but seriously, look up photopea
A lot of people in this thread getting real defensive about objectively shit FOSS UI/UX. It’s not just driven by corporate familiarity or laziness, it’s a pretty major shortcoming in open source projects that never gets addressed because we constantly downplay it.
Designing for user experience isn’t solely Apple’s modern consumerist method of dumbing down, hiding complexity and smoothing corners for the largest audience. Human centered design is a deeply researched field going back to (at minimum) the second industrial revolution. Tool ergonomics, assembly line efficiency, poka-yoke design, control panel layouts for nuclear power plants, etc, etc.
I’m not asking for a design masterpiece every time but just glance at some UX guides. Require a UI review process beyond “I like how it looks”. And please, God, please condense your settings menus and make them searchable.
As someone who is planning to make software for others to use and have it be as user-friendly as possible, thank you… and I hope I can make something you can thank me for later.
Are these western-centric UX guides only? Do you have UX information for different cultures?
Also the next hbomberguy video will be delayed for another 3 months
I see this genre of post going around a lot, and it just reeks of learned helplessness.
Yeah, I get it, sometimes you’re stuck in a situation where, for whatever, the alternatives aren’t viable or practical. You feel trapped. We all do. But why is the first instinct to gripe at the cool free software for not being quite what you wanted instead of getting mad at the rapidly enshittifying megacorps that put you into this trap you’re in to begin with?
I’m mad at both tbh.
More languages should be glyphic.
found the chinese
I would love to be free of Adobe CC, but unfortunately this is the case. The alternatives are getting better, the gap is closing, but it is still there. Adobe’s time will come, but it’s not soon enough.
I’ve already learned Resolve and Motion, so I’m just waiting for my current project to be completely picture locked and out the door, then I’m done with Adobe for good! I almost have a countdown timer going I’m so excited haha
If you don’t want to face the inconvenience of learning something new to escape the grasp of technofeudalism suffer in silence, serf
To be fair, open source apps usually have terrible UI
Hot take: adobe products also have shit UI and are actively being made worse; it’s just that people are used to it (at least until adobe decides to change something again)
I’m not thinking of any Adobe competitors, actually.
At least UIs are standard now, back in my day (and still some today) people would make everything a CLI and then bitch at you when you told them that their very computationally efficient video trimming tool is cool and all, but editing video from the terminal is worse than CBT.
would make everything a CLI
What do you mean? There is nothing wrong with a CLI tool.
editing video from the terminal
Okay, I can get behind that.
Yeah, there are lots of FOSS projects that have very obviously never had input from an artist or UI designer. The Venn diagram of “people who have the programming skills to make good FOSS” and “people who know how to design a good UI” consists of two almost entirely separate circles.
There’s also the attitude that you’re seeing in this thread, where if people had a problem with UX the response from the devs is basically “skill issue, git gud”
If it’s documented… Skill issue or help out.
Most people don’t have the skills to improve UX themselves and it shouldn’t be a requirement of any software aiming for mass adoption. Frankly if you have users familiar with the product space reaching for a manual you’ve failed at UI design. It is entirely possible to design a new UX that people can still pick up and use largely without assistance
And let’s not forget that FOSS is unfortunatly often just awful Elektron apps
Mainly the good ones. The ones with the super polished UIs are most of the time aislop
Honestly I would tell people like this screenshotted poster to suck it up or go fuck themselves, because this is free software that is provided for you as is and for use as you wish. If you think the software isn’t “adjusted enough” to meet your needs, then place requests for features in the relevant channels, be patient and try to work with the existing tools on offer, or keep shelling out booku bucks for Adobe’s continually enshittifying service.
Accept your fate with the corpos instead of bitching that the community effort options aren’t in your Goldilocks zone, shitbag.
God, this is why I hated Apple users at my old IT job. They’d bitch about the continually enshittifying status quo of their software and platform, and in the same statement reject all alternatives for not being “a smooth transition”.
Edit: on a more positive note, Kritia, FreeCAD, and Kdenlive are all great and multiplatform.
