5 ms·

It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough, it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it

by crote 9mo ago

It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough, it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free. But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out. So most FLOSS software gets stuck in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario, where it has enough features to technically be usable but it is painful enough to use that no professional would ever adopt it. Blender got out of it. I really hope more projects will follow their example.

presto8 9mo ago
> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who [...] are awful at UX Doesn't UX depend on the target user and product? To take vi or emacs as examples, they have incredibly steep learning curves, but I think many of their users would consider their UXes to be very good. The hard UX challenge is making a product that can satisfy novice users and power users at the same time. Here I agree that developers most likely have a tendency to develop for their own tastes. IMO, products like Outlook used to good at satisfying most people out-of-the-box, but have become less good with recent releases.
Jedd 9mo ago
> but are awful at UX This is such a weird trope. For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
- xboxnolifes 9mo ago
  Usually being compared with their non-OOS alternatives, not random enterprise org software.
- bitwize 9mo ago
  Getting good UX requires professional designers, extensive human testing, and knowledge of human psychology—things historically in short supply among the OSS geek set. In the 1980s Apple ran a human factors lab that spent thousands of hours determining which interface features were the easiest to use and most efficient for many common computing tasks. This is why classic Mac OS is still the gold standard for UX. Even Mac OS X started making compromises to accommodate techie trends, rather than keeping the focus on the average user. Because much proprietary software has garbo UX, that doesn't make the OSS UX situation not garbo.
- cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
  I think you misread and assumed this was a comparison to something else. It’s not.
- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  Those products likely have UI / UX people behind how they look, feel and behave. ;) Except maybe Jira, Jiras always been the Excel of ticketing.
- high_na_euv 9mo ago
  Teams are decent, wdym? Inb4: I've used ventrilo,team speak, mumble, discord, Skype.
  - dfxm12 9mo ago
    It looks like you only use a tiny fraction of Teams' functionality. I agree, there's little to complain about when using it for IM/voice/video calls. When you start using it for other things, especially the enterprise features, it is bad. It is a resource hog, handles navigation poorly, has poor default settings, finding installed apps can be tough, etc.
    - phatskat 9mo ago
      > handles navigation poorly My current pet peeve: I’m often going back to the previous week on Monday to fill out my time sheet. So, I open the chat for a meeting last week to see how long it took, fill it out, and hit the calendar icon in teams and I’m back on the current week. It’s a painful UX flow that I’ve now built in to my brain, so help me god if they fix it. Note that teams does include a “back” button, and also note that it doesn’t give a flip about state - it knows you were just at the calendar but doesn’t care where, so you’re back on the current week
- bzzzt 9mo ago
  > This is such a weird trope. No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.
  - savolai 9mo ago
    Gimp may be a bitnof a bad example nowadays? Of course depends on your habits and standards.
    - TheBicPen 9mo ago
      The best way to draw a circle in gimp is still the awkward select -> foreground fill workflow. At this point this example is beating a dead horse, but the horse shall continue to be beaten until a proper ellipse tool is added.
      - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
        I select, delete, flood fill. Three steps, but afaik it's quicker.
      - HappMacDonald 9mo ago
        Instructions unclear. I've kidnapped the GIMP and Inkscape teams and forced them to blend their work into one product. It now has an ellipse tool, but finding it among the toolbars and menus is left as an exercise for the reader
  - Moomoomoo309 9mo ago
    Gimp's single window mode was made the default years ago now, so that's not a great example anymore - there's scientific software that uses that paradigm that might work better, but most of that isn't OSS. Also, Libreoffice being slow and having bad font rendering seems pretty inline with Word nowadays...
- savolai 9mo ago
  These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question. Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint. An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply depends on who we are designing for. As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers. Disclaimer: did my master’s thesis on OSS UX.
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    >As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers. Game dev here. Play tests are excruciatingly painful. Spend some time showing off a game and you can see why so much ux these days are "boring" and samey. Deviating off the beaten road takes so much extra polish compared to seeing how competition controls work and copying that.
  - savolai 9mo ago
    Shameless plug: User Experience Design in Open Source: Inviting the Users https://savolai.net/ux/user-experience-design-in-open-source-inviting-the-users/ https://savolai.net/ux/user-experience-design-in-open-source... Product & framework thinkers: Case studies. https://savolai.net/ux/product-and-framework-thinkers-when-developers-and-uxers-dont-get-each-other/ https://savolai.net/ux/product-and-framework-thinkers-when-d...
    - phatskat 9mo ago
      I’m definitely going to read those, but even without doing so “inviting the users” as a concept carries a lot of potential. We were tasked to rewrite a very old windows app for backend grocery store sales in a web/Laravel/Vue application, and product spent _months_ if not longer sitting with sales reps, watching them use the old tool, and asking them what they would want to see - how does it work? Can it be more efficient? What do you dread most when using this? The end result was a real pleasure both to write and to use.
- throwa356262 9mo ago
  Actually, I like Microsoft Teams. I know this is controversial but I prefer teams to zoom and slack.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
  Lots of that is momentum and politicking. Or the result of decades of concerted effort to associate your product with it's niche, from education to industry, like Adobe
- pdpi 9mo ago
