6 ms·

The One in Which I Say Open Source Software Sucks

78 points by JacobK 17y ago

davidw 17y ago
To be fair, people have been saying that for years, and slowly but surely, open source has been marching on. 10 years ago, no way, no how would Linux be even considered for desktop use. Now? A few people on this site have parents using it. Not there yet? Could be. It will be, though. One of the signs of a 'not good enough' disruptive innovation is that the rate of improvement of the new thing is greater than existing tech. Windows and Mac were both fairly usable 10 years ago, Linux not so much (for 'ordinary folks' - I was happily using Linux as my primary environment at work in 1997). Linux has improved by leaps and bounds, and will continue to do so. Will it ever surpass MacOS? Maybe not, but will it hit a 'good enough' level? Certainly. It already has for many things. At the last company I worked at in Italy, full time, we had everyone on Linux, including the administrative assistants and call center people.
- sethg 17y ago
  I think one reason Linux user interfaces have been catching up with Windows (if not Mac) is that for the past ten years or so, desktop-app usability has remained stagnant (or, in the case of MS Office, regressed). Twenty years ago, Apple and Microsoft had to convince non-geek consumers that personal computers were worth buying, and so they had an incentive to make their products as usable as possible (given the constraints of cost and technology). Now that consumers see personal computers as things that they have to use whether they like it or not, there's not as much incentive to use the UI. Instead, people shell out their own money (or, if they're lucky, their employers' money) to take "how to use Microsoft Office" classes.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    "Linux user interfaces have been catching up with Windows (if not Mac)" is a common misconception. I love the tabbed file system views in Gnome. It's much more comfortable than the Finder. Windows Explorer too is simply terrible. I have been using Windows at work and Gnome at home and can't even begin to decribe all the ways Windows is completely broken from a usability standpoint. People tolerate it because they know nothing different and/or are unwilling to learn. In many aspects, Gnome and KDE have already surpassed Windows and OSX.
    - gaius 17y ago
      Yes this is the Year of the Linux Desktop. smirk
ori_b 17y ago
Strangely enough, I'm using Linux precisely because proprietary software is painful to use. For example, searching for software with google to download it, trying to determine if the source is reliable, and clicking through a manual installer is way too tedious - it should be at my fingertips. Also, at least when compared to Windows (where everyone and his brother seems to feel the need for a custom and flashy toolkit, even within Microsoft), Linux apps have mostly standardized on look and feel. Very few people seem to feel the need to reinvent the GUI toolkit and make something that looks completely out of place on Linux (except for the proprietary vendors, like Google, who seem to be ignoring the established human interface guidelines and completely inventing their own look for Chrome) Finally, as a developer, being able to delve into the source of libraries when debugging is invaluable.
- IsaacSchlueter 17y ago
  It is this result of "good lazy" app developers that has helped move FOSS in the right direction, IMO. Aptitude and GTK are the best things to happen to Linux since Linus.
- bad_user 17y ago
  Having a central repository that handles version dependencies and upgrades ... is great. But let's be honest here: whenever a newer version of a software package is released, it can take months before it enters sid on Debian, or in Ubuntu, and these are the better-maintained distros. And if you want to distribute proprietary software, maintaining multiple packages for multiple distributions and multiple versions, is hell-like. And regarding interface guide lines, I do not agree that Linux apps have a standard. Quite the contrary.
  - psadauskas 17y ago
    But that's the philosophy of those distros such as Debian, Ubunutu and Fedora: Don't upgrade anything except security patches between releases. If you want the bleeding edge packages, you need to install it yourself from an add-on repo (once you set it up, its just as easy as `apt-get install newpkg`. Or, pick a rolling-release distro that caters more towards having the latest packages available, such as Gentoo or Arch.
rjurney 17y ago
To get great usability - you need paying users clamoring for it. To implement it, you need central control around a unifying cognitive model. Open source is bad at usability because FOSS projects are controlled by committees that can't even assign tasks, let alone create and enforce coherent cognitive models and elegant interfaces that express them. You could have good FOSS usability - if you had a central company driving the development. As in Firefox. It just hasn't happened many times so far, because people are willing to pay for good closed-source interfaces in most problem domains.
