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Free software scares normal people

danieldelaney.net

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Re: Free software scares normal people

#321

Post by Andrex »

sfRattan wrote: post #297
Andrex wrote: post #267

OP should check out Gnome Circle: https://circle.gnome.org The problem with why so many OSS/free software apps look bad can be demonstrated by the (still ongoing) backlash to Gnome 3+. It just gets exhausting defending every decision to death. Sometimes projects need the spine to say "no, we're not doing that."

GNOME 3+ developers put themselves in the inevitable (and unenviable) position of defending every decision to death because they limited the user's ability to make many, many decisions that were possible in previous versions . There's nothing wrong with an opinionated desktop environment or even an opinionated Linux distribution. But, prior to GNOME 3, the project was highly configurable. Now it is not. When people s…

Ideally you'd want to add selectable options for users in a way that's sustainable long-term and not just panic-adding things all over the place because of user demands. That's how you get the Handbrake situation that OP article is complaining about.

Gnome 3 was a big update and adding options, which does happen, is not free. There were changes from Gnome 2 and 3 and adding some options "back" from Gnome 2 is really asking for that feature to be rewritten from scratch (not all the time, but a lot of the time).

That the Gnome team has different priorities from other DEs, one of them being "keep the design consistent and sustainable," is completely valid and preferred by many users like myself.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#322

Post by Nathanba »

array_key_first wrote: post #280
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Familiarity is massively undersold in the Linux desktop adoption discussion. Having desktop environments that are near 1:1 clones of the commercial platforms (preferably paired with a distribution that's designed to be bulletproof and practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window) would go so far for making Linux viable for users sitting in the middle of the bell curve of technical capability. It's…

The main problem with this is that the commercial offerings are pretty much just bad. Windows isn't the way it is because of some purposeful design or anything. No, it's decades of poor decisions after poor decisions. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, is intuitive on Windows. It's familiar! But it is not intuitive. If you conform to what these commercial offerings do, you are actively making your software worse. On pur…

I don't even think that it remained very familiar aside from a taskbar (that also changed in win11) and the fact that there are desktop icons when you install things via double clicking (the double click installing also optionally changed with the Microsoft store and the msi installers are almost entirely gone these days, totally different uis pop up now). Even core things that people definitely use like the uninstallation, settings etc. ui has changed completely for the worse. Windows has also changed a lot of its core ui over the years like the taskbar, the clock, the startmenu etc. I guess one thing you could say is that it was a gradual change over many versions but everytime people hate it. Really, what Linux should have done is what Windows has done with WSL: Offer a builtin compatability layer so that you can install windows apps on linux, perhaps prompting you to enter a windows license and then it will launch those apps in a VM, even per window/app.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#323

Post by hombre_fatal »

finghin wrote: post #42
DrewADesign wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.) In dev work, the complexity is obvious, and that makes it easy for outsiders to understand— they look at the code we’re writing and say “wow you can read that?!” I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. With…

It’s also about keeping things simple, hierarchical, and very predictable. These do not go hand in hand with the feature creep of collaborative FOSS projects, as others point out here.

Good point. A good interface usually demands a unified end-to-end vision, and that usually comes from one person who has sat down to mull it over and make a bunch of good executive decisions.

And then you need to implement that, which is never an easy task, and maintain the eternal vigilance to both adhere to the vision but also fit future changes into that vision (or vice versa).

All of that is already hard to do when you're trying to build something. Only harder in a highly collaborative voluntary project where it's difficult or maybe even impossible to take that sort of ownership.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#324

Post by BobbyTables2 »

LtWorf wrote: post #290
DrewADesign wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.) In dev work, the complexity is obvious, and that makes it easy for outsiders to understand— they look at the code we’re writing and say “wow you can read that?!” I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. With…

> Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces Nor can the design world, for that matter. They think that making slightly darker gray text on gray background using a tiny font and leaving loads of empty space is peak design. Meanwhile my father cannot use most websites because of this.

What pisses me off is that the “brutalist” style in the 1990s was arguably perfect. Having standardized persistent menus, meaningful compact toolbars was nice.

Then the world threw away the menus, adopted an idiotic “ribbon” that uses more screen real estate. Unsatisfied, we dumbed down desktop apps to look like mobile apps, even though input technology remains different.

Websites also decided to avoid blue underlined text for links and be as nonstandard as possible.

Frankly, developers did UI better before UI designers went off the deep end.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#325

Post by BobbyTables2 »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #306
LtWorf wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces Nor can the design world, for that matter. They think that making slightly darker gray text on gray background using a tiny font and leaving loads of empty space is peak design. Meanwhile my father cannot use most websites because of this.

As I age, this x1000. Even simple slack app on my windows laptop - clicking in the overview scroll bar is NOT "move down a page". It seems to be "the longer you click, the further it moves" or something equally disgusting. Usually, I dock my laptop and use an external mouse with wheel, and it's easy to do what I want. With a touchpad? Forget it.. I'm clicking 20x to get it to move to the top - IF I can hit the 5-pixe…

Indeed.

