14 ms·

This is why in so many problem domains, especially outside technical problems for IT people, proprietary software is the only option, or the only complete optio

by simonh 6y ago

This is why in so many problem domains, especially outside technical problems for IT people, proprietary software is the only option, or the only complete option. The best way to ensure people pay close attention to those last areas of fit and finish, and make sure they get attention from people with the different sets of skills needed to do a good job in all of those areas, is to pay them. That means you need a really solid revenue stream, and initially need enough capital up front to get the project going. I know, there are open source business models which work for some companies and that's true but generally in the sorts of technical problems for IT people. Compared to the IT industry as a whole those are edge cases. They seem more important to us embedded in the IT industry, but compared to the overall multi-trillion dollar global IT industry they're peanuts.

danjac 6y ago
> proprietary software is the only option, or the only complete option. If only that were true. I've watched a completely non-IT person work with both vanilla Gnome 3 and Windows 10; they found the former far more intuitive and unobtrusive (not looking at the individual apps, just the basic desktop UI). Proprietary design-by-committee doesn't necessary make for better solutions: hence the numerous complaints recently from people (often with accessibility issues) trying to book vaccination slots on government websites.
chaos_a 6y ago
This is why most linux distros have interfaces that are missing minor features and can be frustrating for users who don't have command line experience. For example, why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu? Or how about the fact that you can't get full file paths shown in the default file manager, I often know what directory I want to get to but have to figure out what maze of folders I have to go through to get there.
- practice9 6y ago
  > Or how about the fact that you can't get full file paths shown in the default file manager, I often know what directory I want to get to but have to figure out what maze of files I have to go through to get there. Did you mean MacOS?
  - roblabla 6y ago
    Windows also has a similar problem: The URL might not actually have the "true" path. It's so infuriating each time I try to get the path to my Downloads folder on Windows, and end up getting "This PC\Downloads". Please. I'm a grown up. Give me the real damn path... Seriously, Linux has a lot of UX issues, but hiding the full path of files is a problem that plagues literally every single OS file manager. It seems that at some point, all the major OS makers agreed that users are too stupid to understand a file hierarchy, and came up with tricks to hide it.
    - HeckFeck 6y ago
      > It seems that at some point, all the major OS makers agreed that users are too stupid to understand a file hierarchy, and came up with tricks to hide it. And this is why I find myself mostly in the text shell. Were I to go graphical the minimum I want is a simple address bar that I can override the current path with a specified path at will. Maybe a tree view like in Windows 95 Explorer just to pretty things up. Some of the modern comforts like thumbnail images would also be welcome. I wish they would stop insulting their users who have taken the time to understand the underlying technicalities of a file system. All this should be user-configurable in a good file manager. SpaceFM and PcmanFM come closest to what I've specified.
      - groby_b 6y ago
        Hm. Cater to the 1% who have shown that they're able to learn complex concepts easily, or support the 99% who would rather not think about internals and use a computer as a simple tool. That's not a difficult question. The only time it makes sense to expose the internals is if you build a specialist tool for people who like internals exposed. This means that no, it shouldn't be "user configurable" either. You don't want a combinatorial explosion of states in your UI for a tiny set of users in the general purpose case, and you don't want to create a honking fat tool for specialists who'll only use the specialist path. The computer industry is discovering what the mechanical tools industry has known for a while: You can build a general purpose tool that's simple & straightforward, or you can make a specialist tool. Pretty much any specialist will be slightly unhappy with the specialist tool and modify it to their own requirements, but you can't build a specialist tool that makes even close to all specialists happy. The specialists will also continue to use the generalist tool if it gets the job done, but they'll complain every step of the way.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  At least in KDE's default file manager, if you click on the right of the "prettied up" location view, it gives you a plain old text-based path field.
  - TuringTest 6y ago
    And in most KDE and Gnome file explorers and open/save dialogs, Ctrl+L shows the whole path in plain text.
  - aiilns 6y ago
    Same thing in GNOME files if you press ctrl+l. Just like you would to get to Firefox's URL.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      Uh.. I get to Firefox's URL by clicking on the address field.
      - airstrike 6y ago
        Ctrl+L works on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Windows Explorer FYI
        FeepingCreature 6y ago
        Okay?
        airstrike 6y ago
        I just mean it's a seemingly ubiquitous hotkey so you may find it useful to memorize it
        FeepingCreature 6y ago
        Right, and I mean there's no way to discover that hotkey if you don't already know it, which is why requiring it for a common UI function is bad design.
- tomcooks 6y ago
  When you opened an issue on the respective but trackers what did they answer?
  - simonh 6y ago