- bct 17y ago
  That's the conventional wisdom, but I'm not sure I believe it. It takes (much) longer for an app's usability to mature without some central arbiter, but "you need" it is far too strong a statement.
  - rjurney 17y ago
    Without a central arbiter, an app's usability never matures.
    - access_denied 17y ago
      Interesting. Could this central arbiter be a set of rules an principles, an algorythm? That would be a very complicated program, why not take a human mind? It's faster.
      - rjurney 17y ago
        It could be. But it has to be central, because the cognitive model must be cohesive. This is a productive line of thinking.
  - youngian 17y ago
    Exactly. Ten years ago a lot of people would have told you that you need central control of code and full-time work from paid developers in a central office with careful managerial oversight to build powerful software. And all those people, many of them "experts," were laughably wrong. I think the concept of designing for usability has just been slower to enter the FOSS world. Only now are open source projects starting to grapple with how you do interaction design on a open source project. But throwing up our hands and assuming it will never happen just because it doesn't always happen right now is silly. How about we start recruiting non-developers to open source projects to run simple usability tests and report on their findings? It's not that developers will never work on usability, it's just that it's a difficult and foreign field to most of us, so we avoid the issue altogether.
orblivion 17y ago
Firstly, open source does (or can easily) have one big usability advantage: installing things, assuming it's on a repository, is much easier. Or, at least, it's very close to there; I haven't asked a lay user how useful they find the "Add Application" menu in Gnome. But assuming it's not already done right, once it is, that's a huge advantage. Secondly, so we've admitted that non-company-backed open source projects can have good code, making for a good backend. So the economic model does work. What we need now is for more non-developers (UI designers, artists, etc) to join this movement. I think that it's slowly happening. Tech savvy ones would be more likely to join, and as it becomes more and more inviting I think the less savvy will join as well. I can't think of any specific reason this economic model applies to developers more than others, so I think that over time, UI will become good for the same reason the code is good.
- tjr 17y ago
  What economic model are you referring to?
  - orblivion 17y ago
    The electronic gift economy. People collaborating and working for free to produce electronic goods. The point of the article is that, so far, open source only works when there's a company behind it, and companies are structured the way they are, I would argue, because of their profit motive.
- CWuestefeld 17y ago
  I'm primarily a Windows user, having just recently installed Ubuntu onto a netbook. Obviously I'm carrying old habits and baggage, but from my point of view, finding and installing stuff in the repository is a nightmare. On one hand, I can see how putting it there makes a unified update system possible. But the system does nothing for me in helping me discover what I need. To learn of the existence of a tool, I still need to stumble across it from a user recommendation or web search. From there, in Windows I just download and install. But on the Linux platform, I get lost in all the various repositories available, each of which has multiple levels (I forget them specifically, but I remember something about "universal"?). And god forbid that the necessary repository isn't one of the standards (as I had to deal with when installing XBMC); finding and setting up the public keys is like root canal. The flip side of this, uninstalling software, I haven't figured out at all. It seems that doing so doesn't actually delete the deadwood, but I happened somewhere on a command line way to tell it to clean up. I remain confused about how to specify precisely which packages to uninstall. The way they're built into dependency blocks, with optional recommended pieces, on the installation side is great. But I don't see at all how to determine the root package of something I don't want anymore, so that all the children are removed as well. And I really don't get if or how it determines which shared, possibly optional packages, will stay or go. So I think that this is precisely what the OP is referring to. As a developer I can appreciate the benefits of the Linux repository system. But as a user of it, It's hideously unfriendly.
stonemetal 17y ago
Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising? If you are a graphic artist and don't give a rat's behonkus about computers do you really dig until you find the GIMP(and the continual slog for documentation and understanding) or do you read graphic artist monthly with big color Photo Shop ads, Photo Shop books on B&N's book shelves, and training courses. The choice is just about made for you, in their world Photo Shop exists the GIMP doesn't.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- access_denied 17y ago
