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.
Linux will never be main stream popular unless it becomes pre-loaded on major brand laptops and computers, however good the desktop enviroments and apps are. This is the thing that doesn’t get much talk, but however seemless and easy to install most modern Linux distros people just aren’t installing their OS’ in the first place. Most people either get their OS pre-installed or ask their local Geek Squad to do it for them.
One issue is that Microsoft makes so much on data collection, that they actually pay manufacturers to put Windows on there, it’s one of the methods used to try to keep stock computer prices low. While this is scummy and anticompetitive, it helps the consumer and gives me a chuckle that installing Windows inherently decreased the worth of a computer.
Yeah, they could have taken the high road compared to Google and Amazon, but instead were like: Hold my beer. And don’t get me started on smartphones, “smart” TV’s and cars… Wonderful times we’re living in!
True. The problem with that, is that Microsoft pays to have windows installed. Such that it’s actually cheaper to buy a system with windows and delete it than to buy one with Linux preinstalled.
Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it’s pretty great.
But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.
I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.
Yes, absolutely, but sadly the Steam Deck and S76 workstations are still niche products, focusing on the gaming and SoftDev markets.
Framework is very promising and I hope they’ll succeed breaking into more mainstream markets.
But I’m really saddend by Canonical and that they dropped the ball with it because back in the day they made some attempts to partner with larger laptop vendors to pre-load Ubuntu and I think it also had great promise even tho Linux software was not nearly as refines as it is today. But nowadays when the software is much more capable they focus their efforts almost exclusively on business / server side applications.
Even more frustrating that Chromebooks became a thing. It proved that consumers were ready to buy cheap notebooks with an OS that was basically just a browser and no significant computer power.
Any user-friendly Linux distro could have filled that role and done it much better IMO. That one always felt like on of Linux’s biggest misses recently. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault either. Google had the resources, the marketing, and the vision to push those, right place right time.
Yeah. When a Chromebook can satisfy the needs of a lot of users, I feel some distros were ready even a decade ago.
The installation step is a huge hurdle. I don’t know anyone, except techies, who has done it and even some techies haven’t. You can make it pretty (and some installers are both pretty and dead simple) but getting it on a thumb drive and booting from external media are just not user-friendly steps.
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.
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.
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/understand but not an average Joe.
I think FSF needs to invest some money to build a welcoming UI for existing, feature-complete tools.
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.
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.
Isn’t that a type error? The examples given were for protocols, but your specific objection was about clients. There are many amazingly smooth clients for the aforementioned protocols. They may not be popular, you might not like them, but they definitely exist.
We should also briefly take note of the disastrous UI that Microsoft Office has.
Fair point, but I’ll push back a little on your second point. RSS for instance. I really want to like it, but I just cannot get it to work smoothly.
I’ve tried like 8+ FOSS RSS clients, mobile, desktop, web-based. Not one of them has worked seamlessly. I get all kinds of weird problems. The RSS link doesn’t work, thumbnails don’t load, feed headlines are garbled, articles are badly out of order, sync doesn’t work, etc.
I know that if I can’t get them to work right, there’s no way a random person on the street is gunna be willing to tinker and mess around with them.
You bring up a really good point about MS Office UI. Very cluttered and clunky, but so many people are used to it that it doesn’t matter to them. I actually think that Only Office and Libre Office are easily good enough to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for 90% of users out there.
As someone who has written and maintained an RSS aggregator for years, I can tell you that this jankiness is in big part because of how vague and under-defined the feed formats (RDF, RSS2, Atom) are, and how “creative” various websites are in producing feeds which are just barely standard-compliant, but also just enough screwed up to cause problems when parsing them.
It was a headache after a headache trying to get all the weird corner cases handled.
You bring up a good point with utilities like Bitwarden and Proton Mail; things that look nice and have good functionality attract the average user much more easily.
Last I checked, Bitwarden doesn’t have any way to hit a hotkey and insert login credentials in the current app? It also can’t be unlocked with biometrics?
