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Make Apps for Linux

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41–50 of 422 posts

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#41
post #26

The problem is OSS software not even trying to compete with the market. People using OSS software taking it for granted that the UX is going to be subpar, and it really is. Regular propriety software faces the risk of their users not paying, therefore adapting to make end user experience great. OSS usually doesn't have that risk. Open source needs to be exposed to risk from end users. I tried to change that with Note…

The CLI is peak UX for anyone technically competent.

For a subset of tasks, maybe. But I'd rather use Firefox than lynx. And I'd rather use Thunderbird than mutt or pine.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#42
More software? Wonderful! I'm all for it, but before starting something from scratch why not contribute to something that already exists, or possibly pick some project that was abandoned or simply needs to be worked on for example to be built with newer compilers, run on newer hardware, etc. Which makes me wonder if there is somewhere a database of dormant/dead projects that would deserve to be resurrected.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#43

The problem is OSS software not even trying to compete with the market. People using OSS software taking it for granted that the UX is going to be subpar, and it really is. Regular propriety software faces the risk of their users not paying, therefore adapting to make end user experience great. OSS usually doesn't have that risk. Open source needs to be exposed to risk from end users. I tried to change that with Note…

I think you're making the right decision. Open-source is extremely difficult to make even a living wage off of - the number of people who do is orders of magnitude smaller than those who make a living off of commercial software.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#44

The problem is OSS software not even trying to compete with the market. People using OSS software taking it for granted that the UX is going to be subpar, and it really is. Regular propriety software faces the risk of their users not paying, therefore adapting to make end user experience great. OSS usually doesn't have that risk. Open source needs to be exposed to risk from end users. I tried to change that with Note…

What's the difference between "notes" and "plume"?

Hows it different from Obsidian or any other note taking app that has a larger community. I'm sure OP put in lots of hard work and it looks good, but it's not apparent to me why I should abandon my existing platform (stickiness) for another one. There are a lot of note apps out there already which probably makes it hard to sell.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#45

This is one of the biggest issues holding the Linux platform as a whole. It's often cited as a strength, but I don't see it as such. Many times, the plethora of choice is pushed forward by devs as an advantage of Linux ("you have so many choices to pick from!") but for many users this presents the paradox of choice - and pushes many people back to the platform they came from. You get less choice on macOS and Windows,…

I would say there are even more launchers and docks then tiling WMs. Also I don't know what would need to be better about them. Something like ulaucher or Albert is much more powerful than what is available in other platforms and I don't know how one would improve their UI.

Maybe the work needs to go into developing better UX, not so much UI or what the various tools can do. Look at PySimpleGUI (of which I was reminded of from a recent post here) for a good example of a nice project for the masses - we need better software for users.

We need better applications that have better UX.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#46
post #26

The problem is OSS software not even trying to compete with the market. People using OSS software taking it for granted that the UX is going to be subpar, and it really is. Regular propriety software faces the risk of their users not paying, therefore adapting to make end user experience great. OSS usually doesn't have that risk. Open source needs to be exposed to risk from end users. I tried to change that with Note…

The CLI is peak UX for anyone technically competent.

Utter nonsense. The CLI lets you do complex custom things that you sometimes can't do with a GUI. But it is pretty awful from a UX point of view. Terrible discoverability, terrible UI, very unfriendly, no contextual help, etc. etc. I can't think of a worse interface from a UX perspective.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#47
post #38

This is one of the biggest issues holding the Linux platform as a whole. It's often cited as a strength, but I don't see it as such. Many times, the plethora of choice is pushed forward by devs as an advantage of Linux ("you have so many choices to pick from!") but for many users this presents the paradox of choice - and pushes many people back to the platform they came from. You get less choice on macOS and Windows,…

But writing a tiling wm is fun. Writing software collaboratively is the point in itself, not just the means of getting some kind of artifact in the end. Being an open source developer means having agency over your goals and means to get to them, which you often don’t have when doing commercial software development. You sure end up with roughly edges, but the. IKEA-effect kicks in and you like it anyway.

Right and this holds the platform back. I'm all for hobby development- I've been an supporter of open source software for over 2 decades. But nothing much has changed since that time in terms of UX and user-friendliness. (Yes I am aware a lot of things have changed, but as much as things have changed - much of it is still the same.)

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#48
post #26

The problem is OSS software not even trying to compete with the market. People using OSS software taking it for granted that the UX is going to be subpar, and it really is. Regular propriety software faces the risk of their users not paying, therefore adapting to make end user experience great. OSS usually doesn't have that risk. Open source needs to be exposed to risk from end users. I tried to change that with Note…

The CLI is peak UX for anyone technically competent.

In principle maybe, but all present implementations fall a bit short. Why can't I use my mouse to position the cursor in any shell? Placing the cursor with the mouse is something people commonly do in terminal editors like vim or emacs; the efficiency arguments against it fall flat because this is entirely optional and besides, many people use laptops with either a track-point directly in the middle of the home row keys or with a touchpad directly below the keyboard.

And there's no technical reason it couldn't be done; years ago I once did it as a proof of concept. It just hasn't made it into any major shell yet.. besides eshell anyway. It does work on eshell.

Anyway, it's not really a big deal, not important enough for me to pursue, but I do think it counts as a counterexample to disprove the "peak UX" claim. Command line interfaces in principle are great but in practice we're doing it by emulating hardware that went obsolete decades ago and piling cludges and hacks on top of that to make it feel a bit more modern.

Another example; there are a few ways to inline images in a terminal emulator but they're all kind of shit in their own ways; graphical thumbnails have clear utility when listing some directories; every serious file manager supports it but to do this in a terminal emulator is cludgy hacks.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#49
post #14

I recently switched from Mac to Linux so that I can use beefy refurbished machines as my daily driver. I've installed Linux on lots of different machines previously, but this time it's not just a hobby. Ubuntu has great support for my hardware and peripherals, but the app store feels unfinished and forced. Pretty much everything works as expected. I'm interested in checking out Mint (also Debian) and Arch, but it fee…

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. You can use all Ubuntu packages just fine. It is really just a strictly better Ubuntu.

There is a Debian-based Mint version as well but that is more as a security so that they are not deadly dependent on the Ubuntu people.

Though these days, even using exotic distros isn't that problematic, as you can always use appimage/flatpack/snap if you native package manager doesn't have the specific app you need.

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