  GIMP and Inkscape are not ready for prime-time. (And as always at this point: They lack proper support for CMYK, Fonts, Color-Management, Workflow in big publishing and printing shops.) Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS.
  - indiejade 17y ago
    Nah. It is possible to make professional-quality, shiny, colorful graphics with GIMP if you know what you're doing. Sure, installing the non-default fonts (that is, not having a one-button install method) and configuring everything is what prevents most people from adopting it. There are graphic designers who are graphic designers, and then there are web developers who are also graphic designers. Have a look at what some "designers" are getting paid on sites like crowdSPRING.com and 99designs.com and it's pretty obvious that graphic designers who don't know code are fairly easy to find. I think this has been why there's been such a backlash against the freelance sites by the brick-mortar "design only" firms.
    - teilo 17y ago
      You miss the point. The Gimp and Inkscape, as for as they go, are great tools - if you care about nothing but the Web. They are in no way, shape, or form, ready for the print production environment. Not even close.
xinsight 17y ago
As mentioned, OSS projects often lack the "unifying cognitive model". I've also found that with iphone apps, users expect a high level of polish on an app. (A little drop-shadow here, a little shine there, move that button 1-pixel to the right, etc.) It's tedious and fiddly work, and I only bother because I don't want to lose a sale. People often say about 80% of the app is interface - with the iphone, i'd say it's closer to 95%. If OSS projects were able to motivate developers to work on the boring stuff like graphics and layout, the apps would look a lot better and adoption on the desktop would certainly shoot up.
epe 17y ago
I know that one example does not a complete refutation make, but: http://adium.im/ http://adium.im/
bct 17y ago
Truly, this is a novel and intriguing opinion.
tptacek 17y ago
There's nothing in this blog post that's blatantly wrong. There's also nothing in it that's news. It's not written better than other sources that have made the same point, which sources include several famous blog posts from usability and UI experts. The author isn't a usability or UI expert. In fact, I'm not sure who he is.
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  If he's making the same point as usability and UI experts, why does it matter who he is?
  - tptacek 17y ago
    It wouldn't, if he had something novel to say, or an interesting or effective way of phrasing it.
  - gecko 17y ago
    Because I am secretly an axe murderer, and who in the end wants to hear an argument from an axe murderer, however valid they might be?
  - blasdel 17y ago
    Because he's not making any new points. The only way his post could be useful is if he was notable, making his agreement notable.
- fatdog789 17y ago
  At the very least, he's notable for taking all the competing arguments and putting them together into a single post that people have noticed, thereby becoming a potential reference point for future people who will make the exact same arguments.
frodwith 17y ago
At least for me, usability isn't the point of free software. I want my free software to be usable, yes, and usability should be a goal for the development teams, but the overriding benefit of free software is that it is free. It puts the power back in my hands as an end user. Even if I don't have the technical skills to make use of that freedom, the freedom is important. This is something that "closed-source" applications don't have. If Microsoft made Office free tomorrow and it were easier to use than OpenOffice (it is, though that isn't saying much), I'd use it. But Microsoft Office has vendor lock-in problems and platform compatibility issues, and I'm not free to make it better. If people value usability over freedom, that is their choice. I don't begrudge them the headaches of a different sort that they are incurring.
- ThomPete 17y ago
  I disagree. That software is free might be an excuse for why not waste time on the usability, but it sure ain't a good reason if you want more than developers to use it.
- veqon 17y ago
  The motherboard on my XP machine died and I dug out my old w2k machine and (amongst other things) I installed OpenOffice. I only use OO for word documents and spreadsheets but it has served my needs without problems. So why can't I convince anyone else to try it? My guess is that they know Microsoft Office, and they feel safer being in the same boat as everyone else. Any problem won't be their fault. The old FUD.
0xdefec8 17y ago