    Thank you for posting this, a thousand times. It really clearly illuminates precisely why in open source the interests of the user and the developer are fundamentally differently aligned than in commercial software. Not miss-aligned necessarily, but differently aligned. In open source the developer has the power, they get to decide what they work on and nobody can tell them otherwise. The best a user can do is post a begging letter in a bug tracker. It doesn't matter what the user thinks, even a majority of users, all they can do is ask. In commercial software it's the user putting bread on the developer's table. The user feeds and clothes the developer's children, and/or pays for their supply of mountain dew. If the user wants something, bye and large they get it, or at least they have a pretty solid chance of it more often than not. A vote for a feature speaks a lot more convincingly when it's backed up by a wallet. There's nothing wrong with open source or free and libre software. It's great, I love it, but a lot of it's proponents seem to think proprietary software is some sort of crime and genuinely don't understand why proprietary software dominates so completely in so many domains outside of IT infrastructure.
    - tomcooks 6y ago
      Good luck convincing a commercial software developer to apply the changes you want. It's rare that a company, commercial or not, changes software because of what customers want (marketing department koolaid doesn't apply). Developers know best, even when they don't, because they're the ones doing the actual work. But in the FOSS ecosystem you have: i) the freedom to do the changes yourself ii) the freedom to offer help with design, documentation, ideas iii) a public bug tracking and issues manager Let me know when you can do this commercially. On a tangent: it is indeed a crime to use commercial software when there are libre alternatives; every use moves the needle one tick deeper towards Eternal September
      - simonh 6y ago
- collyw 6y ago
  I think the things you are complaining about are more personal preferences and being accustomed to Mac / Windows system. > why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu? > how about the fact that you can't get full file paths shown in the default file manager, Is it any worse than needing to find the setting to display file extension in windows? I am on Cinnamon desktop as it's a bit old school and predictable (for people who have been around since windows 98). I right click a file and I have an option to create a link. And my default file manager shows the full file path in the address bar . So I don't think it's a Linux problem rather than a Gnome 3 problem. But I am sure plenty of people don't mind Gnome 3 (everyone else at my work used the standard Ubuntu desktop.
- cipherboy 6y ago
  >
- Maken 6y ago
  >why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu? Blame GNOME 3. After a decade it's still lacking polish everywhere. The day Canonical decided to drop the ball on Unity was a sad day.
pjc50 6y ago
There's a third category: "enterprise" software, where the people doing the purchasing are completely disconnected from the people using it and the developers. This results in appalling UI disasters like Lotus Notes.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  There used to be meme among my friends that we’d express how much a piece of enterprise software sucked by how expensive we thought it cost. For example, “Wow, this sucks. This must cost $500k a year.” It was scary how close we got to some published prices.
pbasista 6y ago
> proprietary software is the only option What do you mean by "proprietary" in this context? I believe that the availability of the software's source code to its users is unrelated to the fact of whether the actual development of such software is paid or not. Moreover, free and open source software (free as in "freedom", not necessarily free as in "free beer"), makes it generally simpler for the regular users to provide input regarding the features they need changed. So, in a way, it also helps to achieve the goal you describe: > The best way to ensure people pay close attention to those last areas of fit and finish...
- asoneth 6y ago
  > simpler for the regular users to provide input regarding the features they need changed Don't get me wrong, a good interface needs to take user feedback into account. But trying to accommodate the union of all features needed by all users is a recipe for madness. Somewhere you need an engineer, PM, designer, CxO, or someone who can make judgement calls and decide which user needs are more important than others.
- simonh 6y ago
  >I believe that the availability of the software's source code to its users is unrelated to the fact of whether the actual development of such software is paid or not. This is true, and I've seen that happen too, one of the companies I worked with would sell source licenses to customers, and as I understand it this was very common in the mainframe business going way back. The software vendor retained rights to sell and distribute the software though, that's what I mean by proprietary. I've seen these arguments for open source and libre software before many times, but there's a huge discontinuity between the theory and what actually happens in reality. In the real world there are tens of thousands of small and large software houses producing niche software for diverse use cases for businesses all over the world. Hundreds of niche engineering design, test and optimisation applications, B2B services, audio and video tools, chemical engineering tools, automation and industrial control systems, booking and billing systems, here are an almost infinite variety. Most of them are only known to people actually in these niche specialisms. In that world customers paying for customisations is stock in trade, it's entirely normal. In fact the company I'm at right now is paying the vendor for customisations to our incident and change management ticketing system. In comparison open source, outside nerdy IT oriented tech projects, might as well not exist. It's minuscule. Barely even a footnote.

