When facing a strong competitor, you have three options:

Innovate. This is hard, and if you aren't skilled enough to pull it off you end up with something inferior to the original.

Create some kind of gratuitous differentiation. If you're not qualified to innovate but you want to be seen as not copying. This is the worst option IMO.

Copy the leader exactly. (Hello Samsung!) This is what you should do if you can't afford to innovate (and if you can get away with it).

Unfortunately, open source developers who are too proud to copy but not skilled enough to innovate in UI is what leads to bad software.