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by anaganisk 1868 days ago
What you said is correct but thats what even the commenter means, he explicitly talks about the GUI side not linux community on the whole. Lets accept that GUIs built or made for linux are not the best in terms of UX. I regularly find the linux software have the worst UI (GIMP top of the head). Unless its an electron app tho, when the UI is consistent. I also understand that its a community/solo developer effort. But, if linux wants to be a viable Desktop alternative, its time linux developers think from user perspective or bring in some UX designers to improve GUIs, or standardise a GUI toolkit/framework, which can be used to build upon by flutter or whatever. If linux wants to stick to server and Terminals then its solid.
1 comments

Counter-opinion: Most programs I ever installed from my distros repository had a reasonable, good gui experience. I once set a gtk theme which I find pleasant to look at and configured qt to adapt to it as well, no idea how they do it but it works great.

As a non-professional user of gimp, never touched photoshop in my life, gimp does all I ever needed so far and never disappointed me. I edited some vacation photos, created a few humoristic images for banter with my friends, captioned some reaction pictures for online discussion. I don't understand why gimp is said to have such a bad ui, it's easy and efficient to use in my eyes.

Also yes, the ui of electron browser based "apps" is "consistent", but it fails to integrate with everything that uses the gtk theme that I like, disregards what my window manager tells it to do window-decoration wise and is sluggish when used with picom. In addition to that it makes my laptops fan spin loudly. Programs using electron provide a user experience much worse than even a badly done curses ui. Given that those programs are often provided by businesses where "ux-developers" may work, it's probably for the best if those people don't influence the gnu/linux ecosystem in the future.

You see, "linux developers" view their programs from a user perspective all the time. You may think they don't because you have some expectancy that the user has to be your average mom, dad or ten-year old child, but thats wrong. The programs are developed foremost with the developers interest in mind and may satisfy others who have similar intentions. "linux" doesn't want anything. The parent comment already explained that.

"Linux" left server and terminal exclusivity a long time ago.

I don’t think so. I feel that GTK is pretty boring and won’t last long. Sorry if you got offended.

Also, with the development of WASM most of the stuff we do on our desktop will move to browsers and we can use the best UI ever with CSS on browsers.

> I feel that GTK is pretty boring

And for a software library, that's a good thing

> and won’t last long

Don't worry, gtk is 23 years old. It will last long enough for whatever you're trying to do, certainly longer than the javascript framework of the week.

> Also, with the development of WASM most of the stuff we do on our desktop will move to browsers

Nah. Webassembly can do some impressive stuff, but when you compile stuff to a binary blob you might as well do it for native code. Will run faster and feel better

> and we can use the best UI ever with CSS on browsers

My whole post was about why the browser ui is inferior to native applications. You should at least try to justify your position when writing up an answer in a discussion.