| The problem there is, what happens when you get more than one chef in the kitchen? If you want to see what I mean, checkout the Desktop Environment scene. There's so many different views on what is good UX, that if you have 1000 different designers trying to make a UI to the same program, you end up with 1000 different interpretations of what this program should "look like". Free Software doesn't end up looking the way it does because anyone wants it to look bad; it's the way it is because that's all anyone in particular needs it to be. I don't need a GUI for diff and patch. Some people prefer one, and that's fine. Those people can go ahead and get any of the many implementations of a visual diff/patch program. That is their choice, just as it is mine to just use the command line utility as an example. UI/UX as it is taught in the industry comes hand-in-hand with curation, which implies a level of control over the end-user's choices in user experience, dependency graph, etc. Software freedom accepts that the ugly choice is still a choice. And maintenance-wise, that choice (the uglier, low dependency one) is a heck of a sensible default from the distribution maintainer's point of view. Same functional capability, and a heck of a lot less cruft to work with. Besides which, in my experience, most UX folks I meet are cripplingly dependent on a single technology stack I personally have no desire to see everything reimplemented in, which is JavaScript/HTML/CSS. I'd suffer through learning something like TCL/TK before resorting to adopting that nightmare of a toolchain. I'm what you might call a curmudgeonly old man in taste however, so that comes with the territory. There is also the resource intensive vs. pretty trade-off to be made as well. Do I want that sexy Aero/Peek, pseudo 3D, everything has an animation look sucking up my potentially valuable and short supply CPU cycles? Or is minimalist X with a minimal window manager without widgets or gadgets or whatever they call all those extra doodads these days good enough? Software tradeoffs are unfortunately an issue of always on engineering all the time. Something a lot of people don't necessarily find compatible with their tastes. It's certainly a good thing more people are talking about it though. Will have to keep my eye out for new distro's if the more UX savvy take a bite into making something. |
Programmers perhaps do not care for this. But everyone else does. A good, competitive UI is non-optional.
> [Free Software looks bad] because that's all anyone in particular needs it to be.
This is the fundamental disconnect! It's all programmers need it to be. Regular, normal people? They also need it to be fluid, pretty, and intuitive.
Yeah, that's a need, not a want, as much as we might wish it otherwise. We might wish that people had the strength of will/whatever to stick with comparatively worse UIs in exchange for freedom, but we know that's not true, and that won't happen.
> UI/UX as it is taught in the industry comes hand-in-hand with curation [...] Software freedom accepts that the ugly choice is still a choice.
These are not mutually exclusive. UI/UX in free software can come by default as a highly refined and curated experience, with an option to switch things out if you want.
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I agree that there is a fundamental tradeoff in time and resources between implementing "real features" and UI/UX. Even big corporations with billions of dollars to burn struggle with this. But what we need to realize is that UI/UX is a real feature.
If our priority is getting more people to adopt OSS, then it needs to be done. If our priority is getting shit done in the short term, well - I guess you can hold off on it.