  "Bad" comes in many shapes and sizes. Specifically, "technically competent person implementing a thing designed by a technically incompetent person" is remarkably different from "technically incompetent person implementing a thing designed by a technically competent person". The way this plays out in practice is that those products you listed can hire actual UX designers, but many product decisions are made by people focusing on business concerns rather than product concerns, so you have competent people implementing designs by incompetent people. Inversely, because open source software is usually built by people trying to scratch their own itches, they those people actually understand what the product should be, but, because they're usually software engineers instead of UX designers, they're typically incompetent at UX design. So you have incompetent people (devs with their UX design hat on) implementing designs by competent people (those same devs, with their "scratch my own itch" product owner hat on)
- brailsafe 9mo ago
  > microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce Nobody wants to use those products either; they just exist because their default at a certain scale, or they're effectively free because they're included in your existing MS license. For GIMP the comparison would be either Adobe stuff or what used to be Affinity products. Libreoffice is now competing maybe with MS Word but probably more often Google Docs or Markdown editors. Old blender used to have a very technical UI; a cacophony of dropdowns and small text that functioned but was quite overwhelming. Meanwhile things like SketchUp became popular because they weren't as powerful necessarily, but were very welcoming, and that's hard to do with a complex offering.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  >it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims. Relatively good UX. Because Microsoft, Salesforce, etc. Have full time teams of designers in tow. For historical reasons it's harder to get said designers to work on FLOSS.
- riddlemethat 9mo ago
  Microsoft Teams was bad, so they rebuilt it and somehow made it worse. Then they decided to do the same with other apps, like Notepad. I switched to Ubuntu on my computer this week. Linux administration is not something I want to spend time on, but LLMs are able to help me debug why my password manager can't talk to my browser and write shell scripts to fix it... I'm able to focus on work and be done with the Microslop.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
kiba 9mo ago
We should consider public funding for open source projects. Creating something for the benefit of humanity is great and all but ultimately, programmers need to eat.
- throwaway85825 9mo ago
  The problem is knowing what to fund. It's easier if the users would pay. Which is doable for commercial use.
- wang_li 9mo ago
  To paraphrase a quote from long ago: "Public funding doesn't get you great coders, it gets you coders who are great at filling out government forms." Getting paid to deliver a software product that someone wants advances humanity. Getting paid to make your own personal project provides jobs for politician's cousins.
bena 9mo ago
I think it's an issue of "what matters". FLOSS software is often made people who are interested in the thing being done. The UI to do it is something that can be fixed "later". But later is always later. There's always another feature to implement before you can sit down and really fix that UI.
- panarchy 9mo ago
  And then by the time they do get around to fixing the UI it seems the codebase is horribly bloated and littered with tech debt and now updating the UI would basically require a whole application rewrite. Which I have seen happen and work, but I also swear I've seen where teams spread themselves thin trying to make an updated UI version concurrently with their main branch only for the updated UI version to fall so far behind on features (or get worked on so rarely) that they abandoned it to fix it later...
esafak 9mo ago
> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out. That is what product managers are for; someone to lead the product's direction, ensure quality control, and to instill taste. That requires being able to say when a feature is poorly implemented or outright bad and unnecessary -- it's not always just kinks. The problem is that this collides with the collaborative ethos of open source software. But when it's not done it's the users who suffer.
- assaddayinh 9mo ago
  In foss the selector is the merging maintainer. Which is more a gardener than an architect. You need somebody with a vision for a park.
cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
Part of what makes this so much of an issue is that in FOSS projects, the things that get worked on tend to either be low-hanging fruit and/or a personal peeve of one of the engineers. Everything else is at high risk of falling through the cracks and being ignored or forgotten. It’s kind of the open source counterpart of how in proprietary software, some types of bugs tend to get perpetually kicked down the road to make room for development of features that are perceived to be of higher likelihood of increasing revenue. In theory, FOSS projects have more agency to correct this class of problem than their proprietary analogues do because they’re not subject to the same economic pressures. This however requires leadership with a strong vision for the project and soft skills to unify and motivate contributors to work on not-so-sexy bits, and this type of individual is rare in that space.
socalgal2 9mo ago
For Blender I agree. I don't feel like gIMP ever hit that moment. Blender appears to be serious competitor to 3DSMax/Maya/Houdini etc. gIMP does not appear to be a serious competitor to Photoshop even after they shipped v3
- hju22_-3 9mo ago
  Yes, because it isn't. What version they pump out has nothing to do with viability. It still lacks much of the feature set and functionally of Photoshop, enough so that it's just not a valid comparison, let alone a valid alternative. Like, I've seen people comparing Krita as the better alternative to GIMP, which isn't even designed to fill the same need. But the fact that those comparisons have even occurred should tell you enough about the state of GIMP.
somat 9mo ago
I think the blender secret sauce is their artistic projects. Put a bunch of artists in the same room as the developers and have them produce a work. It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product. The GIMP project would probably be better off if they invested in a couple of rounds of this. I think blender always had an amazing, ahead of it's time interface. It did lean overly hard on knowing the hot keys, probably a product of it being an in house tool but the opensource versions have worn a lot of those rough edges off(menus to provide clues) while keeping that same super smooth workflow core.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  >It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product. Devs stil run the show, and it can be a huge effort to convince them to change course on something. People were complaining about the mouse controls for years and it took until 2.8 to finally convince the org otherwise to adapt a more typical workflow. It's a rough balance because the other extreme is artists making unrealistic demands based on how the system is architected (or worse, the deceptively simole: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/). So I don't really have a solution.