by simonh 6y ago

danjac 6y ago

> proprietary software is the only option, or the only complete option. If only that were true. I've watched a completely non-IT person work with both vanilla Gnome 3 and Windows 10; they found the former far more intuitive and unobtrusive (not looking at the individual apps, just the basic desktop UI). Proprietary design-by-committee doesn't necessary make for better solutions: hence the numerous complaints recently from people (often with accessibility issues) trying to book vaccination slots on government websites.

chaos_a 6y ago

This is why most linux distros have interfaces that are missing minor features and can be frustrating for users who don't have command line experience. For example, why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu? Or how about the fact that you can't get full file paths shown in the default file manager, I often know what directory I want to get to but have to figure out what maze of folders I have to go through to get there.

practice9 6y ago
> Or how about the fact that you can't get full file paths shown in the default file manager, I often know what directory I want to get to but have to figure out what maze of files I have to go through to get there. Did you mean MacOS?
- roblabla 6y ago
  Windows also has a similar problem: The URL might not actually have the "true" path. It's so infuriating each time I try to get the path to my Downloads folder on Windows, and end up getting "This PC\Downloads". Please. I'm a grown up. Give me the real damn path... Seriously, Linux has a lot of UX issues, but hiding the full path of files is a problem that plagues literally every single OS file manager. It seems that at some point, all the major OS makers agreed that users are too stupid to understand a file hierarchy, and came up with tricks to hide it.
  - HeckFeck 6y ago
    > It seems that at some point, all the major OS makers agreed that users are too stupid to understand a file hierarchy, and came up with tricks to hide it. And this is why I find myself mostly in the text shell. Were I to go graphical the minimum I want is a simple address bar that I can override the current path with a specified path at will. Maybe a tree view like in Windows 95 Explorer just to pretty things up. Some of the modern comforts like thumbnail images would also be welcome. I wish they would stop insulting their users who have taken the time to understand the underlying technicalities of a file system. All this should be user-configurable in a good file manager. SpaceFM and PcmanFM come closest to what I've specified.
    - groby_b 6y ago
      Hm. Cater to the 1% who have shown that they're able to learn complex concepts easily, or support the 99% who would rather not think about internals and use a computer as a simple tool. That's not a difficult question. The only time it makes sense to expose the internals is if you build a specialist tool for people who like internals exposed. This means that no, it shouldn't be "user configurable" either. You don't want a combinatorial explosion of states in your UI for a tiny set of users in the general purpose case, and you don't want to create a honking fat tool for specialists who'll only use the specialist path. The computer industry is discovering what the mechanical tools industry has known for a while: You can build a general purpose tool that's simple & straightforward, or you can make a specialist tool. Pretty much any specialist will be slightly unhappy with the specialist tool and modify it to their own requirements, but you can't build a specialist tool that makes even close to all specialists happy. The specialists will also continue to use the generalist tool if it gets the job done, but they'll complain every step of the way.
FeepingCreature 6y ago
At least in KDE's default file manager, if you click on the right of the "prettied up" location view, it gives you a plain old text-based path field.
- TuringTest 6y ago
  And in most KDE and Gnome file explorers and open/save dialogs, Ctrl+L shows the whole path in plain text.
- aiilns 6y ago
  Same thing in GNOME files if you press ctrl+l. Just like you would to get to Firefox's URL.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    Uh.. I get to Firefox's URL by clicking on the address field.
    - airstrike 6y ago
      Ctrl+L works on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Windows Explorer FYI
      - FeepingCreature 6y ago
        Okay?
        airstrike 6y ago
        I just mean it's a seemingly ubiquitous hotkey so you may find it useful to memorize it
        FeepingCreature 6y ago
        Right, and I mean there's no way to discover that hotkey if you don't already know it, which is why requiring it for a common UI function is bad design.
tomcooks 6y ago
When you opened an issue on the respective but trackers what did they answer?
- simonh 6y ago
  Thank you for posting this, a thousand times. It really clearly illuminates precisely why in open source the interests of the user and the developer are fundamentally differently aligned than in commercial software. Not miss-aligned necessarily, but differently aligned. In open source the developer has the power, they get to decide what they work on and nobody can tell them otherwise. The best a user can do is post a begging letter in a bug tracker. It doesn't matter what the user thinks, even a majority of users, all they can do is ask. In commercial software it's the user putting bread on the developer's table. The user feeds and clothes the developer's children, and/or pays for their supply of mountain dew. If the user wants something, bye and large they get it, or at least they have a pretty solid chance of it more often than not. A vote for a feature speaks a lot more convincingly when it's backed up by a wallet. There's nothing wrong with open source or free and libre software. It's great, I love it, but a lot of it's proponents seem to think proprietary software is some sort of crime and genuinely don't understand why proprietary software dominates so completely in so many domains outside of IT infrastructure.
  - tomcooks 6y ago
    Good luck convincing a commercial software developer to apply the changes you want. It's rare that a company, commercial or not, changes software because of what customers want (marketing department koolaid doesn't apply). Developers know best, even when they don't, because they're the ones doing the actual work. But in the FOSS ecosystem you have: i) the freedom to do the changes yourself ii) the freedom to offer help with design, documentation, ideas iii) a public bug tracking and issues manager Let me know when you can do this commercially. On a tangent: it is indeed a crime to use commercial software when there are libre alternatives; every use moves the needle one tick deeper towards Eternal September
    - simonh 6y ago
collyw 6y ago
I think the things you are complaining about are more personal preferences and being accustomed to Mac / Windows system. > why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu? > how about the fact that you can't get full file paths shown in the default file manager, Is it any worse than needing to find the setting to display file extension in windows? I am on Cinnamon desktop as it's a bit old school and predictable (for people who have been around since windows 98). I right click a file and I have an option to create a link. And my default file manager shows the full file path in the address bar . So I don't think it's a Linux problem rather than a Gnome 3 problem. But I am sure plenty of people don't mind Gnome 3 (everyone else at my work used the standard Ubuntu desktop.
cipherboy 6y ago
>
Maken 6y ago
>why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu? Blame GNOME 3. After a decade it's still lacking polish everywhere. The day Canonical decided to drop the ball on Unity was a sad day.