This person wasn’t saying that software developers are awful for not tailoring FOSS to their specific desires, they’re venting about something that frustrates them. People should be able to vent without someone telling them to fuck themselves
Then place it in the issues/suggestions tab of the project instead of mocking the project on mainstream social media. If you’re that upset with the labor of others that you get to coast on for free, you don’t belong in the conversation.
I’m tired of dealing with these kinds of people, and I’m willing to infer that maintainers, IT personnel, and friends trying to help this guy with their proprietary problems are too.
Maybe if they were talking about a specific FOSS project, but I don’t think there’s a TintonProClips software with a yucatec maya UI in real life. If you feel that your project is being called out here, that’s on you.
They’re expressing a valid frustration about how every time you complain about [product] getting worse, you get a bunch of people telling you to essentially completely relearn how to use a computer so you can completely change your workflow and use a piece of completely unintuitive software to achieve an end result that’s similar to what you wanted [product] for, with complete disregard to any reasons why you aren’t already using that alternative.
Let people complain. Don’t proselytize for something unless the person complaining signals that they’re looking for an alternative to what they’re complaining about. Don’t proselytize for something that the average user will just find confusing. If you do proselytize for something, know that you’re opening both yourself and the thing you’re advertising to criticism. And for the love of god, do not link a github repo to someone that you aren’t damn sure will know what to do with it
I think it’s OK to complain about free software on social media. It’s also OK to tell people that sometimes, if they want something to be better, they might need to be the ones to roll up their sleeves and make it happen. But not everyone has the time or the technical wherewithal to fix every tool they use. I sure couldn’t implement every improvement I ever thought of for free software, I don’t have the time.
But I think It’s still nice, for maintainers and for people thinking about getting into open source, to get a rolling feel for what gripes a lot of people share about open software. If I have a problem and I know a lot of people share my frustration, I’m much more motivated to try to fix it than if it’s something I and no one else care about.
Peak Consumer Brain individuals cannot understand the concept of actually working together to make and accomplish things, all they know is ‘confirm transaction’ and ‘overdraft fee’.
I think it’s OK to complain about free software on social media.
I think it’s like complaining about a free product someone made in their own time and then delivered it to your doorstep.
If you don’t like it, OK, don’t use it. This isn’t something you bought. Using the thing doesn’t help the dev in any way, unless you also donate or contribute.We live in a time where private FOSS devs of popular projects get buried under AI slop bug reports from multi-billion-$ corporations who use their work without paying, and death threats on social media if they made an unpopular change to the thing they put out there for free.
I think it’s more akin to complaining about the public transit in a city where the public transit funded via donations. Yeah, you could pitch in, and maybe you do, but it’s still a massive undertaking that is also massively underfunded, and even if you have an idea of what you want to change, you might not have the skills to fix it yourself, or even to file an actually helpful bug report. Should you learn how to engage with the process of opensource tool maintenance? Yes! It’s a cool and fun thing to do. Is it hard for most people who aren’t familiar with software development? Also very yes.
To be clear, I don’t think maintainers have any obligation to see or think about whatever gets posted to social media. Trying to stay on top of what the internet is saying is an impossible task. But as a user and sometimes contributor, I like reading about what trials other users are going through, and if a complaint resonates with me I like to chat about it, and occasionally I’ll pull down the source code for a project and see if I can figure out how to patch whatever it is we’re talking about. For most of these cases I’ll give up or get distracted before I have anything worthwhile to contribute, but every once in a while I’ll get a PR submitted that spawned from a random conversation on the internet.
That belongs in a feature request though, not on mainstream social media. I’m not going to comb through feeds to try and figure out what bugfixes or features need priority development.
I would even go as so far to say actually placing the request in the proper place matters more than donations.
Inkscape as well
Inkscape kicks ASS god i love Inkscape
deleted by creator
Seriously fuck the boot lickers.
