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Free software scares normal people

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Re: Free software scares normal people

#201

Post by phoronixrly »

dfxm12 wrote: post #24
phoronixrly wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handbrake's UI is in the uncanny valley for me -- too complicated for use by laymen, and way too limiting for use by people who know what they're doing...

My dad, a total layman, was able to use handbrake as a step in digitizing old family video tapes. I think in the context of this thread, we shouldn't overgeneralize or underestimate "normal people".

Was he able to use it correctly though to be able to digitize video with exacltly the correct setttings so that no notable loss of quality was introduced? How long did it take him to randomly test settings?

Re: Free software scares normal people

#202

Post by 1718627440 »

pwg wrote: post #131
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. "type ffmpeg, then hyphen i then the input filename then the output filename". I would've understood this when I was 8. Because I was super smart? No, because I was making a genuine effort.

The portion you've overlooked is there is an entire population of users out there who have never seen, nor used, a command line, and telling them to "just type this out" ignores all the background command line knowledge necessary to successfully "just type this out": 1) They have to know how to get to a command line somewhere/how (most of this group of users would be stymied right here and get no further along); 2) T…

They are using text inputs, where you press enter to send stuff daily. Most of the hurdle is just overcoming the preconception that at black in put window means hard mode.

They can right-click in the folder view of their OS file viewer. On Windows they can also just type the command into the path bar.

When you tell them the command, you could also just install it. Also you could just tell them to type the name of the app 'ffmpeg' into the OS store and press install. They do this on their phone all the time.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#203

Post by fschuett »

immibis wrote: post #186
fschuett wrote: post #127

> Free audio editing software that requires hours of learning to be useful for simple tasks. To be fair, the Audacity UX designer made a massive video about the next UX redesign and how he tried to get rid of "modes" and the "Audacity says no" problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38 So this problem should get better in the future. Good UX (doesn't necessarily have to have a flashy UI, but just a good UX)…

The problem with the new Audacity isn't the new version, it's that it replaces the old version. If the new version came out but it was called "DARing" and Audacity continued to be the thing we have now, people might question the name but no other eyes would be batted. Pre-emptive anti-snark: yes, the old version will still exist... if you can dig up the right github commit and still make it compile in 2030.

Well, Tantacrul did answer that objection: it just shows you a popup dialog on first start: "which theme do you want" (colorful or colorless, light / dark) and "which experience do you want" (classic / new). So if you pick the "colorless, light, classic" option, it's going to look pretty much like the current Audacity, except that they moved from wxWidgets to Qt.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#204

Post by Dylan16807 »

lamontcg wrote: post #103
zer00eyz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI != icons. UI and UX are for all intents lost arts. No one is sitting on the other side of a 2 way mirror any more and watching people use their app... This is how we get UI's that work but suck to use. This is how we allow dark patterns to flourish. You can and will happily do things your users/customers hate if it makes a dent in the bottom of the eye and you dont have to face their criticisms directly.

> UI and UX are for all intents lost arts. No one is sitting on the other side of a 2 way mirror any more and watching people use their app... Which is also why UI/UX on open source projects are generally going to suck. There's certainly no money to pay for that kind of experiment. And if you include telemetry, people lose their goddamn minds, assuming the open source author isn't morally against it to begin with. Th…

Unless you get super invasive, telemetry will tell you how often a feature is used but I don't think it'll help much with bad and confusing layouts.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#205

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

galagawinkle489 wrote: post #158
some_furry wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird thread for me to read, as someone who a) works primarily with developer tooling (and not even GUI tooling, I write cryptography stuff usually!), b) is very active in a vibrant community of artists that care about nerd software projects. I don't, as a rule, ever ask artists to contribute for free, but I still occasionally get gifted art from kind folks. (I'm more than happy to commission them for one-o…

Why should they work for pay on free software? Nobody expects to be paid to work on the software itself. Yet artists expect to be treated differently. If it is your job, then go do it as a job. But we all have jobs. Free software is what we do in our free time. Artists don't seem to have this distinction. They expect to be paid to do a hobby.

Doing a pro graphic design treatment is lot more than just "drawing a few pictures," and picking a color palette.

