poorly designed. Even so, the opportunity is there.

The desktop is a little different though, there's already a load of user expectations that you have to live up to. The space for proposing solutions is a lot smaller. Riding on the coat tails of OSX may not be a bad idea so long as the developers understand the reasons why Mac made the design decisions that they did and adjust accordingly.

At least that's how I feel. Trying to innovate isn't a bad thing, it has to lead to failure first before you get it right.