I think this is a needlessly combative stance. If your goal is to get new users to engage with the development side, calling their criticism “bitching” isn’t going to do that. Most software users don’t have the first clue about software development and wouldn’t even know what exactly to say if given a suggestion form. The best feedback a lot of new users can give is “the user experience is clunky and unintuitive”.
My stance has been forged by the repeated disappointing interactions that I’ve had with people who I spend painstaking amounts of time illustrating how to solve their problems with these tools and why a certain design quirk is the way it is vs. the proprietary model.
Without fail, the kinds of users like the screenshotted poster will look at me with a blank face or reply in forum chats with the same statement: “But can’t they just make it usable like [enshittified software] instead?”
How can we bridge this gap? At least to the point where users can give constructive feedback like “I wanted to do this thing, and searched for a way here and here. It took me hours to figure out how to do it. It would have been intuitive if…” Maybe we will have to be proactive about UX issues and have proper channels for this information?
It would have been intuitive if…
One issue I see with suggestions is that everyone thinks their a designer. What they suggest might even be an improvement for that one small tool but would make the overall experience less intuitive. Overall, I think OSS should cater to their existing users plus a little bit more. Make the experience better for the people who really want to try to use it but eventually give up in frustration. Over time, it will improve and the user base will increase.
It’s not the same, the idea is that you are suggesting things that are not suitable replacements. You can’t then say “bUt ItS fReE sOfTwArE” as it that makes it a suitable replacement.
That’s the kicker though. The poster framed it as Adobe was the only game in town that was abusing them, a friend told them about a service that was free and had their entire feature set, but it was rejected due to UI and platform concerns.
Not all free software will reach feature or UI parity with their proprietary competition. That’s just reality. However, if you are paying a grand total of $0 for the alternative and have no interest in being constructive either through submitting a feature request or contributing code (donating doesn’t have an obligation for anything so in this circumstance that wouldn’t factor), then you should just either accept the software “as is” (which is a key component of most licenses), or accept that it’s not for you.
Stay with the devil that you know if you disregard positioned alternatives for not being “suitable enough”, and if you want to change that, be proactive and open-minded. Not bitch.
I read it more as a critique on the self-satisfied recommendation for something that just isn’t the drop in replacement they’re making it out to be.
Don’t get me wrong, I love foss software. 3 out of 4 computers in my household run linux and I‘ve converted a handful of people already.
However, I couldn’t and wouldn’t replace photoshop with gimp/krita, premiere or davinci with kdenlive, etc. for the time being. Not because they’re bad but because I use them professionally and cannot take any risks. Adobe is shit but their software is a known quantity.
Privately, I would never pay for Adobe (not paying anyways, my boss does). And for personal use and maybe smaller (somewhat tech savvy) freelancers, I‘d absolutely recommend everyone at least try the FOSS alternatives.
But, I‘d never go „um akhtshually, foss program xy is just as good as adobe program xy“. Because while they might be as powerful in theory, that doesn’t help if they’re a hurdle to use.
That’s a fine, nuanced take. I think the key part is that accepting that you are using a flawed option because it’s critical for your employer’s standard practices or required for a client’s needs (or is the only option that is acceptable to said employer or client) is perfectly fine. You are accepting that the enshittified software is aggravating and not what you’d prefer, but aren’t dismissive of alternatives and would consider them if you had the flexibility to.
What I’m trying to poke at here is people finding the “perfect savior” to their existing tools that were made out of choice (that enshittified) or complacency (unwilling to move until they find something that is effectively a reverse engineered clone). Of course, that usually doesn’t exist, so they whine about how “FOSS doesn’t match everything I want!” despite being capable of learning and not truly bound to their tools by say an employer.
“Hurdle to use” (In my opinion) is just the outcome of being used to the old platform rather than poor design by the developer (even if some FOSS projects may need some UI love).
There are indeed a lot of people who completely dismiss good things because they’re not perfect.
But I‘d argue „hurdle to use“ goes a bit further.