by crote 9mo ago

presto8 9mo ago

> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who [...] are awful at UX Doesn't UX depend on the target user and product? To take vi or emacs as examples, they have incredibly steep learning curves, but I think many of their users would consider their UXes to be very good. The hard UX challenge is making a product that can satisfy novice users and power users at the same time. Here I agree that developers most likely have a tendency to develop for their own tastes. IMO, products like Outlook used to good at satisfying most people out-of-the-box, but have become less good with recent releases.

Jedd 9mo ago

> but are awful at UX This is such a weird trope. For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.

xboxnolifes 9mo ago
Usually being compared with their non-OOS alternatives, not random enterprise org software.
bitwize 9mo ago
Getting good UX requires professional designers, extensive human testing, and knowledge of human psychology—things historically in short supply among the OSS geek set. In the 1980s Apple ran a human factors lab that spent thousands of hours determining which interface features were the easiest to use and most efficient for many common computing tasks. This is why classic Mac OS is still the gold standard for UX. Even Mac OS X started making compromises to accommodate techie trends, rather than keeping the focus on the average user. Because much proprietary software has garbo UX, that doesn't make the OSS UX situation not garbo.
cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
I think you misread and assumed this was a comparison to something else. It’s not.
giancarlostoro 9mo ago
Those products likely have UI / UX people behind how they look, feel and behave. ;) Except maybe Jira, Jiras always been the Excel of ticketing.
high_na_euv 9mo ago
Teams are decent, wdym? Inb4: I've used ventrilo,team speak, mumble, discord, Skype.
- dfxm12 9mo ago
  It looks like you only use a tiny fraction of Teams' functionality. I agree, there's little to complain about when using it for IM/voice/video calls. When you start using it for other things, especially the enterprise features, it is bad. It is a resource hog, handles navigation poorly, has poor default settings, finding installed apps can be tough, etc.
  - phatskat 9mo ago
    > handles navigation poorly My current pet peeve: I’m often going back to the previous week on Monday to fill out my time sheet. So, I open the chat for a meeting last week to see how long it took, fill it out, and hit the calendar icon in teams and I’m back on the current week. It’s a painful UX flow that I’ve now built in to my brain, so help me god if they fix it. Note that teams does include a “back” button, and also note that it doesn’t give a flip about state - it knows you were just at the calendar but doesn’t care where, so you’re back on the current week
bzzzt 9mo ago
> This is such a weird trope. No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.
- savolai 9mo ago
  Gimp may be a bitnof a bad example nowadays? Of course depends on your habits and standards.
  - TheBicPen 9mo ago
    The best way to draw a circle in gimp is still the awkward select -> foreground fill workflow. At this point this example is beating a dead horse, but the horse shall continue to be beaten until a proper ellipse tool is added.
    - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
      I select, delete, flood fill. Three steps, but afaik it's quicker.
    - HappMacDonald 9mo ago
      Instructions unclear. I've kidnapped the GIMP and Inkscape teams and forced them to blend their work into one product. It now has an ellipse tool, but finding it among the toolbars and menus is left as an exercise for the reader
- Moomoomoo309 9mo ago
  Gimp's single window mode was made the default years ago now, so that's not a great example anymore - there's scientific software that uses that paradigm that might work better, but most of that isn't OSS. Also, Libreoffice being slow and having bad font rendering seems pretty inline with Word nowadays...
savolai 9mo ago
