5 ms·

I mean, hard to disagree even if I wanted to. Seems to me that free software community is lacking UI/UX Designers and so looks and feels considerably less "coo

by kaolti 7y ago

I mean, hard to disagree even if I wanted to. Seems to me that free software community is lacking UI/UX Designers and so looks and feels considerably less "cool" than commercial counterparts. What do you think?

dTal 7y ago
I think free software has caught up on the prettiness score. KDE Plasma 5 looks pretty slick. Graphic designers might niggle at aspects of it, but the layperson won't care. However, human factors is undervalued. There's a cultural issue in free software wherein good UI is rejected as being for sissies and not worth the effort. Hacking is a social activity, and hackers naturally like to make stuff for other hackers. Hackers tend to be the kind of person who has a lot of patience for tedious bullshit, or they would have thrown up their hands in despair long before becoming a hacker. And so you often hear people defend poor UI with talk of "investing in tools" and "if <UI annoyance> is enough to stop you, you don't have the patience for <activity> anyway". Which is possibly true! But it's a gatekeeping self-fulfilling prophecy. The trouble is, by the time you're expert enough to write software, you've long since forgotten what good UI even looks like: "I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as a undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act." — Ken Pier, Xerox PARC
- kaolti 7y ago
  Haha nice, enjoyed reading that. I'm a UI/UX Designer myself and was just thinking it comes down to designers contributing to these projects. Especially new people starting out and needing a portfolio, seems like a win - win for everyone involved.
  - Ajedi32 7y ago
    Part of the problem is likely that it's often difficult for non-programmers to contribute to open source projects directly. If I as a software engineer have a new feature I'd like to add to an open source project, I can usually just write that feature myself and submit a PR that the project maintainer can review and merge with minimal effort. But what if a UI/UX designer wants to contribute an improved UI for a particular feature? They could probably create a mockup and submit it to the repository as an issue, but then who's going to actually go and implement those changes?
    - kitsunesoba 7y ago
      FOSS projects absolutely have big accessibility problems. Many projects are still centered around mailing lists, IRC channels, and diff patches and some don’t even use what’s comes to be the “standard” version tracker (git). This is massively unwelcoming to even newer software engineers, let alone UI/UX people.
- magduf 7y ago
  >I think free software has caught up on the prettiness score. Free software surpassed proprietary software the day that Microsoft released Windows 8.
- dlivingston 7y ago
  I think you are spot on with your analysis. And while Plasma 5 looks good for OSS, it is far from consumer-ready. Look at the KDE Plasma 5 press release [0] versus the macOS Catalina press release [1]. KDE's looks like it was made in Wordpress. Look at this screenshot of Plasma shutting down [2]. The 'shutdown' text is so poorly aligned that it would give a proper UX designer heart palpitations. Compare to the iOS 'scandal' when calendar dates were mis-aligned by several pixels [3]. Overall, consumers do care about this - much more than you think. It's a non-negligable reason why Apple has the premium status that it does, particularly amongst creative industries (film, music, design). Good OSS UI/UX <<<<<< good commercial UI/UX. That's the state of the union (with the exception of few products like Firefox) and I wish it would change. [0]: https://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/ https://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/ [1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-previews-macos-catalina/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-previews-macos-... [2]: https://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/screenshots/shutdown.png https://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/screenshots/shutdown... [3]: https://gizmodo.com/victory-apple-has-fixed-the-number-1-in-ios-7s-calenda-992376970 https://gizmodo.com/victory-apple-has-fixed-the-number-1-in-...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
thinkingemote 7y ago
Just choose - we have to accept this. Nice UX or freedom - the big corporates will always win the battle of UX. Free software will always be less cool. Choose. "you'll have fashionable and functional technology - but at the cost of freedom" We have to accept that if users only choose something "that just works" or it works better than the Free alternative then they are not choosing Freedom. Of course reading the above doesn't in any way mean that Free software shouldn't try to have good design, UI and UX, just that Free software will always lose if that's the main criteria to choose from. And there's a danger of knowing that this war could never be won that it might not be worth fighting. This also needs to be accepted and acknowledged - we have to fight the war but change the terms. Simply look at any HN thread about Free software or alternative services and you will find the majority of users right here basically saying "well I support Freedom in theory but this non free thing is simply nicer to use".
- kaolti 7y ago
  You're right, that's just how people work. I do think there is an opportunity nowadays, because commercial software has gone down a highly disliked path of anti privacy, clickbait, optimize for addiction. Now seems to be the time for alternatives to pop up that: - Look and feel good enough - Open source - Respecting privacy - Immune to (most) criticism because of blockchain or similar
