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I largely nodded along with the post, I think it raised a lot of valid issues about the state of non-profit software Yet, I think one big reason why non-profit

by Yaina 5y ago

I largely nodded along with the post, I think it raised a lot of valid issues about the state of non-profit software Yet, I think one big reason why non-profit solutions are so unpopular is not primarily about marking, but about the terrible, truly terrible UX that most non-profit projects have. As far is I can tell this has (mostly) nothing to do with constrained resources and just with the extremely technical perspectives of the maintainers. Element is a laggy Discord clone. Signal is years behind other messengers in terms of features and general UI quality, Thunderbird is stock in the early 2000s, same as VLC, and I don't know a lot of serious artists that are using GIMP. So, even though this is surely not the only reason why open source projects are not widely used, I think it's a huge contributing factor. There are shining example s though, like Blender, Godot or Mastodon, that are truly open source and have a great set of features paired with nice UX and I don't think they're doing too badly :)

Quiark 5y ago
What's wrong with VLC or Thunderbird? Nothing, they got replaced by online services which provide storage/content and not just the UI (usually the UI feature set of online services is actually inferior).
alexwennerberg 5y ago
> As far is I can tell this has (mostly) nothing to do with constrained resources and just with the extremely technical perspectives of the maintainers. Discord, for example, has 450 full-time employees and is valued at $7 billion. I simply don't see how small non-profit teams, many of which are run primarily by volunteer labor, can compete with that in terms of UX. How many full-time designers or UX folks are working on GIMP or VLC?
zzo38computer 5y ago
Which UX is good can be a matter of opinion, some people may prefer different programs. I use a IRC client which doesn't do a lot more than display raw IRC protocol messages with syntax highlighting and a few other things (such as shortcuts, macros, filters, auto-pong, etc), and I think it is better than any web chat that I have seen (profit or not), but I am strange, anyways. But, I am the kind of guy who use Heirloom-mailx for email (one thing it has is the ability to write an attachment to a pipe; most modern programs only support files and not pipes; a lot my own software is designed to import from and export to pipes instead of files, since I think that is more useful), who want to read the RFC before using the internet, and who learned Magic: the Gathering by reading the entire Comprehensive Rules before starting the game, and disliking USB, and preferring Plain TeX instead of LaTeX; which I think are the kind of things that most people hate. So, it is a matter of opinion, I suppose. It seems to be a lot of more modern programs seem to have worse UX, in my opinion (part of the problem is lack of documentation, too); not whether or not it is profit. At least in my experience, profit makes many things worse because they try to be mass-marketing and more trying to earn money, rather than being first the quality of the product. And also, they put too many fancy animations and stuff.

by Yaina 5y ago

Quiark 5y ago

What's wrong with VLC or Thunderbird? Nothing, they got replaced by online services which provide storage/content and not just the UI (usually the UI feature set of online services is actually inferior).

alexwennerberg 5y ago

> As far is I can tell this has (mostly) nothing to do with constrained resources and just with the extremely technical perspectives of the maintainers. Discord, for example, has 450 full-time employees and is valued at $7 billion. I simply don't see how small non-profit teams, many of which are run primarily by volunteer labor, can compete with that in terms of UX. How many full-time designers or UX folks are working on GIMP or VLC?

zzo38computer 5y ago

Which UX is good can be a matter of opinion, some people may prefer different programs. I use a IRC client which doesn't do a lot more than display raw IRC protocol messages with syntax highlighting and a few other things (such as shortcuts, macros, filters, auto-pong, etc), and I think it is better than any web chat that I have seen (profit or not), but I am strange, anyways. But, I am the kind of guy who use Heirloom-mailx for email (one thing it has is the ability to write an attachment to a pipe; most modern programs only support files and not pipes; a lot my own software is designed to import from and export to pipes instead of files, since I think that is more useful), who want to read the RFC before using the internet, and who learned Magic: the Gathering by reading the entire Comprehensive Rules before starting the game, and disliking USB, and preferring Plain TeX instead of LaTeX; which I think are the kind of things that most people hate. So, it is a matter of opinion, I suppose. It seems to be a lot of more modern programs seem to have worse UX, in my opinion (part of the problem is lack of documentation, too); not whether or not it is profit. At least in my experience, profit makes many things worse because they try to be mass-marketing and more trying to earn money, rather than being first the quality of the product. And also, they put too many fancy animations and stuff.