As a dude who just tried Ubuntu for the first time in 5 years to see how far they've come, but couldn't because the fucking liveCD didn't have a driver for my cdrom, this rings true. But for what it's worth, after a few grueling days getting the p.o.s. up and running, I was shocked to have all the UI fluff my macbook has, plus the infinite list of other great stuff that's inherent to Linux. The moral? Just shrinkwrap all OSS with a CS degree holding nerd who has a couple days of free time.
- sophacles 17y ago
  Wait, you're actually saying that: 1. Someone still makes non-standard cd-roms? 2. Someone else still buys them? After learning you are person #2, why would anyone ever trust any other judgement you make?
  - 0xdefec8 17y ago
    and therein lies the predictable attitude that will keep linux a distant 3rd on the desktop.
    - kl4m 17y ago
      and therein lies the predictable attitude that will keep linux a distant 3rd on the desktop. See what I did there?
    - krschultz 17y ago
      Linux users have no need to court people like you. We're not a business, market share is a meaningless metric. I don't care if 1% or 100% of the people using computers use Linux, what I care about is if there are enough people working on the projects to make it usable for ME. There are. People who complain about FOSS community's "attitude" should really check their own sense of entitlement. We are talking about you getting something FREE that costs hundreds of thousands of man hours to make. If it takes you more than one try to get it to install then think of that as the cost to enter instead of the $150 you pay Microsoft (incidentally Windows suffers similar problems on my home desktops SATA controller as you describe having under Linux, it is not a Linux thing it is a shitty hardware thing).
naz 17y ago
I think the main problem with Open Source application software is the lack of experience in the field the application deals with. Open source programming libraries and languages, webservers and browsers are all great because they are mainly programming problems, and open source developers are programmers. Things like the GIMP and Virtualdub try to deal with problems outside the field of programming, and don't have the knowledge, research or resources to develop something that people in those fields want. Usability is one of those fields but it isn't the heart of the problem.
- rottencupcakes 17y ago
  This is exactly the problem. What percent of graphic designers would use an app, find a bug, and report it, let alone wade through the code and fix it? On the other hand, an open source webserver or programming language, in which the user is a programmer by default, is much more likely to get fixed. And honestly, what is your average open source developer more interested in: GIMP or Apache?
yesimahuman 17y ago
I think a perfect example of Open Source thriving is IBM. They package open source software (Eclipse for RAD, Apache for IBM Apache), and sell support. It's not a clusterfuck, you just have business people who need to have support 24/7 from people with full time intimate knowledge of the product.
- tdonia 17y ago
  If you accept the premise from the post that minimizing support costs acts as an incentive to enhance usability, then i think there's an important factor you're touching on here. Since many open source organizations provide FOSS software and charge for support, they've got less of an incentive to provide easy to use software. Rather, their model is tuned to providing easy to support software.
ThomPete 17y ago
OOS doesn't suck it just needs more designers involved. I am a pretty experienced designer focusing on interface design and have tried a couple of times to get involved in these kinds of projects. But what often happens is that they coders don't really want to have designers involved before at the very end where needless to say the software suddenly dictates the experience. It's a perfectly solvable problem and have nothing to do with OSS as such but the same thing that hit many big corporate projects. You decide the platform before you decide on the product.
finger_pussy 17y ago
open source is crap, ain't it folks? It sucks the cum out of your dick and takes your money with you; so screw open source let's fucking give our money to the bastard at microsoft.
nl 17y ago
That's bullshit. The key problem isn't if an application is open source, or even it's usability - it's the incumbency problem. Name one general consumer application for windows which wasn't being used ~5 years ago - even if it is non open source. I can only think of Firefox, games, and maybe some IM client software. Even usability disasters (eg Vista) win huge numbers of users when they are the default choice. When new niches open up (eg, web applications), open source apps have proven to be just as usable as commercial apps. Eg Wikipedia and Wordpress.com are both in the top 10 sites world wide, and both are open source (ie, the apps themselves are open source, not just the infrastructure software).
jdm 17y ago
a more accurate headline might be "software sucks". it's not like most closed-source software is all that great either, e.g CS