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  I don't accept that this is binary choice. The free software movement has failed to attract designers and UX minded people. As dTal said in a sibling comment: "There's a cultural issue in free software wherein good UI is rejected as being for sissies and not worth the effort" So there's the answer. Once the movement (whatever that is) becomes more open to accept that good software doesn't stop at being free then it might have a change to take on the world.
  - salawat 7y ago
    The problem there is, what happens when you get more than one chef in the kitchen? If you want to see what I mean, checkout the Desktop Environment scene. There's so many different views on what is good UX, that if you have 1000 different designers trying to make a UI to the same program, you end up with 1000 different interpretations of what this program should "look like". Free Software doesn't end up looking the way it does because anyone wants it to look bad; it's the way it is because that's all anyone in particular needs it to be. I don't need a GUI for diff and patch. Some people prefer one, and that's fine. Those people can go ahead and get any of the many implementations of a visual diff/patch program. That is their choice, just as it is mine to just use the command line utility as an example. UI/UX as it is taught in the industry comes hand-in-hand with curation, which implies a level of control over the end-user's choices in user experience, dependency graph, etc. Software freedom accepts that the ugly choice is still a choice. And maintenance-wise, that choice (the uglier, low dependency one) is a heck of a sensible default from the distribution maintainer's point of view. Same functional capability, and a heck of a lot less cruft to work with. Besides which, in my experience, most UX folks I meet are cripplingly dependent on a single technology stack I personally have no desire to see everything reimplemented in, which is JavaScript/HTML/CSS. I'd suffer through learning something like TCL/TK before resorting to adopting that nightmare of a toolchain. I'm what you might call a curmudgeonly old man in taste however, so that comes with the territory. There is also the resource intensive vs. pretty trade-off to be made as well. Do I want that sexy Aero/Peek, pseudo 3D, everything has an animation look sucking up my potentially valuable and short supply CPU cycles? Or is minimalist X with a minimal window manager without widgets or gadgets or whatever they call all those extra doodads these days good enough? Software tradeoffs are unfortunately an issue of always on engineering all the time. Something a lot of people don't necessarily find compatible with their tastes. It's certainly a good thing more people are talking about it though. Will have to keep my eye out for new distro's if the more UX savvy take a bite into making something.
strzibny 7y ago
True, but I also have to say that latest GNOME 3 and newest GTK apps look actually really really nice. I did not like the looks of GNOME 3 when it came out, but now it's on par/even nicer than macOS. The issue is that not every application is on latest GTK and thus while working, do not have the unified look.
- kaolti 7y ago
  Yea they do look nice, but something seems to be missing or just feels off to me.
magduf 7y ago
>Seems to me that free software community is lacking UI/UX Designers and so looks and feels considerably less "cool" than commercial counterparts. I keep reading this argument here. Does no one here use Windows 10? What kind of drugs would you have to be smoking to believe that Windows 8 or 10 looks "cool"? Sure, MacOSX looks "cool", I'll give it that (it doesn't work that great though), but Windows is far and away more widely-used than MacOSX, and is basically the standard-bearer for "commercial software" when we're talking about UI/UX, and it's really ugly.
- kaolti 7y ago
  A better word is probably "polished". I agree that Windows is not the prettiest thing to look at, but it's definitely polished.
  - magduf 7y ago
    Is having two different control center applications part of that "polish"? The last thing I'd call Windows is "polished"; instead, it looks like a great example of software built by strict evolution.
dangerface 7y ago
Theres defiantly a lot of free software that suffers from engineer UI but I find the UI of Apple and Google shockingly poor. Their UI focus is on encouraging the user to do what Google / Apple want not what the end user wants. Free software gives people freedom to have what they want but figuring out what you want and setting it up takes effort. Many people are like dogs they don't think freedom is worth the effort if they can be kept by a master that feeds them regularly.
- kaolti 7y ago
  Agreed, people ultimately don't want freedom, they want 0% chance of messing things up. I'm including myself btw.
- kitsunesoba 7y ago
  Often times achieving your desired result with free software is onerous, even if you know what you want know what you’re doing. This is a problem I’ve encountered several times just trying to achieve a desktop setup that works for me; I always eventually arrive at living with countless tiny issues or writing what I want from scratch.
swiley 7y ago
A lot of commercial software focuses on building cool GUIs because selling the software is the whole point. The point of community maintained software is to solve some problem some people have and so that’s what gets focused on. I don’t think tacking “cool stuff” onto free software is the answer, I would argue education is. Much like how we educate kids on the dangers of false advertising we should educate them on the dangers of non-free software.
- kaolti 7y ago
  I agree with you, but what I mean is people will be more inclined to use software that looks good - more broadly good UI/UX and I don't mean gimmicks. That's just how it is.
IanSanders 7y ago
The UX is not terrible though. And lack of dark patterns arguably makes it more pleassant at least in some aspects.

