Free software scares normal people

Making a complicated and powerful piece of software is difficult. Just slapping a user interface that _allows_ using all the power, is hard enough. With that interface, the simple thing is difficult, and the complex thing is also difficult.

The really hard problem to solve is making an UI where the simple thing is easy and the complex thing is still possible.

But that requires 1) strong leadership 2) people with the correct skill set for UX design.

Making a clean UI means cutting things out. And that's not easy in many large OSS projects because every menu item and every button is someone's pet feature. The leaders in the projects are often the most senior _developers_, not UX experts. It's (I'm assuming) a lot less common to have good telemetry and user labs in OSS than it is for commercial software. So you also might not know exactly what features people use and how they use them, making it even harder to remove features.

I think the author is absolutely right. If Handbrake is intimidating, or hard to use without reading a manual in order to do just the simple use case that 80% of users have, then they have failed in making a good UX. A good UX would make the simple thing easy without sacrificing power for the complex case. And the author is absolutely having the right idea when making a simpler wrapper for the powerful software.

I think There’s a survivorship problem though. This software needs to be marketed and maintained to stay in the zeitgeist. It would have to compete with competitors that do more than just the simple things.

I think it’s essentially survivorship bias. The simple applications don’t get traction and later get abandoned.

I recently came across a particular GUI quirk in a Linux distro, which went against my experience with similar UIs in Windows, Mac and Chrome. There were existing bug reports for it, attributing the cause to upstream. Upstream project said they were following the GNOME guidelines.

Eventually, I found the bug report that was filed against the guideline itself. The person who wrote that part of the guideline had responded that he made the decision based on a poll (presumably of people in the mailing list), and that no-one really had a strong opinion on it. He asserted that it was no big deal, and refused to reconsider the guideline.

Now, I think it is perfectly OK to make the wrong decision when it comes to something outside your expertise. If you are a backend software expert, it is OK for you to do the wrong thing when it comes to the UI for a project you are supporting for free. But when someone who does know that field makes a reasoned suggestion, you should not really be doubling down.

A UI/UX designer in this situation is not exactly going to be prepared fork and maintain a whole stack over this. It just means that the experience will be worse for users.

If we're still talking about an amateur doing it, isn't their understanding of the possibilities petty limited?

No, this is poison. They constantly change things, and Free Software would be racing to clone them, continually leaving familiarity behind in order to be a wonky version of the real thing. That battle is lost when it starts. Firefox was a great version of Firefox, everybody loved it (except when it locked up the entire system), nobody thought it was a knock-off of IE. Firefox then became a shit version of Chrome (I assume on Google's orders), and eventually developed into a good enough version of Chrome, shedding all of its users along the way. The Linux desktop is doing better than Firefox now.

The advantage to Free Software is that you don't have to change everything with Windows, Apple, Adobe, or Google demand you do (unless they grab control of a FOSS project, like in Firefox's case.) There are a number of writers who recommend Linux and Free software only for that reason - that once you get a workflow going, you don't want to change it according to corporate whims.

> practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window

This can be a problem. But it will be less of a problem with LLMs. We need to encourage amateur (and proficient) Linux adopters and users to lean on AI to deal with anything giving them problems. I had an LLM walk me through updating a .deb package in MATE to match HEAD upstream, and to do it in a way that would be replaced when Debian updated the package itself. This is something I've been carefully avoiding learning for a decade, and if I had taken the effort to try to learn, it would be weeks of research and I'd have messed up the system multiple times along the way. Instead, after a few false starts, I did it and gained the knowledge to do it again.