78 points by JacobK 17y ago

To be fair, people have been saying that for years, and slowly but surely, open source has been marching on. 10 years ago, no way, no how would Linux be even considered for desktop use. Now? A few people on this site have parents using it. Not there yet? Could be. It will be, though. One of the signs of a 'not good enough' disruptive innovation is that the rate of improvement of the new thing is greater than existing tech. Windows and Mac were both fairly usable 10 years ago, Linux not so much (for 'ordinary folks' - I was happily using Linux as my primary environment at work in 1997). Linux has improved by leaps and bounds, and will continue to do so. Will it ever surpass MacOS? Maybe not, but will it hit a 'good enough' level? Certainly. It already has for many things. At the last company I worked at in Italy, full time, we had everyone on Linux, including the administrative assistants and call center people.

sethg 17y ago
I think one reason Linux user interfaces have been catching up with Windows (if not Mac) is that for the past ten years or so, desktop-app usability has remained stagnant (or, in the case of MS Office, regressed). Twenty years ago, Apple and Microsoft had to convince non-geek consumers that personal computers were worth buying, and so they had an incentive to make their products as usable as possible (given the constraints of cost and technology). Now that consumers see personal computers as things that they have to use whether they like it or not, there's not as much incentive to use the UI. Instead, people shell out their own money (or, if they're lucky, their employers' money) to take "how to use Microsoft Office" classes.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  "Linux user interfaces have been catching up with Windows (if not Mac)" is a common misconception. I love the tabbed file system views in Gnome. It's much more comfortable than the Finder. Windows Explorer too is simply terrible. I have been using Windows at work and Gnome at home and can't even begin to decribe all the ways Windows is completely broken from a usability standpoint. People tolerate it because they know nothing different and/or are unwilling to learn. In many aspects, Gnome and KDE have already surpassed Windows and OSX.
  - gaius 17y ago
    Yes this is the Year of the Linux Desktop. smirk

ori_b 17y ago

Strangely enough, I'm using Linux precisely because proprietary software is painful to use. For example, searching for software with google to download it, trying to determine if the source is reliable, and clicking through a manual installer is way too tedious - it should be at my fingertips. Also, at least when compared to Windows (where everyone and his brother seems to feel the need for a custom and flashy toolkit, even within Microsoft), Linux apps have mostly standardized on look and feel. Very few people seem to feel the need to reinvent the GUI toolkit and make something that looks completely out of place on Linux (except for the proprietary vendors, like Google, who seem to be ignoring the established human interface guidelines and completely inventing their own look for Chrome) Finally, as a developer, being able to delve into the source of libraries when debugging is invaluable.

IsaacSchlueter 17y ago
It is this result of "good lazy" app developers that has helped move FOSS in the right direction, IMO. Aptitude and GTK are the best things to happen to Linux since Linus.
bad_user 17y ago
Having a central repository that handles version dependencies and upgrades ... is great. But let's be honest here: whenever a newer version of a software package is released, it can take months before it enters sid on Debian, or in Ubuntu, and these are the better-maintained distros. And if you want to distribute proprietary software, maintaining multiple packages for multiple distributions and multiple versions, is hell-like. And regarding interface guide lines, I do not agree that Linux apps have a standard. Quite the contrary.
- psadauskas 17y ago
  But that's the philosophy of those distros such as Debian, Ubunutu and Fedora: Don't upgrade anything except security patches between releases. If you want the bleeding edge packages, you need to install it yourself from an add-on repo (once you set it up, its just as easy as `apt-get install newpkg`. Or, pick a rolling-release distro that caters more towards having the latest packages available, such as Gentoo or Arch.

rjurney 17y ago

To get great usability - you need paying users clamoring for it. To implement it, you need central control around a unifying cognitive model. Open source is bad at usability because FOSS projects are controlled by committees that can't even assign tasks, let alone create and enforce coherent cognitive models and elegant interfaces that express them. You could have good FOSS usability - if you had a central company driving the development. As in Firefox. It just hasn't happened many times so far, because people are willing to pay for good closed-source interfaces in most problem domains.