by kaolti 7y ago

dTal 7y ago

I think free software has caught up on the prettiness score. KDE Plasma 5 looks pretty slick. Graphic designers might niggle at aspects of it, but the layperson won't care. However, human factors is undervalued. There's a cultural issue in free software wherein good UI is rejected as being for sissies and not worth the effort. Hacking is a social activity, and hackers naturally like to make stuff for other hackers. Hackers tend to be the kind of person who has a lot of patience for tedious bullshit, or they would have thrown up their hands in despair long before becoming a hacker. And so you often hear people defend poor UI with talk of "investing in tools" and "if <UI annoyance> is enough to stop you, you don't have the patience for <activity> anyway". Which is possibly true! But it's a gatekeeping self-fulfilling prophecy. The trouble is, by the time you're expert enough to write software, you've long since forgotten what good UI even looks like: "I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as a undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act." — Ken Pier, Xerox PARC

kaolti 7y ago
Haha nice, enjoyed reading that. I'm a UI/UX Designer myself and was just thinking it comes down to designers contributing to these projects. Especially new people starting out and needing a portfolio, seems like a win - win for everyone involved.
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  Part of the problem is likely that it's often difficult for non-programmers to contribute to open source projects directly. If I as a software engineer have a new feature I'd like to add to an open source project, I can usually just write that feature myself and submit a PR that the project maintainer can review and merge with minimal effort. But what if a UI/UX designer wants to contribute an improved UI for a particular feature? They could probably create a mockup and submit it to the repository as an issue, but then who's going to actually go and implement those changes?
  - kitsunesoba 7y ago
    FOSS projects absolutely have big accessibility problems. Many projects are still centered around mailing lists, IRC channels, and diff patches and some don’t even use what’s comes to be the “standard” version tracker (git). This is massively unwelcoming to even newer software engineers, let alone UI/UX people.
magduf 7y ago
>I think free software has caught up on the prettiness score. Free software surpassed proprietary software the day that Microsoft released Windows 8.
dlivingston 7y ago
I think you are spot on with your analysis. And while Plasma 5 looks good for OSS, it is far from consumer-ready. Look at the KDE Plasma 5 press release [0] versus the macOS Catalina press release [1]. KDE's looks like it was made in Wordpress. Look at this screenshot of Plasma shutting down [2]. The 'shutdown' text is so poorly aligned that it would give a proper UX designer heart palpitations. Compare to the iOS 'scandal' when calendar dates were mis-aligned by several pixels [3]. Overall, consumers do care about this - much more than you think. It's a non-negligable reason why Apple has the premium status that it does, particularly amongst creative industries (film, music, design). Good OSS UI/UX <<<<<< good commercial UI/UX. That's the state of the union (with the exception of few products like Firefox) and I wish it would change. [0]: https://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/ https://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/ [1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-previews-macos-catalina/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-previews-macos-... [2]: https://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/screenshots/shutdown.png https://kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/screenshots/shutdown... [3]: https://gizmodo.com/victory-apple-has-fixed-the-number-1-in-ios-7s-calenda-992376970 https://gizmodo.com/victory-apple-has-fixed-the-number-1-in-...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

thinkingemote 7y ago

Just choose - we have to accept this. Nice UX or freedom - the big corporates will always win the battle of UX. Free software will always be less cool. Choose. "you'll have fashionable and functional technology - but at the cost of freedom" We have to accept that if users only choose something "that just works" or it works better than the Free alternative then they are not choosing Freedom. Of course reading the above doesn't in any way mean that Free software shouldn't try to have good design, UI and UX, just that Free software will always lose if that's the main criteria to choose from. And there's a danger of knowing that this war could never be won that it might not be worth fighting. This also needs to be accepted and acknowledged - we have to fight the war but change the terms. Simply look at any HN thread about Free software or alternative services and you will find the majority of users right here basically saying "well I support Freedom in theory but this non free thing is simply nicer to use".

