Comment by crote

"Bad" comes in many shapes and sizes. Specifically, "technically competent person implementing a thing designed by a technically incompetent person" is remarkably different from "technically incompetent person implementing a thing designed by a technically competent person".

The way this plays out in practice is that those products you listed can hire actual UX designers, but many product decisions are made by people focusing on business concerns rather than product concerns, so you have competent people implementing designs by incompetent people.

Inversely, because open source software is usually built by people trying to scratch their own itches, they those people actually understand what the product should be, but, because they're usually software engineers instead of UX designers, they're typically incompetent at UX design. So you have incompetent people (devs with their UX design hat on) implementing designs by competent people (those same devs, with their "scratch my own itch" product owner hat on)

> This is such a weird trope.

No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.

These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question.

Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint.

An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply depends on who we are designing for.

As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.

Disclaimer: did my master’s thesis on OSS UX.

Microsoft Teams was bad, so they rebuilt it and somehow made it worse. Then they decided to do the same with other apps, like Notepad. I switched to Ubuntu on my computer this week. Linux administration is not something I want to spend time on, but LLMs are able to help me debug why my password manager can't talk to my browser and write shell scripts to fix it... I'm able to focus on work and be done with the Microslop.

> microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce

Nobody wants to use those products either; they just exist because their default at a certain scale, or they're effectively free because they're included in your existing MS license.

For GIMP the comparison would be either Adobe stuff or what used to be Affinity products. Libreoffice is now competing maybe with MS Word but probably more often Google Docs or Markdown editors.

Old blender used to have a very technical UI; a cacophony of dropdowns and small text that functioned but was quite overwhelming. Meanwhile things like SketchUp became popular because they weren't as powerful necessarily, but were very welcoming, and that's hard to do with a complex offering.

I think you misread and assumed this was a comparison to something else. It’s not.

Actually, I like Microsoft Teams.

I know this is controversial but I prefer teams to zoom and slack.

Usually being compared with their non-OOS alternatives, not random enterprise org software.

Teams are decent, wdym?

Inb4: I've used ventrilo,team speak, mumble, discord, Skype.

Lots of that is momentum and politicking. Or the result of decades of concerted effort to associate your product with it's niche, from education to industry, like Adobe

Those products likely have UI / UX people behind how they look, feel and behave. ;) Except maybe Jira, Jiras always been the Excel of ticketing.

>it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.

Relatively good UX. Because Microsoft, Salesforce, etc. Have full time teams of designers in tow. For historical reasons it's harder to get said designers to work on FLOSS.

Getting good UX requires professional designers, extensive human testing, and knowledge of human psychology—things historically in short supply among the OSS geek set. In the 1980s Apple ran a human factors lab that spent thousands of hours determining which interface features were the easiest to use and most efficient for many common computing tasks. This is why classic Mac OS is still the gold standard for UX. Even Mac OS X started making compromises to accommodate techie trends, rather than keeping the focus on the average user.

Because much proprietary software has garbo UX, that doesn't make the OSS UX situation not garbo.

>It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product.

Devs stil run the show, and it can be a huge effort to convince them to change course on something. People were complaining about the mouse controls for years and it took until 2.8 to finally convince the org otherwise to adapt a more typical workflow.

It's a rough balance because the other extreme is artists making unrealistic demands based on how the system is architected (or worse, the deceptively simole: https://xkcd.com/1425/). So I don't really have a solution.

In foss the selector is the merging maintainer. Which is more a gardener than an architect. You need somebody with a vision for a park.

And then by the time they do get around to fixing the UI it seems the codebase is horribly bloated and littered with tech debt and now updating the UI would basically require a whole application rewrite. Which I have seen happen and work, but I also swear I've seen where teams spread themselves thin trying to make an updated UI version concurrently with their main branch only for the updated UI version to fall so far behind on features (or get worked on so rarely) that they abandoned it to fix it later...

To paraphrase a quote from long ago:

"Public funding doesn't get you great coders, it gets you coders who are great at filling out government forms."

Getting paid to deliver a software product that someone wants advances humanity. Getting paid to make your own personal project provides jobs for politician's cousins.

The problem is knowing what to fund. It's easier if the users would pay. Which is doable for commercial use.

Yes, because it isn't. What version they pump out has nothing to do with viability. It still lacks much of the feature set and functionally of Photoshop, enough so that it's just not a valid comparison, let alone a valid alternative. Like, I've seen people comparing Krita as the better alternative to GIMP, which isn't even designed to fill the same need. But the fact that those comparisons have even occurred should tell you enough about the state of GIMP.