this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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This kind of gatekeeping and elitism is bad for Lemmy and for FOSS.
It makes this community a less welcoming place and leaves new folks with a bad first impression. Much better to be welcoming and let people learn/see the benefits of FOSS at their own pace.
I'd given up on lemmy because every so I had tried was unfinished and unpolished. I tried sync and finally felt like the user experience wasn't getting in the way of content.
I'd love to support foss, if a genuinely comparable experience existed.
I'm glad to say that sync has revived my interest in lemmy.
FOSS doesn't need your support. You misunderstand the relationship. FOSS is looking out for you.
I see the upvotes but I cannot support this comment. FOSS could use a lot more support at every level, including users.
Seconded
It's been one year of this conversation, but I just found it now.
Sync has also made me use Lemmy more often, but I was still missing a good web environment until recently when I started using photon. It is the best web experience I had using Lemmy and now I'm using as a progressive web app.
Photon repository here! Give it a star or start contributing to it.
IMO FOSS has really great offerings when it comes to libraries or other highly technical code.
But something about either the community or incentive structure results in sub-par UI/UX. Obviously not a rule, but definitely a trend I've noticed.
Don't forget the community's reaction to comments like yours, why down vote him if he's stating the obvious? FOSS projects often focus so much on technical features because everyone wants to flex their code-fu, but nobody gives enough time to UI/UX. Just look at pretty much every Lemmy web frontend, fugly webpages with early 2000s look-and-feel, usually slow and/or buggy, and with little to no user feedback.
I've seen it for years and years now, and I can only conclude that it's down to the kinds of people who are attracted by these kinds of projects.
They're tech literate at a professional level by necessity in order to engage with these things at an early time in their development, and this seems to drive a mentality that makes UX design kind of an afterthought, since they already know how to do the things they want the software to do, and they're not focused on how less tech literate users will handle it.
Then you add in the small minority of gatekeepers that wind up in every community, who feel that a larger, more generalized userbase would be invading their niche community, and you end up with stuff like the Linux forums where asking a simple question would get you a series of remarks that essentially boil down to "go fuck yourself, you should know how to do it already."
I feel like the people concerned with UI/UX come into these kinds of projects later on after they've matured a little, rather than right from start, and this causes resistance to their changes because the userbase is already entrenched in the current UX, especially from the gatekeeper folk in the community who see a higher tech literacy threshold as a good thing.
Lemmy is just new. The best desktops that exist are FOSS.
That's very subjective. I have yet to find a Linux desktop I like as much as MacOS, especially when it comes to WACOM drivers. The stylus response time/curve almost always feels wrong.
Also, I've worked with designers who can get something that looks and feels fully professional on a first pass, so it's not just newness for Lemmy.
This is why I unsubscribed from the Android community. I love Android, I use nothing but Linux at home and really appreciate open source software.
But the FOSS...enthusiasm is starting to border on zealotry. It's getting really unpleasant.
Try to tell the Linux users on here that you prefer to use Windows...
I use Linux as my daily driver, yet I 100% believe Linux is overrated. It's great if you're willing to put in the work to get it working well, or maybe if you have someone else to do all your tech support for you, but it's just not a good option for the majority of people.
I hate when people keep trying to push it on Windows users, especially when they go on about how "easy" it is. It's not. And doing that will get people to try it out with high expectations and then get disappointed when they try it out and that's not the case.
I honestly feel like people who say this stuff either haven't tried Linux since 2008 or went straight to Arch.
I use Manjaro as my daily driver and I never need to fix the system. It really does just work, and these a bunch of disyros out there that do.
The only thing you might find terrible is trying to run windows programs on Linux, to which I say: dual boot! Even with all the progress Proton, Lutris etc. have made, it's still way easier to just boot into windows on the occasion you want to play games or whatever.
I switched to Linux last year, and I used Linux Mint, which people say is the easiest, and then KDE Neon which I'm still using now, which is definitely way better than Linux Mint but it's still not easy. I'm fine with it, and I personally prefer it to Windows, but I could never imagine my parents or my friends trying to use it without help.
I love Linux. I love the flexibility it gives me and I enjoy tinkering when I feel like it and having something rock solid and reliable when I don't. I don't game on the PC, so this works out great for me. However, my use case isn't everyone else's, and part of the idea of giving people freedom to use their computer the way they want is accepting that sometimes they want to use their computer in a way that you don't like.
Maybe that means using a proprietary operating system. Maybe it means using a search engine that you don't like. But that is what works for them, and sometimes I think the open source people operate on the fallacy of "there's two types of people, those who use FOSS and those who haven't found FOSS yet", and it's just so obnoxious.
You think people go nuts when you tell them you prefer WIndows? Wait until you see their heads spin when I tell them that while I use Arch Linux, I also use Google Chrome, Telegram, Spotify, and Discord...
God yes this is so freaking annoying.
As much as I adore FOSS and hold it near to my heart; Most FOSS software just doesn't have a lot of polish. That isn't a fault; but some of the zealots take it that way; and that last 5% of polish is sometimes required, and is absolutely critical to some users' workflows.
I hear you. I am an Arch user as well but my primary browser has become Microsoft Edge. My preference would be Firefox but it has lots of problems, especially with some of the video conferencing apps I use for work. I am in Outlook all day as well ( on Edge ). Spotify is certainly in the mix.
I had to leave the Linux memes community because I swear nearly every post was shitting on Windows. Yes, I get it. Windows isn't all that great. But, much like Ios, it just works for what I need. And I haven't had any issues that weren't ny fault with it.