kaolti 7y ago
You're right, that's just how people work. I do think there is an opportunity nowadays, because commercial software has gone down a highly disliked path of anti privacy, clickbait, optimize for addiction. Now seems to be the time for alternatives to pop up that: - Look and feel good enough - Open source - Respecting privacy - Immune to (most) criticism because of blockchain or similar
tiborsaas 7y ago
I don't accept that this is binary choice. The free software movement has failed to attract designers and UX minded people. As dTal said in a sibling comment: "There's a cultural issue in free software wherein good UI is rejected as being for sissies and not worth the effort" So there's the answer. Once the movement (whatever that is) becomes more open to accept that good software doesn't stop at being free then it might have a change to take on the world.
- salawat 7y ago
  The problem there is, what happens when you get more than one chef in the kitchen? If you want to see what I mean, checkout the Desktop Environment scene. There's so many different views on what is good UX, that if you have 1000 different designers trying to make a UI to the same program, you end up with 1000 different interpretations of what this program should "look like". Free Software doesn't end up looking the way it does because anyone wants it to look bad; it's the way it is because that's all anyone in particular needs it to be. I don't need a GUI for diff and patch. Some people prefer one, and that's fine. Those people can go ahead and get any of the many implementations of a visual diff/patch program. That is their choice, just as it is mine to just use the command line utility as an example. UI/UX as it is taught in the industry comes hand-in-hand with curation, which implies a level of control over the end-user's choices in user experience, dependency graph, etc. Software freedom accepts that the ugly choice is still a choice. And maintenance-wise, that choice (the uglier, low dependency one) is a heck of a sensible default from the distribution maintainer's point of view. Same functional capability, and a heck of a lot less cruft to work with. Besides which, in my experience, most UX folks I meet are cripplingly dependent on a single technology stack I personally have no desire to see everything reimplemented in, which is JavaScript/HTML/CSS. I'd suffer through learning something like TCL/TK before resorting to adopting that nightmare of a toolchain. I'm what you might call a curmudgeonly old man in taste however, so that comes with the territory. There is also the resource intensive vs. pretty trade-off to be made as well. Do I want that sexy Aero/Peek, pseudo 3D, everything has an animation look sucking up my potentially valuable and short supply CPU cycles? Or is minimalist X with a minimal window manager without widgets or gadgets or whatever they call all those extra doodads these days good enough? Software tradeoffs are unfortunately an issue of always on engineering all the time. Something a lot of people don't necessarily find compatible with their tastes. It's certainly a good thing more people are talking about it though. Will have to keep my eye out for new distro's if the more UX savvy take a bite into making something.

strzibny 7y ago

True, but I also have to say that latest GNOME 3 and newest GTK apps look actually really really nice. I did not like the looks of GNOME 3 when it came out, but now it's on par/even nicer than macOS. The issue is that not every application is on latest GTK and thus while working, do not have the unified look.

kaolti 7y ago
Yea they do look nice, but something seems to be missing or just feels off to me.

magduf 7y ago

>Seems to me that free software community is lacking UI/UX Designers and so looks and feels considerably less "cool" than commercial counterparts. I keep reading this argument here. Does no one here use Windows 10? What kind of drugs would you have to be smoking to believe that Windows 8 or 10 looks "cool"? Sure, MacOSX looks "cool", I'll give it that (it doesn't work that great though), but Windows is far and away more widely-used than MacOSX, and is basically the standard-bearer for "commercial software" when we're talking about UI/UX, and it's really ugly.

kaolti 7y ago
A better word is probably "polished". I agree that Windows is not the prettiest thing to look at, but it's definitely polished.
- magduf 7y ago
  Is having two different control center applications part of that "polish"? The last thing I'd call Windows is "polished"; instead, it looks like a great example of software built by strict evolution.

dangerface 7y ago

Theres defiantly a lot of free software that suffers from engineer UI but I find the UI of Apple and Google shockingly poor. Their UI focus is on encouraging the user to do what Google / Apple want not what the end user wants. Free software gives people freedom to have what they want but figuring out what you want and setting it up takes effort. Many people are like dogs they don't think freedom is worth the effort if they can be kept by a master that feeds them regularly.

kaolti 7y ago
Agreed, people ultimately don't want freedom, they want 0% chance of messing things up. I'm including myself btw.
kitsunesoba 7y ago
Often times achieving your desired result with free software is onerous, even if you know what you want know what you’re doing. This is a problem I’ve encountered several times just trying to achieve a desktop setup that works for me; I always eventually arrive at living with countless tiny issues or writing what I want from scratch.

swiley 7y ago

A lot of commercial software focuses on building cool GUIs because selling the software is the whole point. The point of community maintained software is to solve some problem some people have and so that’s what gets focused on. I don’t think tacking “cool stuff” onto free software is the answer, I would argue education is. Much like how we educate kids on the dangers of false advertising we should educate them on the dangers of non-free software.

kaolti 7y ago
I agree with you, but what I mean is people will be more inclined to use software that looks good - more broadly good UI/UX and I don't mean gimmicks. That's just how it is.

IanSanders 7y ago

The UX is not terrible though. And lack of dark patterns arguably makes it more pleassant at least in some aspects.