These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question. Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint. An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply depends on who we are designing for. As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers. Disclaimer: did my master’s thesis on OSS UX.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  >As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers. Game dev here. Play tests are excruciatingly painful. Spend some time showing off a game and you can see why so much ux these days are "boring" and samey. Deviating off the beaten road takes so much extra polish compared to seeing how competition controls work and copying that.
- savolai 9mo ago
  Shameless plug: User Experience Design in Open Source: Inviting the Users https://savolai.net/ux/user-experience-design-in-open-source-inviting-the-users/ https://savolai.net/ux/user-experience-design-in-open-source... Product & framework thinkers: Case studies. https://savolai.net/ux/product-and-framework-thinkers-when-developers-and-uxers-dont-get-each-other/ https://savolai.net/ux/product-and-framework-thinkers-when-d...
  - phatskat 9mo ago
    I’m definitely going to read those, but even without doing so “inviting the users” as a concept carries a lot of potential. We were tasked to rewrite a very old windows app for backend grocery store sales in a web/Laravel/Vue application, and product spent _months_ if not longer sitting with sales reps, watching them use the old tool, and asking them what they would want to see - how does it work? Can it be more efficient? What do you dread most when using this? The end result was a real pleasure both to write and to use.
throwa356262 9mo ago
Actually, I like Microsoft Teams. I know this is controversial but I prefer teams to zoom and slack.
b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
Lots of that is momentum and politicking. Or the result of decades of concerted effort to associate your product with it's niche, from education to industry, like Adobe
pdpi 9mo ago
"Bad" comes in many shapes and sizes. Specifically, "technically competent person implementing a thing designed by a technically incompetent person" is remarkably different from "technically incompetent person implementing a thing designed by a technically competent person". The way this plays out in practice is that those products you listed can hire actual UX designers, but many product decisions are made by people focusing on business concerns rather than product concerns, so you have competent people implementing designs by incompetent people. Inversely, because open source software is usually built by people trying to scratch their own itches, they those people actually understand what the product should be, but, because they're usually software engineers instead of UX designers, they're typically incompetent at UX design. So you have incompetent people (devs with their UX design hat on) implementing designs by competent people (those same devs, with their "scratch my own itch" product owner hat on)
brailsafe 9mo ago
> microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce Nobody wants to use those products either; they just exist because their default at a certain scale, or they're effectively free because they're included in your existing MS license. For GIMP the comparison would be either Adobe stuff or what used to be Affinity products. Libreoffice is now competing maybe with MS Word but probably more often Google Docs or Markdown editors. Old blender used to have a very technical UI; a cacophony of dropdowns and small text that functioned but was quite overwhelming. Meanwhile things like SketchUp became popular because they weren't as powerful necessarily, but were very welcoming, and that's hard to do with a complex offering.
johnnyanmac 9mo ago
>it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims. Relatively good UX. Because Microsoft, Salesforce, etc. Have full time teams of designers in tow. For historical reasons it's harder to get said designers to work on FLOSS.
riddlemethat 9mo ago
Microsoft Teams was bad, so they rebuilt it and somehow made it worse. Then they decided to do the same with other apps, like Notepad. I switched to Ubuntu on my computer this week. Linux administration is not something I want to spend time on, but LLMs are able to help me debug why my password manager can't talk to my browser and write shell scripts to fix it... I'm able to focus on work and be done with the Microslop.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

kiba 9mo ago

We should consider public funding for open source projects. Creating something for the benefit of humanity is great and all but ultimately, programmers need to eat.