Win95 was peak UI design.

I don’t understand modern trends.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#326

Post by SftwrSvior81 »

f33d5173 wrote: post #313
robenkleene wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this example: > we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file Why are you arriving at the conclusion that this requires complex software, rather than just a simple UI that says "Drop video file here" and "Fix It" below? E.g., instead of your conclusion "stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works", another possibility is the simple UI I de…

The issue is that downloading a software, for most people, implies an investment in the task the software does that is unlikely to be paid off if it only does a single simple task. If I'm going out of my way to download something, then I'm probably willing to learn a few knobs that give me more control. Hence why I suggested that such a person would rather use a website. This is really just my read for why this sort…

> an investment in the task the software does that is unlikely to be paid off if it only does a single simple task

I don't think that's true at all. The tool linked here is exactly the kind of utility that does one single task and that people are happy to download. Most people use software to solve a problem, not to play around with it and figure out if they have a use for it.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#327

Post by fragmede »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #306
LtWorf wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces Nor can the design world, for that matter. They think that making slightly darker gray text on gray background using a tiny font and leaving loads of empty space is peak design. Meanwhile my father cannot use most websites because of this.

As I age, this x1000. Even simple slack app on my windows laptop - clicking in the overview scroll bar is NOT "move down a page". It seems to be "the longer you click, the further it moves" or something equally disgusting. Usually, I dock my laptop and use an external mouse with wheel, and it's easy to do what I want. With a touchpad? Forget it.. I'm clicking 20x to get it to move to the top - IF I can hit the 5-pixe…

With a touchpad? Use two fingers to scroll (also works horizontally). Who's managing to hit a tiny scrollbar that disappears with a touchpad‽

Re: Free software scares normal people

#328

Post by DrewADesign »

hilong2 wrote: post #314
DrewADesign wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.) In dev work, the complexity is obvious, and that makes it easy for outsiders to understand— they look at the code we’re writing and say “wow you can read that?!” I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. With…

One thing I still struggle with is writing interfaces for complex use cases in an intuitive and simple manner that minimizes required movements and context switching. Are there any good resources for developing good UX for necessarily complex use cases?

Honestly, it’s a really deep topic — for a while I majored in interface/interaction design in school— and getting good at it is like getting good at writing. It’s not like amateurs can’t write solid stories, but they probably don’t really understand the decisions they’re making and the factors involved, and success usually involves accidentally being influenced by the right combination of things at the right time.

The toughest hurdle to overcome as a developer is not thinking about the gui as a thin client for the application, because to the user, the gui is the application. Developers intuitively keep state in their head and know what to look for in a complex field of information, and often get frustrated when not everything is visible all at once. Regular users are quite different— think about what problems people use your software to solve, think about the process they’d use to solve them, and break it down into a few primary phases or steps, and then consider everything they’d want to know or be able to do in each of those steps. Then, figure out how you’re going to give focus to those things… this could be as drastic as each step having its own screen, or as subtle as putting the cursor in a different field.

Visually grouping things, by itself, is a whole thing. Important things to consider that are conceptually simple but difficult to really master are informational hierarchy and how to convey that through visual hierarchy, gestalt, implied lines, type hierarchy, thematic grouping (all buttons that initiate a certain type of action, for example, might have rounded corners.)

You want to communicate the state of whatever process, what’s required to move forward and how the user can make that happen, and avoid unintentionally communicating things that are unhelpful. For example, putting a bunch of buttons on the same vertical axis might look nice, but it could imply a relationship that doesn’t exist. That sort of thing.

A book that helps get you into the designing mindset even if it isn’t directly related to interface design is Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. People criticize it like it’s an academic tome — don’t take it so seriously. It shows a way of critically thinking about things from the users perspective, and that’s the most important part of design.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#329

Post by DrewADesign »

Cotterzz wrote: post #111
DrewADesign wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been beating this drum for many years. There are some big cultural rifts and workflow difficulties. Unless FOSS products are run by project managers rather than either developers or designers, it’s a tough nut. Last I looked, gimp has been really tackling this effort more aggressively than most.

gimp has been my goto when I want to explain bad ui, developer designed ui, or just typical foss ui I'm glad they're fixing it. It's also my image editor of choice.

Yeah I’ve been using it as a go-to example for the wrongest approach to UI design for years. I’m glad to see they’re working harder than most to fix some of the underlying problems.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#330

Post by Forgeties79 »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #308
singhrac wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One summer in middle school our family computer failed. We bought a new motherboard from Microcenter but it didn’t come with a Windows license, so I proposed we just try Ubuntu for a while. My mom had no trouble adjusting to it. It was all just computer to her in some ways.

Sometime around 2012, Windows XP started having issues on my parent's PC, so I installed Xubuntu on it (my preferred distro at the time). I told them that "it works like Windows", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer + scanner they had worked great! I went back home 2 states away, and expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it…

Mint is definitely what I recommend to people who hate windows now but are nervous about swapping to Linux. Bazzite if they’re gamers.
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