this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Free and Open Source Software

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I'll start:

  • RSS and blogs, news vs. social media
  • XMPP vs. WhatsApp/FB messenger/Snapchat
  • IRC vs. Matrix, Teams, Discord etc.
  • Forums vs. Social media, Reddit, Lemmy(?)
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[–] Skooshjones@vlemmy.net 29 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (31 children)

Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.

The general public isn't interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.

Say what you want about that, I'm not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn't the world we live in right now.

The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.

Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don't know what is the correct approach. All I know is I've heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.

Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.

Sad truth. I'm super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I'm also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.

OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.

My choice is Vim and its variants. Add some plugins, it's a really great way to write code. I have no interest in GUI IDEs anymore since getting my NeoVim installation set up and tuned.

[–] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago (5 children)

UI/UX has always been a massive problem in F/OSS. The biggest issue is that you need one person, or a team, with a coherent design vision, actual UI/UX understanding, and who will make sure that not every random pull request related to UX is accepted and ensure those contributions align with the design vision.

That rarely happens

[–] Skooshjones@vlemmy.net 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah makes sense. I wish there was a FOSS UX design philosophy that had caught on. For app design, the Unix philosophy has driven development even to this day, although not as popular now as it once was.

We sort of have bits of it, with the GTK framework and KDE styling. But those ecosystems don't extend outwards enough, and still allow far too much leeway to the UX design to ensure nice looks/function.

Maybe the nature of the widely distributed development makes it overall impossible. The goal of FOSS makes that kind of universal look and feel largely impossible. Heck, even Microsoft can't get that to happen in their own OS. There are many applications/utilities that look pretty much the same now as they did on Windows XP or even earlier.

The general attitude of function over form in our community also makes it hard, and I get that. Especially with limited dev resources as you pointed out. Would you rather have better functionality, or a prettier interface? Tough choice sometimes.

[–] Hexorg@beehaw.org 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I think another problem is that since FOSS is not profitable, it mostly attracts people who want to make software “for themselves” - “hey I need a tool that can do X and if I make it public maybe the other people will like it”. And that’s good but that means the software isn’t “for people” it’s “for people like me”, which is programmers. So they make UI that programmers like but not an average Joe. I think FSF needs to invest some money to build a welcoming UI for existing, feature-complete tools.

[–] Souvlaki@beehaw.org 3 points 2 years ago

Definitely. Programmers and super users, tend to be the kind of people that want configurability and are able (and even enjoy) to figure out what they are trying to do by themselves. If they have a question or a problem, the solution is usually one search away. But that doesn't fly for the average person who wants the thing to work out of the box without having to dig into menus and settings.

[–] monobot@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

My personal experience is that it is really hard to make app that works perfect and looks nice. It takes three to four times more time than just making and app that works with few glitches. Additionally, that is the boring part, not many developers will do it for fun, I really admire complex open source apps (like AntennaPod) that are beautiful and glich free.

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