throwaway85825 9mo ago
The problem is knowing what to fund. It's easier if the users would pay. Which is doable for commercial use.
wang_li 9mo ago
To paraphrase a quote from long ago: "Public funding doesn't get you great coders, it gets you coders who are great at filling out government forms." Getting paid to deliver a software product that someone wants advances humanity. Getting paid to make your own personal project provides jobs for politician's cousins.

bena 9mo ago

I think it's an issue of "what matters". FLOSS software is often made people who are interested in the thing being done. The UI to do it is something that can be fixed "later". But later is always later. There's always another feature to implement before you can sit down and really fix that UI.

panarchy 9mo ago
And then by the time they do get around to fixing the UI it seems the codebase is horribly bloated and littered with tech debt and now updating the UI would basically require a whole application rewrite. Which I have seen happen and work, but I also swear I've seen where teams spread themselves thin trying to make an updated UI version concurrently with their main branch only for the updated UI version to fall so far behind on features (or get worked on so rarely) that they abandoned it to fix it later...

esafak 9mo ago

> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out. That is what product managers are for; someone to lead the product's direction, ensure quality control, and to instill taste. That requires being able to say when a feature is poorly implemented or outright bad and unnecessary -- it's not always just kinks. The problem is that this collides with the collaborative ethos of open source software. But when it's not done it's the users who suffer.

assaddayinh 9mo ago
In foss the selector is the merging maintainer. Which is more a gardener than an architect. You need somebody with a vision for a park.

cosmic_cheese 9mo ago

Part of what makes this so much of an issue is that in FOSS projects, the things that get worked on tend to either be low-hanging fruit and/or a personal peeve of one of the engineers. Everything else is at high risk of falling through the cracks and being ignored or forgotten. It’s kind of the open source counterpart of how in proprietary software, some types of bugs tend to get perpetually kicked down the road to make room for development of features that are perceived to be of higher likelihood of increasing revenue. In theory, FOSS projects have more agency to correct this class of problem than their proprietary analogues do because they’re not subject to the same economic pressures. This however requires leadership with a strong vision for the project and soft skills to unify and motivate contributors to work on not-so-sexy bits, and this type of individual is rare in that space.

socalgal2 9mo ago

For Blender I agree. I don't feel like gIMP ever hit that moment. Blender appears to be serious competitor to 3DSMax/Maya/Houdini etc. gIMP does not appear to be a serious competitor to Photoshop even after they shipped v3

hju22_-3 9mo ago
Yes, because it isn't. What version they pump out has nothing to do with viability. It still lacks much of the feature set and functionally of Photoshop, enough so that it's just not a valid comparison, let alone a valid alternative. Like, I've seen people comparing Krita as the better alternative to GIMP, which isn't even designed to fill the same need. But the fact that those comparisons have even occurred should tell you enough about the state of GIMP.

somat 9mo ago

I think the blender secret sauce is their artistic projects. Put a bunch of artists in the same room as the developers and have them produce a work. It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product. The GIMP project would probably be better off if they invested in a couple of rounds of this. I think blender always had an amazing, ahead of it's time interface. It did lean overly hard on knowing the hot keys, probably a product of it being an in house tool but the opensource versions have worn a lot of those rough edges off(menus to provide clues) while keeping that same super smooth workflow core.

johnnyanmac 9mo ago
>It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product. Devs stil run the show, and it can be a huge effort to convince them to change course on something. People were complaining about the mouse controls for years and it took until 2.8 to finally convince the org otherwise to adapt a more typical workflow. It's a rough balance because the other extreme is artists making unrealistic demands based on how the system is architected (or worse, the deceptively simole: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/). So I don't really have a solution.