bct 17y ago
That's the conventional wisdom, but I'm not sure I believe it. It takes (much) longer for an app's usability to mature without some central arbiter, but "you need" it is far too strong a statement.
- rjurney 17y ago
  Without a central arbiter, an app's usability never matures.
  - access_denied 17y ago
    Interesting. Could this central arbiter be a set of rules an principles, an algorythm? That would be a very complicated program, why not take a human mind? It's faster.
    - rjurney 17y ago
      It could be. But it has to be central, because the cognitive model must be cohesive. This is a productive line of thinking.
- youngian 17y ago
  Exactly. Ten years ago a lot of people would have told you that you need central control of code and full-time work from paid developers in a central office with careful managerial oversight to build powerful software. And all those people, many of them "experts," were laughably wrong. I think the concept of designing for usability has just been slower to enter the FOSS world. Only now are open source projects starting to grapple with how you do interaction design on a open source project. But throwing up our hands and assuming it will never happen just because it doesn't always happen right now is silly. How about we start recruiting non-developers to open source projects to run simple usability tests and report on their findings? It's not that developers will never work on usability, it's just that it's a difficult and foreign field to most of us, so we avoid the issue altogether.

orblivion 17y ago

Firstly, open source does (or can easily) have one big usability advantage: installing things, assuming it's on a repository, is much easier. Or, at least, it's very close to there; I haven't asked a lay user how useful they find the "Add Application" menu in Gnome. But assuming it's not already done right, once it is, that's a huge advantage. Secondly, so we've admitted that non-company-backed open source projects can have good code, making for a good backend. So the economic model does work. What we need now is for more non-developers (UI designers, artists, etc) to join this movement. I think that it's slowly happening. Tech savvy ones would be more likely to join, and as it becomes more and more inviting I think the less savvy will join as well. I can't think of any specific reason this economic model applies to developers more than others, so I think that over time, UI will become good for the same reason the code is good.

tjr 17y ago
What economic model are you referring to?
- orblivion 17y ago
  The electronic gift economy. People collaborating and working for free to produce electronic goods. The point of the article is that, so far, open source only works when there's a company behind it, and companies are structured the way they are, I would argue, because of their profit motive.
CWuestefeld 17y ago
I'm primarily a Windows user, having just recently installed Ubuntu onto a netbook. Obviously I'm carrying old habits and baggage, but from my point of view, finding and installing stuff in the repository is a nightmare. On one hand, I can see how putting it there makes a unified update system possible. But the system does nothing for me in helping me discover what I need. To learn of the existence of a tool, I still need to stumble across it from a user recommendation or web search. From there, in Windows I just download and install. But on the Linux platform, I get lost in all the various repositories available, each of which has multiple levels (I forget them specifically, but I remember something about "universal"?). And god forbid that the necessary repository isn't one of the standards (as I had to deal with when installing XBMC); finding and setting up the public keys is like root canal. The flip side of this, uninstalling software, I haven't figured out at all. It seems that doing so doesn't actually delete the deadwood, but I happened somewhere on a command line way to tell it to clean up. I remain confused about how to specify precisely which packages to uninstall. The way they're built into dependency blocks, with optional recommended pieces, on the installation side is great. But I don't see at all how to determine the root package of something I don't want anymore, so that all the children are removed as well. And I really don't get if or how it determines which shared, possibly optional packages, will stay or go. So I think that this is precisely what the OP is referring to. As a developer I can appreciate the benefits of the Linux repository system. But as a user of it, It's hideously unfriendly.

