[prox]

Also the term “easy” is a terrible trap for any developer to use as a word. Easy would be flipping a switch, maybe one or two easy to remember credentials tops. Something like turning on your smartphone on for the first time.

Heck, like 95% of open source fails in that regard. Hell, anything Linux fails (even though progress has been made, it falls halfway short still)

[ekianjo]

> Heck, like 95% of open source fails in that regard.

That's a dubious remark. Even proprietary software most of the time fails at being easy. Easy takes great design and most software out there falls into the average.

[prox]

Open source more often than not is not quality assessed as some commercial products, and hence the UX and ease of use falls behind. So if open source as an ideal wants to be successful, it needs to step in that regard.

Take Blender which was terrible for years and years, but changed happened because the projects they did allowed them to work with professionals which could point out shortcomings.

Or GIMP, its UX is terrible still afaik.

Or lets install Linux, as long as it takes a considerable expertise and doesn’t come preloaded, people won’t switch.

[skohan]

There's a ton of software that succeeds at being easy. NPM for example is amazing - just write a simple package.json file and 99% of the time you have a perfectly portable project which you can run anywhere with a few simple commands.

[dns_snek]

I have to wonder, is this satire? package.json is notorious for not pinning dependencies by default, leading to unexpected behavior such as dependencies being updated to new minor versions when you run `npm install`, which fails the principle of least surprise.

You'll usually only learn about this after getting bitten by a bug in an auto-updated dependency and at that point you'll learn to manually pin your dependencies and use commands such as `npm ci` instead of `npm install` in your build pipeline.

As such, navigating around the NPM world is anything but easy. There are razor sharp edges and footguns lying around everywhere, just waiting for you to use them.

[prox]

Easy for “us” developers. If I mention NPM to my neighbor in construction, I would get a vacant stare. No I mean for adoption to take place, the bar needs to be a lot lower.