If the game I play most, and the number one reason why i go on my pc, works on Windows, but won't work on Linux. Which OS is better for me?
I thought all this software war crap era was over. That was shit I cared about when I was 14 or something. Just let it herself use what they want and explain the benefits of alternatives, only if they care.
I'm surprised they don't shit on macOS too lol
Honestly same, but I think a lot of those people are talking highly of their privacy policy, so they turn a blind eye. It's honestly funny when you see some of them being all like "Linux is significantly better because it gives you absolute freedom.
Then, proceed to use Ios.
I tell myself that I like MacOS as it was my favourite desktop for years. Honestly though, it is the worst of the three at this point.
Oh yes. A free OS that literally can't play my game without me possibly being banned is significantly better for my needs.
Or Chrome over Firefox
This drives me nuts. I like Chrome. It's simple, it's fast, the extensions I want run on it (for now), and I love the Google Account Sync because I have an Android phone. This greatly pisses off people for whatever reason, despite the fact I've never had a bad opinion about Firefox and love what they're doing too, and I never criticize anyone for choosing Firefox.
As with everything open source communities need nuance and understanding, otherwise they start to feel like cults.
For whatever reason? They're trying to DRM the internet lol. You're certainly entitled to your opinion but there are some pretty big reasons to be mad at Google on a good day. Nobody should take that out on you but I understand the frustration. People letting things slide because it doesn't bother them specifically until it's too late is how everything keeps getting worse.
There's no denying that WEI is evil. It may in fact be the feature that kills the Chrome Browser and gets Google fined into poverty.
But from a user standpoint; I get it. It Just Works. That polish built into Chrome that allows users to sync their browsing sessions across machines? It's absolutely critical and required.
The FOSS community has this weird habit of requiring it's users to make sacrifices to meet it's values. Where that doesn't harm the user, their workflows or their convenience in general; users are typically more than happy to do so.
However; A lot of FOSS and FLOSS projects tend to take ridiculous stances against certain kinds of polish features and will REFUSE to implement them no matter how many people ask. In my opinion; if you want a software project to succeed and overtake massive competition; that's just stupid. Especially when it's as easy as forking a repository and baking the "Controversial feature" into the user-friendly fork version.
If you want to provide a core piece of software and all; sure! Please do that! But a lot of projects don't, and won't spend any time on user experience at all; and any kind of work on the UX arises because something is inconvenient for the devs.
Worse is that oftentimes; the polish features that are being blanket denied and intentionally omitted from the software are in fact not that complicated to implement in a manner that runs consistent with the values of the FLOSS community. Sure; that means that perhaps you do have to host a lot of things yourself to make sure that you truly retain control over your data; but that's actually pretty easy to learn how to do.
I do understand the limitations of the average FLOSS project. Unfortunately; a lot of FLOSS and FOSS devs are very quick to decide that they know the best, and will frequently and often refuse to listen to the user. That's not better. It's worse. At least when a user is a customer, they have some degree of influence and can exert some small force on development priorities. In the FLOSS community; you can donate every cent you have to a project and it does not necessarily guarantee that you will get a say, or even one request, fulfilled. For some users; that is not better, it is worse.
We still have a long way to go before we reach a society with the maximum amount of balance between beneficial qualities, and none of the negative qualities, of socialism and capitalism.
firefox can also sync your shit across browsers, I'd argue it does it better than chrome and it just works, I'd argue better than Chrome.
The nuance is recognising the Google hegemony is supported by choosing Chrome.
The understanding is realising what is happening to the open web as a result.
Your comment could be distilled down to "Let people have things" and is still getting downvotes lol. Yeesh.
firefox also has sync, better even than chrome you literally have a button for checking out what you browsed accross all devices, you can send tabs from. one device to another
Linux fanaticism drives me crazy. I'm definitely not saying this is true of everyone, but the very nature of Linux seems to attract many elitists who are against unified vision, accessibility, and the unfun amount and types of work required for testing quality and compatibility. The result is that for the foreseeable future, desktop Linux is a mess for everyone, and unusable by the masses. And while I'll get downvoted for saying that (and for saying the rest of this), I feel like many Linux fanatics secretly like that "normal peasants" can't effectively use Linux.
I will take some corporate bullshit that works, over only-half-working FOSS any day of the week. And I'm not shitting on FOSS itself. I'm just saying Linux is a disorganized and unfriendly mess. I never did get any sound whatsoever working on my i7-6700 and MSI gaming motherboard in Ubuntu, no matter how long I screwed around with Linux. And that was just to start. I wanted to love and use Linux, I really did.
Lastly, I just want to say I'm super happy with the other responses from Linux fans in this thread. They seem to understand that Linux is overrated, isn't for everyone, doesn't always work, and that Linux-pushers can be obnoxious. I super appreciate that understanding, fam.
100% agree. Going “haha, aren’t I COOL for NOT using this one popular app or software!?” contributes absolutely nothing and actively makes the community uninviting. I’m all for FOSS, but if a closed-source app is better than the FOSS options, I ain’t gonna knock on anybody for using it.
Also why even use an app outside of accessibility reasons? Been using Kbin on a mobile browser and it’s been a pretty good experience.
Also sometimes the FOSS software sucks compared to the non-open alternatives.
I don't understand how promoting FOSS in favor of proprietary software is bad for FOSS?
This is not promoting FOSS. This is mocking closed-source/paid Lemmy clients.