stonemetal 17y ago

Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising? If you are a graphic artist and don't give a rat's behonkus about computers do you really dig until you find the GIMP(and the continual slog for documentation and understanding) or do you read graphic artist monthly with big color Photo Shop ads, Photo Shop books on B&N's book shelves, and training courses. The choice is just about made for you, in their world Photo Shop exists the GIMP doesn't.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
access_denied 17y ago
GIMP and Inkscape are not ready for prime-time. (And as always at this point: They lack proper support for CMYK, Fonts, Color-Management, Workflow in big publishing and printing shops.) Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS.
- indiejade 17y ago
  Nah. It is possible to make professional-quality, shiny, colorful graphics with GIMP if you know what you're doing. Sure, installing the non-default fonts (that is, not having a one-button install method) and configuring everything is what prevents most people from adopting it. There are graphic designers who are graphic designers, and then there are web developers who are also graphic designers. Have a look at what some "designers" are getting paid on sites like crowdSPRING.com and 99designs.com and it's pretty obvious that graphic designers who don't know code are fairly easy to find. I think this has been why there's been such a backlash against the freelance sites by the brick-mortar "design only" firms.
  - teilo 17y ago
    You miss the point. The Gimp and Inkscape, as for as they go, are great tools - if you care about nothing but the Web. They are in no way, shape, or form, ready for the print production environment. Not even close.

xinsight 17y ago

As mentioned, OSS projects often lack the "unifying cognitive model". I've also found that with iphone apps, users expect a high level of polish on an app. (A little drop-shadow here, a little shine there, move that button 1-pixel to the right, etc.) It's tedious and fiddly work, and I only bother because I don't want to lose a sale. People often say about 80% of the app is interface - with the iphone, i'd say it's closer to 95%. If OSS projects were able to motivate developers to work on the boring stuff like graphics and layout, the apps would look a lot better and adoption on the desktop would certainly shoot up.

epe 17y ago

I know that one example does not a complete refutation make, but: http://adium.im/ http://adium.im/

bct 17y ago

Truly, this is a novel and intriguing opinion.

tptacek 17y ago

There's nothing in this blog post that's blatantly wrong. There's also nothing in it that's news. It's not written better than other sources that have made the same point, which sources include several famous blog posts from usability and UI experts. The author isn't a usability or UI expert. In fact, I'm not sure who he is.

jodrellblank 17y ago
If he's making the same point as usability and UI experts, why does it matter who he is?
- tptacek 17y ago
  It wouldn't, if he had something novel to say, or an interesting or effective way of phrasing it.
- gecko 17y ago
  Because I am secretly an axe murderer, and who in the end wants to hear an argument from an axe murderer, however valid they might be?
- blasdel 17y ago
  Because he's not making any new points. The only way his post could be useful is if he was notable, making his agreement notable.
fatdog789 17y ago
At the very least, he's notable for taking all the competing arguments and putting them together into a single post that people have noticed, thereby becoming a potential reference point for future people who will make the exact same arguments.

frodwith 17y ago

At least for me, usability isn't the point of free software. I want my free software to be usable, yes, and usability should be a goal for the development teams, but the overriding benefit of free software is that it is free. It puts the power back in my hands as an end user. Even if I don't have the technical skills to make use of that freedom, the freedom is important. This is something that "closed-source" applications don't have. If Microsoft made Office free tomorrow and it were easier to use than OpenOffice (it is, though that isn't saying much), I'd use it. But Microsoft Office has vendor lock-in problems and platform compatibility issues, and I'm not free to make it better. If people value usability over freedom, that is their choice. I don't begrudge them the headaches of a different sort that they are incurring.

ThomPete 17y ago
I disagree. That software is free might be an excuse for why not waste time on the usability, but it sure ain't a good reason if you want more than developers to use it.
veqon 17y ago
The motherboard on my XP machine died and I dug out my old w2k machine and (amongst other things) I installed OpenOffice. I only use OO for word documents and spreadsheets but it has served my needs without problems. So why can't I convince anyone else to try it? My guess is that they know Microsoft Office, and they feel safer being in the same boat as everyone else. Any problem won't be their fault. The old FUD.