UX is obviously a part of that. It’s the main reason you can’t make me touch gimp, for example.But, on top of that, a lot of those foss programs require a more involved setup, especially if you want all features to work. Getting hardware de-/encoding to work in kdenlive, for example, isn’t necessarily something everyone can easily do but something that’s absolutely necessary for professional use.
And of course there’s the endless gamble, whether the foss community will happily aid you or curse you, when you’re asking for guidance.
Or if the tutorials and documentation need you to use the terminal for setup or certain features.
Most paid software has both a large community of users (forums, tutorials) and is polished to an extent that every idiot can install and start using it.That’s what I mean with hurdle. I’m personally tech savvy enough, that I could deal with any problem that might occur, even if I‘m not willing to learn a developer designed UI, but lots of people I know would not.
That’s why, for example, for video editing software, I love to recommend DaVinci resolve. It’s closed source but it’s free, polished n powerful. (And in my humble opinion better that Adobe premiere in every single way). Good software doesn’t have to cost anything, but it also doesn’t always have to be foss either. There’s a middle ground.
gimp/krita
I think this is one thing people who don’t make art don’t really understand when it comes to making digital art. Changing the program you draw with is sometimes like changing from watercolors to oil paints; the “replacement” just can’t do what the artist is using the original for in the first place. It does not matter if it has 80% of the same technical specs if you can’t use it for what you are doing
Yeah,man. Can you believe those carpenters that still want to buy hammers from big tool? Our federation of unemployed navel gazers has built at least three hammer replacements that consist of a rock attached to a thick stick with Elmer’s glue, but they just wanna throw their money at the big tool companies. I even told them that our next iteration will have one side of the rock flattened for better hammering, but they keep going on about “ergonomics”, and “effectiveness”.
I swear, I think all the open source people see software as toys and only as toys. For those of us who actually use it to do things, it’s a tool, and it needs to work like the tools I’ve been using at work for more decades than I want to own up to.
You are hilariously misinformed about things lmao
Nah, you’re just delusional that your toy hammer is a good hammer.
Bro OSS runs the fucking world. You are using stacks and fucking stacks of it right now. It is the backbone of literally fucking everything. It is in some respects the most serious software that has ever been produced. Your delusional codependence on an abusive monopoly is just that.
Bro OSS runs the fucking world
Yes, I’m well aware.
OSS office productivity tools still suck out loud, and the OSS nerds should stick to making widgets that make networking work better and keep their noses out of a domain they clearly don’t understand. Because open source office and graphic design software sucks out loud, and always has.
Get snooty with people who want to criticize OSS compilers, networking, and development tools all you want. But don’t try to push GIMP as an equivalent to Photoshop or the ridiculous Open Office suite as being in the same class as Microsoft. Don’t get me wrong - I wish to fuck there were a worthwhile alternative, but the industry standards are industry standards for a reason, and the people who make OSS don’t spend enough time working as an admin grunt to have the faintest clue why their “alternatives” aren’t worth the time it takes to install them and then uninstall them when it takes 20 minutes to create a document template.
Dude, the open source tools only differ in the sense that you own the software and therefore are immune to enshittification, and that they are provided as is without direct customer support.
If you’re saying a particular “hammer” is missing a component that you relied on previously with what you purchased from “big tool”, there’s a suggestions box right there that costs you nothing and will be read by the maintainers. You’ll have to just be patient and try it out once it’s released (for free mind you).
Also, that hammer from “big tool” has an IED planted into the handle that will explode if you don’t swipe your credit card into it every month. Just saying.
They also differ in the sense that you have to completely relearn how to do everything you’ve been doing your whole career and usually in a way that is more complicated and less efficient.
It’s not missing components, it’s the fact that the most commonly used components are clunkier, less user friendly, and feel like an afterthought tacked on after someone made the software to prove they could.witbout ever talking to anyone who uses the software to do their job. If Open Office were as good a suite of office software as Microsoft, it’d be the industry standard. No business wants to pay Microsoft license fees just because, they do it because the tools work better and create a better end product.
