291–300 of 641 posts
You can always cherry pick apps to fit a narrative.
FOSS apps with simple interfaces: Signal, Firefox, VLC, Gnome [1], Organic Maps, etc, the list goes on and on.
[1] it’s not a simple app but I think there’s a good argument to be made that it’s simpler/cleaner than commercial competitors.
Over the years I've gotten really tired of this obsession with "normal people" and not just because I'm one of the so called power users. This is really part of a growing effort to hide the computer away as an implementation detail. https://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/ That's what "UX" is all about. "Scripting the users", minimizing and channeling their interactions within the system. Providing one button tha…
Most people don't need computer (full feature power, full power of choice) to solve their task, as could be seen with the smartphones, which are designed as appliances more or less. I don't want most of consumer electronics to act like a computer, it is a deficiency for me. I chose "dumb" Linux-based eBook reader instead of Android-based, because I want it to read books, full stop.
The problem is nobody makes this distinction for some reason. In my mind there's two types of software - the kind for doing things, and the kind for mostly consuming. As the wise Britney Spears once said, "there's only two types of people in the world: those that entertain, and the ones that observe"
It makes no sense for your CAD program you're building a company out from to be dumbed down.
I feel like the author wants everything to be Apple simplified. That all users should dumb down to on off go and stop. Ask chat got for anything else. I disagree for so many obvious reasons it's pointless to iterate them. We as a society need to get MORE capable, more critical, and improve our cognitive abilities; not the opposite.
I’m not sure I’d describe Apple products as simplified any more, take a look at the settings in iOS for example, it has grown in complexity with each release.
The simplicity Apple had was always a mistake, an artifact of their hubris.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people don't need computer (full feature power, full power of choice) to solve their task, as could be seen with the smartphones, which are designed as appliances more or less. I don't want most of consumer electronics to act like a computer, it is a deficiency for me. I chose "dumb" Linux-based eBook reader instead of Android-based, because I want it to read books, full stop.
This quickly falls apart when you need to do stuff and be productive. Reading as a pass time is a different thing. The problem is nobody makes this distinction for some reason. In my mind there's two types of software - the kind for doing things, and the kind for mostly consuming. As the wise Britney Spears once said, "there's only two types of people in the world: those that entertain, and the ones that observe" It…
I use it mostly for work and academic papers, not for amusement.
Most of the regular simple pdf viewers on the PC don't have this kind of productivity functionality in mind. They might have some, but in general they are not designed to work with read-only text.
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."
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 start up new highly opinionated projects (e.g. crunchbang, Omarchy), the feedback is generally more positive because those who try it and stick with it are the ones who like the project's opinions. The people who don't like those opinions just stop using it. There isn't a large, established base of longstanding users who are invested in workflows, features, and options.
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The contributors of free software tend to be power users who want to ensure their use case works. I don't think they're investing a lot of thought into the 80/20 use case for normal/majority or users or would risk hurting their workflow to make it easier for others
> contributors of free software tend to be power users or, simply put, nerds it takes both a different background, approach and skillset to design ux and interface if anything FOSS should figure out how to attract skilled artists so majority of designs and logos doesn't look so blatantly amateurish.
This means they want to add features they couldn't get anywhere else, and already know how to use the existing UI. Onboarding new users is just not their problem or something they care about - They are interested in their own utility, because they aren't getting paid to care about someone else's.
It's not a "nerd" thing.
Seems like a win-win, take my money solution, for some reason the market (and I guess that means investors) are not pursuing this as a consumer service?