Those aren’t “nice” features, they’re baseline features that every password manager needs to have. I don’t just type passwords into a browser, so a browser extension alone isn’t enough. And I’m not typing my umpteen character long password fifty times a day, there needs to be biometrics.
I will always choose open source software over closed source software - but not if it means choosing mediocre software over good software.
At least with android 13, you can choose the bitwarden app as your default autofill option, and it will fill login info in apps/websites/etc. That being said, I’ve noticed sometimes it won’t pop up immediately, but it’s by far the minority of situations where it does that.
On the app page Bitwarden has the typical biometric symbols. And other FOSS alternatives also have biometric unlock. I use Keepass for example. On my desktop computer it is pretty easy to fill in passwords in my browser and on my phone it is very easy to open the database via biometrics. However, non of the clients actually have a nice and shiny GUI…
That’s why I don’t suggest Keepass to people vs Bitwarden, even though it’s quote good, I know they’re gunna be put off instantly by Keepass’s ugly look.
Honestly though, all the mainstream password managers have pretty nasty looking interfaces IMO, so maybe it actually wouldn’t matter lol.
Bitwarden 100% has biometric unlock (at least on Android, can’t speak for other platforms); as mentioned by @pattern, you can set it up to autofill login info in apps and websites. It does sometimes take a bit of time to show up, though.
Anecdotal experience, I know, but I managed to cure my wife of her habit of storing passwords in plaintext on her computer by moving her to Bitwarden, and I’ve had very little in the way of tech support to deal with in that area ever since, so at least for me it passes the “good for non-tech savvy folks” test.
FOSS is going to struggle to have good UX forever becuase you usually need one coherent vision for good UX and that’s the antithesis to FOSS projects, the only exceptions being ones run exclusively by one company.
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.
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.
Linux will never be main stream popular unless it becomes pre-loaded on major brand laptops and computers, however good the desktop enviroments and apps are. This is the thing that doesn’t get much talk, but however seemless and easy to install most modern Linux distros people just aren’t installing their OS’ in the first place. Most people either get their OS pre-installed or ask their local Geek Squad to do it for them.
There might be some traction if those laptops and desktops were a little cheaper than those preloaded with Windows.
One issue is that Microsoft makes so much on data collection, that they actually pay manufacturers to put Windows on there, it’s one of the methods used to try to keep stock computer prices low. While this is scummy and anticompetitive, it helps the consumer and gives me a chuckle that installing Windows inherently decreased the worth of a computer.
Yeah, they could have taken the high road compared to Google and Amazon, but instead were like: Hold my beer. And don’t get me started on smartphones, “smart” TV’s and cars… Wonderful times we’re living in!
True. The problem with that, is that Microsoft pays to have windows installed. Such that it’s actually cheaper to buy a system with windows and delete it than to buy one with Linux preinstalled.
Don’t forget the bloatware vendors that pay to be preinstalled.
Ah that’s probably how they’re able to squeeze Linux out of the market by having it OEM installed at cost.
Not that there are a lot of ordinary people who know what Linux is, much less desire to actively use it if it comes preinstalled on their machine.
Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it’s pretty great.
But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.
I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.
Yes, absolutely, but sadly the Steam Deck and S76 workstations are still niche products, focusing on the gaming and SoftDev markets.
Framework is very promising and I hope they’ll succeed breaking into more mainstream markets. But I’m really saddend by Canonical and that they dropped the ball with it because back in the day they made some attempts to partner with larger laptop vendors to pre-load Ubuntu and I think it also had great promise even tho Linux software was not nearly as refines as it is today. But nowadays when the software is much more capable they focus their efforts almost exclusively on business / server side applications.
Even more frustrating that Chromebooks became a thing. It proved that consumers were ready to buy cheap notebooks with an OS that was basically just a browser and no significant computer power.
Any user-friendly Linux distro could have filled that role and done it much better IMO. That one always felt like on of Linux’s biggest misses recently. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault either. Google had the resources, the marketing, and the vision to push those, right place right time.
The emerging immutable distros might be better positioned.