pjc50 6y ago

There's a third category: "enterprise" software, where the people doing the purchasing are completely disconnected from the people using it and the developers. This results in appalling UI disasters like Lotus Notes.

jonathankoren 6y ago
There used to be meme among my friends that we’d express how much a piece of enterprise software sucked by how expensive we thought it cost. For example, “Wow, this sucks. This must cost $500k a year.” It was scary how close we got to some published prices.

pbasista 6y ago

> proprietary software is the only option What do you mean by "proprietary" in this context? I believe that the availability of the software's source code to its users is unrelated to the fact of whether the actual development of such software is paid or not. Moreover, free and open source software (free as in "freedom", not necessarily free as in "free beer"), makes it generally simpler for the regular users to provide input regarding the features they need changed. So, in a way, it also helps to achieve the goal you describe: > The best way to ensure people pay close attention to those last areas of fit and finish...

asoneth 6y ago
> simpler for the regular users to provide input regarding the features they need changed Don't get me wrong, a good interface needs to take user feedback into account. But trying to accommodate the union of all features needed by all users is a recipe for madness. Somewhere you need an engineer, PM, designer, CxO, or someone who can make judgement calls and decide which user needs are more important than others.
simonh 6y ago
>I believe that the availability of the software's source code to its users is unrelated to the fact of whether the actual development of such software is paid or not. This is true, and I've seen that happen too, one of the companies I worked with would sell source licenses to customers, and as I understand it this was very common in the mainframe business going way back. The software vendor retained rights to sell and distribute the software though, that's what I mean by proprietary. I've seen these arguments for open source and libre software before many times, but there's a huge discontinuity between the theory and what actually happens in reality. In the real world there are tens of thousands of small and large software houses producing niche software for diverse use cases for businesses all over the world. Hundreds of niche engineering design, test and optimisation applications, B2B services, audio and video tools, chemical engineering tools, automation and industrial control systems, booking and billing systems, here are an almost infinite variety. Most of them are only known to people actually in these niche specialisms. In that world customers paying for customisations is stock in trade, it's entirely normal. In fact the company I'm at right now is paying the vendor for customisations to our incident and change management ticketing system. In comparison open source, outside nerdy IT oriented tech projects, might as well not exist. It's minuscule. Barely even a footnote.