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I think the reason that open source software is so often poorly designed is this committee approach where no one person can lead the design team. Strong leaders
by _frog 16y ago
I think the reason that open source software is so often poorly designed is this committee approach where no one person can lead the design team. Strong leadership is extremely important when designing a good UI and I feel a lot of open source projects forget this.
Also this leader needs to be thick skinned and self confident enough to take criticism from others on the project but also assert their own subjective views.
- dman 16y agoLeadership is one issue. Another one is that the big Linux companies (Novell and Redhat) make most of their money from the enterprise market. So there isnt significant desktop design expenditure because the revenue slice from the Linux desktop market is vanishingly small. Canonical is trying to change this. As an aside - www.enlightenment.org is one project which has had pretty strong leadership (Raster is a great programmer and also has good aesthetic sensibilities). I hope enlightenment comes back and the big two (KDE and Gnome) becomes the big four (kde, gnome, ubuntus take on gnome and enlightenment).
- wladimir 16y agoThe problem with the Enlightenment guys (as I understood) is that they always had big plans and awesome ideas, but there's just not many enough of them to implement everything they want. They might consider to simply take the good parts of KDE/Gnome and build a visual shell around it to their liking. Kind of like what Canonical is doing.
- Flow 16y agoLots of variations of "Dungeons and Dragons"-desktop environments are not a good show of aesthetics. IMHO.