It usually involves developing a design language for the app, or sometimes, for the whole organization (if, like the one I do a lot of work for, it's really all about one app). That's a big deal.

Logo design is also a much more difficult task than people think. A good logo can be insanely valuable. The one we use for the app I've done a lot of work on, was a quick "one-off," by a guy who ended up running design for a major software house. It was a princely gift.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#206

Post by jcranmer »

ThatFave wrote: post #178
hydrogen7800 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This describes me somewhat. I use FEA software and only recently started using it to execute jobs in CLI. I still trip over changing directories. Fortunately notepad++ has an option to open CLI with the filepath of the currently open file. I also didn't know right-click is paste in CLI. Don't use ctrl+c accidentally. But ctrl+v does work in powershell (sometimes?). "Error, command not found" is puzzling to me. Where…

To answer your last question, on your operating system there is something called “PATH”. It is a user- or systemwide variable that dictates where to look for programs. It basically is a list of directories, often separated by “:” Further reading: https://www.java.com/en/download/help/path.html (this may have Java references but still applies)

The GP here appears to be on Windows, given their reference to PowerShell. And on Windows, the path separator is ";", not ":".

One of the things I've noticed is that people trying to help the true beginners vastly overestimate their skill level, and when you get a couple of people all trying to help, each of them is making a completely different set of suggestions which doesn't end up helpful at all. Recently, I was helping somebody who was struggling with trying to compile and link against a C++ library on Windows, and the second person to suggest something went full-bore down the "just install and use a Linux VM cause I don't have time to help you do anything on Windows."

Re: Free software scares normal people

#207

Post by Dylan16807 »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #176
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. "type ffmpeg, then hyphen i then the input filename then the output filename". I would've understood this when I was 8. Because I was super smart? No, because I was making a genuine effort.

To grab a random part of an ffmpeg command in my history: "-q:a 0 -map a" Sorry, that's pretty damn indecipherable.

Yes, your example that completely ignores the premise is pretty damn indecipherable.

"If you only care about converting media without tweaking anything"

Re: Free software scares normal people

#208

Post by Qem »

galagawinkle489 wrote: post #162
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points, but to add to the sources of instability ... a first time user of a piece of software may be very appreciative of its simplicity and "intuitiveness". However, if it is a tool that they spend a lot of time with and is connected to a potentially complex workflow, it won't be long before even they are asking for "this little extra thing". It is hard to overestimate the difference between creating tools for…

And why exactly should free software prioritise someone's first five minutes (or first 100 hours, even) over the rest of the thousands of hours they might spend with it? I see people using DAWs, even "pro" ones made by companies presumably interested in their bottom lines. In all cases I have no idea how to use it. Do I complain about intuitiveness etc? Of course not. I don't know how to do something. That's my probl…

> And why exactly should free software prioritise someone's first five minutes (or first 100 hours, even) over the rest of the thousands of hours they might spend with it?

Well, if people fail at that first five minutes, the subsequent thousand hours most often never happens.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#209

Post by robenkleene »

RajT88 wrote: post #136

I like the design pattern of a "basic mode" and an "advanced mode". The "advanced mode" rarely actually covers all the needs of an advanced user (because software is never quite everything to everyone), but it's at least better at handling both types of users. Not all free software has this problem... Mozilla and Thunderbird I've had my parents on for years. It's not a ton to learn, and they work fine. Taking the cas…

> Taking the case of Photoshop vs. Gimp - I don't think the problem is complexity, lol. It's having to relearn everything once you're used to photoshop. (Conversely, I've never shelled out for Adobe products, and now don't want to have to relearn how to edit images in photoshop or illustrator)

I don't think this comparison is really accurate, Adobe's suite is designed for professionals that are working in the program for hours daily (e.g., ~1000 hours annually for a creative professional). There are probably some power users of The GIMP that hit similar numbers, but Creative Cloud has ~35-40 million subscribers, these are entirely different programs for entirely different classes of users.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#210

Post by thinkmassive »

ghaff wrote: post #175
bigfishrunning wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's fine. Those users who want something that's not like desktop Linux have plenty of options.

And increasingly it doesn't matter because they just live in a browser anyway.

Which also makes it easier than ever for more users to run Linux as a desktop OS :)
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