If Open Office were as good a suite of office software as Microsoft, it’d be the industry standard. No business wants to pay Microsoft license fees just because, they do it because the tools work better and create a better end product.
The idea that everything that businesses do is as efficient as physically possible and the executives are all mega geniuses that are incapable of making bad decisions (or are even incentivized to make good decisions) is untrue.
COBAL is not the greatest programming language to ever be invented. It, and the various pieces of dogshit software that companies collectively shell out billions for every year, are used because they are entrenched in their respective industries and corporate structures, not because of their brilliant design.
The idea that everything that businesses do is as efficient as physically possible and the executives are all mega geniuses that are incapable of making bad decisions (or are even incentivized to make good decisions) is untrue.
I never said that was true. But I’ve sat through enough budget meetings to know for certain that if Open Office were even “good enough”, let alone “as good” it would be the corporate standard, because everyone hates paying for Office.
But it isn’t, for all the reasons I listed before.
freeCAD is great and recently it got a whole lot better!
I have a hard time taking a rant seriously when it includes such a neologistic gem as ‘booku’.
How old does a word have to be to satisfy you?
“Beaucoup” is like 800 years old. Shitty spelling isn’t a neologism.
Not the lemming you replied to, but I’ve never seen the word booku before, and had no clue what it meant until your post. Still don’t know what beaucoup is doing in an English post but sure
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard this as well, but never seen it spelled before. My grandad and dad used to use it to essentially mean “a ridiculous amount”.
It’s a loanword.
Lemmy users are never beating the reputation of taking anything and everything in the most literal way.
Yes, I have literally stolen the word “beaucoup” from you. ;-)
Apologies - took it from a video that used it to describe a ludicrous amount of money being spent. Same spelling, by the way (from closed captions)
‘Beaucoup’ is the word you were looking for. Although Wiktionary says that ‘bookoo’ and similar spellings are indeed used alternatively, possibly popularised by US soldiers in Vietnam. And, although the French pronunciation is ‘boh-koo’, Louisianan is indeed ‘bookoo’.
So my jab about it being a neologism was inadvertently on the nose, though belated by fifty years.
Ngl learning new UI is pretty easy.
That’s a young man’s game
This reads like someone who just isn’t willing to learn whatever new workflow the software requires. If that’s the issue, then that person will never leave their enshittified walled gardens. There is no workflow that matches or imitates the one you learned, it’s probably copyrighted, you’re best bet is to jump ship and learn a new paradigm.
Also, have yet to run into an alternative that’s actively recommended which doesn’t at least have a windows build. LibreOffice, Krita, Blender, Darktable, GIMP, Audacity, Inkscape, and Openshot - the most common recs as alternatives to apps, all have windows as an option.
i found Krita to not really work well for me and my drawing tablet. i went with MediBang instead, and it’s been going well
Oh no slight inconvenience, how will he ever deal with it
Linux only? Yes please. Do you know your distro waifu/catgirl/catboy? It rules.
I’d like to file a complaint, my distro didn’t come with a catgirl? ☹️
Counterpoint: All distros come with Xenia, she’s a canonically trans foxgirl.
I run NixOS. Mine came with too many. We can share.
Thank you! One with glasses please~ :3
kin tukult je’el u páajtal u sa’atal ti’ teech Jayp’éel jaatso’ob ti’ le ecuación
Skill issue
I see Resolve has just moved to challenge Lightroom too, which is kinda of amazing.
Between the affinity apps, reaper and Resolve there’s a fairly competent replacement set for Adobe apps on windows.
I wish Linux was as good.
My main gripe is the lack of professional typesetting software. Scribus just doesn’t cut it.
My main gripe is the lack of professional typesetting software. Scribus just doesn’t cut it.
LaTeX /s/s/s
i’ve heard a lot of good things about typst
I’m not sure if one /s cancels another out or multiplies it.
I’ve used it to set academic (mostly scientific) works and it was rather lovely in that context… But it really highlights that sometimes efficiency isn’t always what you want in a creative process.
Swapped Adobe Audition for Reaper. No regrets
