Do you have any specific notable examples? In my experience, FOSS tends to take a more no-nonsense approach to things.
How does a product that defaults to its own proprietary for-profit offerings providing a better user experience?
The argument I hear most of is that people are just used to what they’ve used in the past, and having difficulty moving to an alternative because of that isn’t indicative of the alternative offering worse UX, but rather an unwillingness to learn anything by the user.
If you try to get a professional Photoshop or After Effects or Resolve or Solidworks or Quickbooks etc etc. user to use a FOSS equivalent you will be laughed out of the building.
It’s not that they won’t learn, it’s that the alternatives literally can’t do so much of what people need it to do. And at the same time they most often look worse, are harder to use, and are sometimes less stable.
A prime example myself, I have tried to use kdenlive for YEARS to do simple subtitling. Every few years I try the latest version. Without fail it ALWAYS crashes within 20 minutes.
Same for Audacity. 5 minutes into clipping some audio… crash. 3 times in a row. And it looks dog ugly enough to turn me off to even wanting to try it in the first place.
Or GIMP, it can’t do non-destructive editing, this makes it completely unusable for many professionals.
It’s not just one or two things here or there in these apps, it’s huge sweeping problems across the entire FOSS landscape, almost none of the options are comparable for professional users.
So I’ll counter an anecdote with an anecdote, my dad is a draftsman by trade and was an engineering technologist for decades, he’s looked at Freecad back and forth and is now seriously looking at it over solidworks for his personal projects now that he’s retired, I also flipped from solidworks which I used professionally for about 5 years before changing roles. Does it have quirks, yeah it does, but so do other cad packages, and lets not pretend that solidworks is a beacon of stability, there’s a reason it was drilled into us in uni to save frequently and why it has autosaving. The UI is relatively simple, there’s plugins to customise it and it has substantially improved over the last decade when I first gave it a try, way better than my memories of using solid edge (and I personally disliked fusion, just didn’t click with me, at least freecad has a near identical workflow to SW). Am I more accepting of jankiness with Foss solutions, straightup yes, it’s provided for free without restrictions on its usage vs solidworks where if you have a maker license for example, only other maker licenses can open the sldprt file.
Another example, I’d wager it’s why you see a lot more r and python usage in statistical spaces where SPSS and SAS were used because those tools are extremely expensive for licenses (I recall a colleague talking about it costing 10s of thousanda at leaat, maybe more, company was always looking into ways they can get off of it) cost alone makes the Foss solutions more accessible.
I’ll be also fair that both of my anecdotal examples we’re using for personal projects but the point is that professional users aren’t a monolith.
Do you mean the byzantine directory structure for system files? The default of installing to “Program Files” doesn’t seem too unusual, although adding “x86” bit seems unnecessarily complicated for a typical end user. Same with the rest of the standard directories that people use most often.
The directory structure for system files is bad, but that’s true for Unix-derivatives too. Unix has /bin and /lib, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/opt, etc. Different versions of Unix have different ideas of what belongs where. Even different flavours of Linux have their own ideas.
At least with Linux the distro-specific packages install software where it should go.
On Windows you end up with 32-bit binaries in the 64-bit Program Files folder, and vise versa. You end up with files saved arbitrarily to three different application data directories, and sometimes your Documents folder, so sometimes the registry, why not? Should we put several folders full of drivers directly on the root of the C drive? Of course, where else would they go?
The average windows user is tech illiterate. They don’t know what a directory is. I work with a person who opens .docx files by opening Word and using its internal search function. She does not comprehend how or where files are stored.
On my Android phone the Android phone I have, I find it hard to tell where the stuff I downloaded is.
Until I connect it to the computer and see the directory structure easily.
The Files app seems to be trying to do some kind of Abstraction over here.
Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.
Nobody really bothers to change the default though, so it only really matters if they later try to find the file without using their web browser. And if they do try to do that, “Downloads” is a pretty obvious place to look.
People blindly using their computer with zero understand of what they are doing absolutely matters. A computer is a powerful tool. I take the same attitude boomers take with their cars: If you can’t tell me how it works, you have no business using it.
if you think FOSS makes anything better for the average user, especially UX, I have a bridge to sell you.
Do you have any specific notable examples? In my experience, FOSS tends to take a more no-nonsense approach to things.
How does a product that defaults to its own proprietary for-profit offerings providing a better user experience?
