Free software scares normal people • Hacker News Board

Re: Free software scares normal people

#181

Post by jacobr1 » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 7:45 PM UTC

vayup wrote: post #171

squeedles wrote: post #10

Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one. Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I j…

Spot on. Defending simplicity takes a lot of energy and commitment. It is not sexy. It is a thankless job. But doing it well takes a lot of skill, skill that is often disparaged by many communities as "political non sense"[1]. It is not a surprise that free software world has this problem. But it is not a uniquely free software world problem. It is there in the industry as well. But the marketplace serves as a realit…

The cycle repeats frequently in industry. New waves of startups address a problem with better UX, and maybe some other details like increased automated and speed using more modern architectures. But feature-creep eventually makes the UX cumbersome, the complexity makes it hard to migrate to new paradigms or at least doing so without a ton of baggage, so they in turn are displaced by new startups.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#182

Post by some_furry » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 7:46 PM UTC

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.

> Yet artists expect to be treated differently.

Because it's a different job!

Your post is like asking, "Why is breathing free but food costs money?"

Re: Free software scares normal people

#183

Post by diabeetusman » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 7:53 PM UTC

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…

To add on to this, there's no standardized way of indicating what needs to be typed out and what needs to be replaced. `foo --bar ` might be a good example command in a README, but I had to help someone the other day when they ran `foo --bar `, not realizing they should have replaced the as well as just the text.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#184

Post by cosmic_cheese » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #163

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…

What do you see as wrong or missing "fine details" in, say, Cinnamon?

Assuming that the point of comparison is Windows (since it’s a rough XP/7 analogue), any difference in behaviors, patterns, or conventions that might differ from what a long time Windows user would expect, including things that some might write off as insignificant. In particular, anything relating to the user’s muscle memory (such as key shortcuts, menu item positions, etc) needs to match.

The DE needs to be as close to a drop-in replacement as possible while remaining legally distinct. The less the user needs to relearn the better.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#185

Post by devilbunny » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #128

LiquidSky wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the linked article addresses that. They're not advocating for removing the full-feature UI, they just advise having a simple version that does the one thing (or couple of things) most users want in a simple way. Users who want to do more can just use the full version.

Users don't want "to do more". They want to do "that one extra thing". Going from the "novice" version to the "full version" just to get that one extra thing is a real problem for a lot of people. But how do you address this as a software designer?

I'm not a coder, so I'm not going to pretend that this solution is easy to implement (it might be, but I wouldn't assume so), but how about allowing you to expose the "expert" options just temporarily (to find the tool you need) and then allow adding that to your new "novice plus" custom menus? I.e., if you use a menu option from the expert menu X number of times, it just shows up even though your default is the novice view.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#186

Post by immibis » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 8:00 PM UTC

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.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#187

Post by initramfs » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 8:01 PM UTC

True in many ways.

I wanted to write an article or short blog post about how Windows 10, menus and javascript, increasingly tuck away important tools/buttons in little folds. This was many months ago.

I want to write it and title it, "What the tuck?" But tuck refers exactly to the kind of hidden menus that make those so called sleek and simple UIs for the the 80% of users.

The problem is that it stupefies computing literacy, especially mobile web versions.

Perhaps not every casual web browser needs to sit at a desk to learn website navigation. Then again, they may never learn anything productive on their own.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#188

Post by threetonesun » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 8:04 PM UTC

andreldm wrote: post #11

If handbrake scares them, don’t you dare to demonstrate how to use ffmpeg. I remember when I used handbrake for the first time and thought “wow, it’s much more convenient than struggling with ffmpeg”.

Using ffmpeg to convert one file to another remains probably my main use of general LLM web searches. This isn't to say it does a good job with that, but it's still ahead of me.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#189

Post by cwillu » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 8:05 PM UTC

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.

You know that (some) people get paid to work on free software, right?

Re: Free software scares normal people

#190

Post by f33d5173 » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 8:07 PM UTC

People want features, and they're willing to learn complicated UIs to get them. A software that has hyper simplified options has a very limited audience. Take his example: we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file, yet whose understanding of video amounts to wanting it to be "normal" so they can play it. For such a person, there are two paths: become familiar enough with video formats that you understand exactly what you want, and correspondingly can manipulate a tool like handbrake to get it, or stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works. A software that appeals to the weird purgatory in the middle necessarily has a very limited audience. In practice, this small audience is served by websites. Someone searches "convert x to y" and a website comes up that does the conversion. Knowing some specialized software that does that task (and only that one narrow task) puts you so far into the domain of the specialist that you can manage to figure out a specialist tool.