0xdefec8 17y ago

As a dude who just tried Ubuntu for the first time in 5 years to see how far they've come, but couldn't because the fucking liveCD didn't have a driver for my cdrom, this rings true. But for what it's worth, after a few grueling days getting the p.o.s. up and running, I was shocked to have all the UI fluff my macbook has, plus the infinite list of other great stuff that's inherent to Linux. The moral? Just shrinkwrap all OSS with a CS degree holding nerd who has a couple days of free time.

sophacles 17y ago
Wait, you're actually saying that: 1. Someone still makes non-standard cd-roms? 2. Someone else still buys them? After learning you are person #2, why would anyone ever trust any other judgement you make?
- 0xdefec8 17y ago
  and therein lies the predictable attitude that will keep linux a distant 3rd on the desktop.
  - kl4m 17y ago
    and therein lies the predictable attitude that will keep linux a distant 3rd on the desktop. See what I did there?
  - krschultz 17y ago
    Linux users have no need to court people like you. We're not a business, market share is a meaningless metric. I don't care if 1% or 100% of the people using computers use Linux, what I care about is if there are enough people working on the projects to make it usable for ME. There are. People who complain about FOSS community's "attitude" should really check their own sense of entitlement. We are talking about you getting something FREE that costs hundreds of thousands of man hours to make. If it takes you more than one try to get it to install then think of that as the cost to enter instead of the $150 you pay Microsoft (incidentally Windows suffers similar problems on my home desktops SATA controller as you describe having under Linux, it is not a Linux thing it is a shitty hardware thing).

naz 17y ago

I think the main problem with Open Source application software is the lack of experience in the field the application deals with. Open source programming libraries and languages, webservers and browsers are all great because they are mainly programming problems, and open source developers are programmers. Things like the GIMP and Virtualdub try to deal with problems outside the field of programming, and don't have the knowledge, research or resources to develop something that people in those fields want. Usability is one of those fields but it isn't the heart of the problem.

rottencupcakes 17y ago
This is exactly the problem. What percent of graphic designers would use an app, find a bug, and report it, let alone wade through the code and fix it? On the other hand, an open source webserver or programming language, in which the user is a programmer by default, is much more likely to get fixed. And honestly, what is your average open source developer more interested in: GIMP or Apache?

yesimahuman 17y ago

I think a perfect example of Open Source thriving is IBM. They package open source software (Eclipse for RAD, Apache for IBM Apache), and sell support. It's not a clusterfuck, you just have business people who need to have support 24/7 from people with full time intimate knowledge of the product.

tdonia 17y ago
If you accept the premise from the post that minimizing support costs acts as an incentive to enhance usability, then i think there's an important factor you're touching on here. Since many open source organizations provide FOSS software and charge for support, they've got less of an incentive to provide easy to use software. Rather, their model is tuned to providing easy to support software.

ThomPete 17y ago

OOS doesn't suck it just needs more designers involved. I am a pretty experienced designer focusing on interface design and have tried a couple of times to get involved in these kinds of projects. But what often happens is that they coders don't really want to have designers involved before at the very end where needless to say the software suddenly dictates the experience. It's a perfectly solvable problem and have nothing to do with OSS as such but the same thing that hit many big corporate projects. You decide the platform before you decide on the product.

finger_pussy 17y ago

open source is crap, ain't it folks? It sucks the cum out of your dick and takes your money with you; so screw open source let's fucking give our money to the bastard at microsoft.

nl 17y ago

That's bullshit. The key problem isn't if an application is open source, or even it's usability - it's the incumbency problem. Name one general consumer application for windows which wasn't being used ~5 years ago - even if it is non open source. I can only think of Firefox, games, and maybe some IM client software. Even usability disasters (eg Vista) win huge numbers of users when they are the default choice. When new niches open up (eg, web applications), open source apps have proven to be just as usable as commercial apps. Eg Wikipedia and Wordpress.com are both in the top 10 sites world wide, and both are open source (ie, the apps themselves are open source, not just the infrastructure software).

jdm 17y ago

a more accurate headline might be "software sucks". it's not like most closed-source software is all that great either, e.g CS