The argument I hear most of is that people are just used to what they’ve used in the past, and having difficulty moving to an alternative because of that isn’t indicative of the alternative offering worse UX, but rather an unwillingness to learn anything by the user.
If you try to get a professional Photoshop or After Effects or Resolve or Solidworks or Quickbooks etc etc. user to use a FOSS equivalent you will be laughed out of the building.
It’s not that they won’t learn, it’s that the alternatives literally can’t do so much of what people need it to do. And at the same time they most often look worse, are harder to use, and are sometimes less stable.
A prime example myself, I have tried to use kdenlive for YEARS to do simple subtitling. Every few years I try the latest version. Without fail it ALWAYS crashes within 20 minutes.
Same for Audacity. 5 minutes into clipping some audio… crash. 3 times in a row. And it looks dog ugly enough to turn me off to even wanting to try it in the first place.
Or GIMP, it can’t do non-destructive editing, this makes it completely unusable for many professionals.
It’s not just one or two things here or there in these apps, it’s huge sweeping problems across the entire FOSS landscape, almost none of the options are comparable for professional users.
So I’ll counter an anecdote with an anecdote, my dad is a draftsman by trade and was an engineering technologist for decades, he’s looked at Freecad back and forth and is now seriously looking at it over solidworks for his personal projects now that he’s retired, I also flipped from solidworks which I used professionally for about 5 years before changing roles. Does it have quirks, yeah it does, but so do other cad packages, and lets not pretend that solidworks is a beacon of stability, there’s a reason it was drilled into us in uni to save frequently and why it has autosaving. The UI is relatively simple, there’s plugins to customise it and it has substantially improved over the last decade when I first gave it a try, way better than my memories of using solid edge (and I personally disliked fusion, just didn’t click with me, at least freecad has a near identical workflow to SW). Am I more accepting of jankiness with Foss solutions, straightup yes, it’s provided for free without restrictions on its usage vs solidworks where if you have a maker license for example, only other maker licenses can open the sldprt file.
Another example, I’d wager it’s why you see a lot more r and python usage in statistical spaces where SPSS and SAS were used because those tools are extremely expensive for licenses (I recall a colleague talking about it costing 10s of thousanda at leaat, maybe more, company was always looking into ways they can get off of it) cost alone makes the Foss solutions more accessible.
I’ll be also fair that both of my anecdotal examples we’re using for personal projects but the point is that professional users aren’t a monolith.
Whenever I get to use windows and I face their byzantine directory structure, I wonder how people put up with that shit.
Do you mean the byzantine directory structure for system files? The default of installing to “Program Files” doesn’t seem too unusual, although adding “x86” bit seems unnecessarily complicated for a typical end user. Same with the rest of the standard directories that people use most often.
The directory structure for system files is bad, but that’s true for Unix-derivatives too. Unix has /bin and /lib, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/opt, etc. Different versions of Unix have different ideas of what belongs where. Even different flavours of Linux have their own ideas.
At least with Linux the distro-specific packages install software where it should go.
On Windows you end up with 32-bit binaries in the 64-bit Program Files folder, and vise versa. You end up with files saved arbitrarily to three different application data directories, and sometimes your Documents folder, so sometimes the registry, why not? Should we put several folders full of drivers directly on the root of the C drive? Of course, where else would they go?
I keep explaining this to my grandmother but she just stares at me and says “When I was your age, we wrote things down in our Trapper Keepers”
Well going to .local/share/… Isn’t very Intuitive either. Try asking someone who’s new to find their Steam Directory.
The average windows user is tech illiterate. They don’t know what a directory is. I work with a person who opens .docx files by opening Word and using its internal search function. She does not comprehend how or where files are stored.
People don’t know what files and folders are anymore.
Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.
On
my Android phonethe Android phone I have, I find it hard to tell where the stuff I downloaded is.Until I connect it to the computer and see the directory structure easily.
The Files app seems to be trying to do some kind of Abstraction over here.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Nobody really bothers to change the default though, so it only really matters if they later try to find the file without using their web browser. And if they do try to do that, “Downloads” is a pretty obvious place to look.
People blindly using their computer with zero understand of what they are doing absolutely matters. A computer is a powerful tool. I take the same attitude boomers take with their cars: If you can’t tell me how it works, you have no business using it.