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I use Calibre and it's great to see how far it has come. That said, let's not pretend it's all kittens and rainbows. It has all the problems people associate w

I use Calibre and it's great to see how far it has come. That said, let's not pretend it's all kittens and rainbows. It has all the problems people associate with GUI based FOSS. The UI is pretty terrible. It looks and feels like FOSS from seven years ago. It has about a million prefs / settings buried many layers down in a very confusing series of prefs dialogs. It shouldn't take you 3 hours to configure an ebook reader. It should just come with sane settings out of the box. As someone else remarked the UI often feels slow / sluggish. The app is 253MB (OS X version)! Is it just me or is that crazy?

shadowmint 13y ago
The true culprit for the massive size is Qt. It weighs in at ~23Mb for the python library, and about 100Mb for the bundled framework. All in all python code and libraries accounts for 73Mb, and bundled frameworks for 143Mb. That's the price you pay for writing an app with a UI in python.
- crististm 13y ago
  You say that as if it's his fault. He did not write the app - he's just using it.
  - __david__ 13y ago
    > You say that as if it's his fault. I don't think he was. I read that as the unspecific "you", with the meaning being equivalent to "That's the price one pays for writing an app with a UI in python."
sbarre 13y ago
The beauty of FOSS is you can take your criticism and turn it into action by contributing to make it better!
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  I'm not sure if this was sarcasm, or simple platitudes about open source, but this whole "contribute to make it better" is really a hit-and-miss affair. Best case scenario is that the code is clear, easy to update the UI, and the only reason it hasn't been done is because no one cares about the UI. That seems incredibly unlikely (the caring part - someone built it, maintains it, and will probably be upset if you "fix" it). On other projects, you first get a huge range of code complexity/quality, making contributing perhaps simply not feasible. After that, you can run into all sorts of stuff. My real world experience: "We won't take this because we use linked lists, not hashtables, because <original maintainer> likes linked lists." "We won't fix this broken XML parser because this code is fast." "Why did you fork and create those modules without telling us? That's really rude to all of us that spent so much time on this." (In response to an announcement a company had ported a project to another platform, and wanted feedback and was going to open all their work. They ended up just keeping it internally.) And some of that is on projects that are actually very friendly otherwise and to which I've contributed large and successful pieces. (To those involved if you happen to read this: you already know my criticisms ;)). In short, the whole "hey it's open so go fix it" is a rather trite simplification. It does not reflect the usual or even possible experience for the majority of users.
  - sbarre 13y ago
    It wasn't really sarcastic, but it was my intention to point out that, unlike closed source, if your complaint about open source software UI means that much to you, you do have the option of actually putting your time where your mouth is, and helping solve the problem that is bothering you. Your personal anecdotes are less about the software being open source and perhaps more about a lack of coordination with the existing developers. Every time I've contributed to an OSS project, I've opened a dialogue with the existing team ahead of time and had my ideas vetted before I put in a bunch of work. That or (now in the Github era) they were tiny/trivial patches where I wouldn't mind if my pull requests get ignored. With closed source software that has shitty UI (and there's lots of that too), you have to just live with it...
- driverdan 13y ago
jordigh 13y ago
> The app is 253MB (OS X version)! Is it just me or is that crazy? The bulk of that is Qt. If your OS had a standard Qt library thaf every application that uses Qt could reuse, Calibre wouldn't have to distribute Qt itself. But since on McOS10 the preferred method is to distribute every depedency over and over again in each app that needs that dependency, you end up with that bloat. The common retort is, "253 MB? We have terabytes of storage now! Who cares about a few extra megabytes here and there."
reefab 13y ago
Calibre is indeed my go to example when I need to demonstrate horrible FOSS GUI.
DanBC 13y ago
There are a bunch of uderlying scripts. These are great. The rest of it - the UI, the workflow, the community - these are all horrible.

shadowmint 13y ago

The true culprit for the massive size is Qt. It weighs in at ~23Mb for the python library, and about 100Mb for the bundled framework. All in all python code and libraries accounts for 73Mb, and bundled frameworks for 143Mb. That's the price you pay for writing an app with a UI in python.

crististm 13y ago
You say that as if it's his fault. He did not write the app - he's just using it.
- __david__ 13y ago
  > You say that as if it's his fault. I don't think he was. I read that as the unspecific "you", with the meaning being equivalent to "That's the price one pays for writing an app with a UI in python."

sbarre 13y ago

The beauty of FOSS is you can take your criticism and turn it into action by contributing to make it better!

MichaelGG 13y ago
I'm not sure if this was sarcasm, or simple platitudes about open source, but this whole "contribute to make it better" is really a hit-and-miss affair. Best case scenario is that the code is clear, easy to update the UI, and the only reason it hasn't been done is because no one cares about the UI. That seems incredibly unlikely (the caring part - someone built it, maintains it, and will probably be upset if you "fix" it). On other projects, you first get a huge range of code complexity/quality, making contributing perhaps simply not feasible. After that, you can run into all sorts of stuff. My real world experience: "We won't take this because we use linked lists, not hashtables, because <original maintainer> likes linked lists." "We won't fix this broken XML parser because this code is fast." "Why did you fork and create those modules without telling us? That's really rude to all of us that spent so much time on this." (In response to an announcement a company had ported a project to another platform, and wanted feedback and was going to open all their work. They ended up just keeping it internally.) And some of that is on projects that are actually very friendly otherwise and to which I've contributed large and successful pieces. (To those involved if you happen to read this: you already know my criticisms ;)). In short, the whole "hey it's open so go fix it" is a rather trite simplification. It does not reflect the usual or even possible experience for the majority of users.
- sbarre 13y ago
  It wasn't really sarcastic, but it was my intention to point out that, unlike closed source, if your complaint about open source software UI means that much to you, you do have the option of actually putting your time where your mouth is, and helping solve the problem that is bothering you. Your personal anecdotes are less about the software being open source and perhaps more about a lack of coordination with the existing developers. Every time I've contributed to an OSS project, I've opened a dialogue with the existing team ahead of time and had my ideas vetted before I put in a bunch of work. That or (now in the Github era) they were tiny/trivial patches where I wouldn't mind if my pull requests get ignored. With closed source software that has shitty UI (and there's lots of that too), you have to just live with it...
driverdan 13y ago

jordigh 13y ago

> The app is 253MB (OS X version)! Is it just me or is that crazy? The bulk of that is Qt. If your OS had a standard Qt library thaf every application that uses Qt could reuse, Calibre wouldn't have to distribute Qt itself. But since on McOS10 the preferred method is to distribute every depedency over and over again in each app that needs that dependency, you end up with that bloat. The common retort is, "253 MB? We have terabytes of storage now! Who cares about a few extra megabytes here and there."

reefab 13y ago

Calibre is indeed my go to example when I need to demonstrate horrible FOSS GUI.

DanBC 13y ago

There are a bunch of uderlying scripts. These are great. The rest of it - the UI, the workflow, the community - these are all horrible.