In general it is. Opensource software has less bugs that proprietary. And even those bugs can be mitigated with hardening.
That’s…a gross oversimplification. Super popular open source projects tend to have few bugs from the sheer number of contributors available to fix them, but active proprietary software has dedicated teams working fulltime every week to deal woth issues. Proprietary stuff is often way wider in scope than open source, so more surface for bugs to creep in. Scope and team size have a lot more to do with bug density than open vs closed source.
I don’t know how much effort thoose proprietary software companies put into the actual software. Why is windows so shit? Why is whatsapp buggy? They try to get money with shit software with no optimisations at all.
How many open source projects have 50 million lines of code like Windows, or legal agreements related to backwards compatibility and version support guarantees?
A for-profit company is going to focus on whatever generates revenue, sure. But crappy software will lose customers in a non-monopoly scenario. They’re not exactly incentivized to make broken things nobody wants.
