this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Free and Open Source Software
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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.
I hope that this comes off as encouraging more than discouraging, but this lack of design and accessibility comes from the fact that it's all volunteer work, and volunteers are going to prioritize what they need. The big companies don't have smarter people working for them. They have money to spend on full-time developers (and designers, and writers, and...you get the idea) and someone at the top who wants to turn that investment into significantly more money by selling the software to people.
That's a huge problem, because it puts up a wall between the people who do the work and people who just want to use the results of the work as the workers offered. And I don't know how to fix that, other than to start making a bigger deal about the cultural aspects of Free Software. Like, a particular user may not care about how programmers develop the software, but by showing up and getting to know people, their one-off bug reports become something that people take seriously, because they know that person.
...But that obviously drifts further off topic.