Yeah. When a Chromebook can satisfy the needs of a lot of users, I feel some distros were ready even a decade ago.
The installation step is a huge hurdle. I don’t know anyone, except techies, who has done it and even some techies haven’t. You can make it pretty (and some installers are both pretty and dead simple) but getting it on a thumb drive and booting from external media are just not user-friendly steps.
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
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.
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/understand but not an average Joe. I think FSF needs to invest some money to build a welcoming UI for existing, feature-complete tools.
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.
Agreed.
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.
Isn’t that a type error? The examples given were for protocols, but your specific objection was about clients. There are many amazingly smooth clients for the aforementioned protocols. They may not be popular, you might not like them, but they definitely exist.
We should also briefly take note of the disastrous UI that Microsoft Office has.
Fair point, but I’ll push back a little on your second point. RSS for instance. I really want to like it, but I just cannot get it to work smoothly.
I’ve tried like 8+ FOSS RSS clients, mobile, desktop, web-based. Not one of them has worked seamlessly. I get all kinds of weird problems. The RSS link doesn’t work, thumbnails don’t load, feed headlines are garbled, articles are badly out of order, sync doesn’t work, etc.
I know that if I can’t get them to work right, there’s no way a random person on the street is gunna be willing to tinker and mess around with them.
You bring up a really good point about MS Office UI. Very cluttered and clunky, but so many people are used to it that it doesn’t matter to them. I actually think that Only Office and Libre Office are easily good enough to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for 90% of users out there.
As someone who has written and maintained an RSS aggregator for years, I can tell you that this jankiness is in big part because of how vague and under-defined the feed formats (RDF, RSS2, Atom) are, and how “creative” various websites are in producing feeds which are just barely standard-compliant, but also just enough screwed up to cause problems when parsing them.
It was a headache after a headache trying to get all the weird corner cases handled.
You bring up a good point with utilities like Bitwarden and Proton Mail; things that look nice and have good functionality attract the average user much more easily.
Last I checked, Bitwarden doesn’t have any way to hit a hotkey and insert login credentials in the current app? It also can’t be unlocked with biometrics?
Those aren’t “nice” features, they’re baseline features that every password manager needs to have. I don’t just type passwords into a browser, so a browser extension alone isn’t enough. And I’m not typing my umpteen character long password fifty times a day, there needs to be biometrics.
I will always choose open source software over closed source software - but not if it means choosing mediocre software over good software.
At least with android 13, you can choose the bitwarden app as your default autofill option, and it will fill login info in apps/websites/etc. That being said, I’ve noticed sometimes it won’t pop up immediately, but it’s by far the minority of situations where it does that.
This has been a feature for years - Android 10 at least, if not earlier.
Ah okay, I was an apple/iOS user, first experience with Android has been 13. Thanks for the info!
On the app page Bitwarden has the typical biometric symbols. And other FOSS alternatives also have biometric unlock. I use Keepass for example. On my desktop computer it is pretty easy to fill in passwords in my browser and on my phone it is very easy to open the database via biometrics. However, non of the clients actually have a nice and shiny GUI…
That’s why I don’t suggest Keepass to people vs Bitwarden, even though it’s quote good, I know they’re gunna be put off instantly by Keepass’s ugly look.
Honestly though, all the mainstream password managers have pretty nasty looking interfaces IMO, so maybe it actually wouldn’t matter lol.
Bitwarden 100% has biometric unlock (at least on Android, can’t speak for other platforms); as mentioned by @pattern, you can set it up to autofill login info in apps and websites. It does sometimes take a bit of time to show up, though.
Anecdotal experience, I know, but I managed to cure my wife of her habit of storing passwords in plaintext on her computer by moving her to Bitwarden, and I’ve had very little in the way of tech support to deal with in that area ever since, so at least for me it passes the “good for non-tech savvy folks” test.
Huh, turns out it does now! Definitely didn’t when I last tried the desktop app.
FOSS is going to struggle to have good UX forever becuase you usually need one coherent vision for good UX and that’s the antithesis to FOSS projects, the only exceptions being ones run exclusively by one company.
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.