Users: I demand OSS devs and Maintainers do X
OSS Devs/Maintainers: Are you willing to contribute code or at least donate any money?
Users: Uhh its OSS, you should just do all the work for free with no funding. Also I demand that your software be as polished and complete as (premium proprietary software) I demand you do X, I demand you do Y, because im entitled to free software.
I am sympathetic but also so damn tired of seeing what essentially translates to:
"Look, [megacorpo] bought out my school's ecosystem so that's all I learned. It's "industry standard", I can't believe this FOSS can't even do this one niche corporate-job feature, therefore it's objectively terrible / not ready / inferior / useless for job work."
Which can usually be further boiled down to:
"I tried it but it wasn't a carbon copy of my preferred corpo-ware without any strings attached so it basically sucks."
Counterpoint: Blender was the first 3d modeling tool I tried and I bounced off that UX so hard that I haven't touched it in nearly 20 years. Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.
Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.
Totally can be! Absolutely!
Although Blender's amazingly usable now and has had lots of love in that regard! But it took a LOT of support to get this far.
Good UX is crazy important.
I think I'm more irritated at the people who seem to show up in so many FOSS discussions, expect FOSS alternatives to compete 1:1 with their billion-dollar corpo-ware of choice, demand the world of it, offer zero support, and then declare "it sucks and isn't ready for the real world" because it's not so perfect that Autodesk and Adobe are like "Well we've had a good run, guys." and give up lol.
I sympathize because I know where the frustration comes from. They're sick of their tools being held hostage by interests that constantly seek to screw them! But change requires flexibility, cooperation, and support.
I think a lot of people just don't want to say "I want Maya/Photoshop/Excel/Solidworks/Windows/etc...but free and without dark-patterns!" (Don't we all lol) Because they know that sounds unreasonable (yarr aside lol) , but people tend to get settled and comfortable with whatever got to them first.
But taking that out on the community isn't helping anybody.
Constructive criticism of UI/UX is absolutely essential though, and requires a lot more understanding of how humans interact with things than simply "Well, billion-dollar-ware has always done it this way." Haha
Absolutely this, you cannot expect Blender level UI/UX without blender level funding. The fundamental problem is that new users/inexperienced users/nontechnical users arent used to contributing bug reports or even proper constructive criticism.
Furthermore what people forget is that being a 1:1 carbon copy of a corporate software isnt inherently a good thing. For example Linux, I love Linux and I love the way it works. I use it not because its OSS but because I genuenly prefer it above Windows, I dont want Linux to be like Windows. I love tiling, I love Sway, I love Hyprland, and despite being in alpha I love the Cosmic Desktop. I dont care that tiling isnt immediately intuitive to Windows users, I absolutely love it.
While im at it I absolutely despise the idea that the Terminal is inherently not user friendly (especially with a shell like fish). The idea that just because somebody isnt used to something makes it bad. Or that having to use a wiki/look at the docs means its "not ready". All software is new to somebody at some point, that doesn't make it bad.
OSS: Why do so few people use our softwaree!? It's literally free!
And here I am trying to convince my sales team that supporting a workflow where users run our app with sudo is a bad idea.
This sadly excludes the majority of bad UX decisions that are done entirely to maximize users time inside of the app as well as display advertising.
So many functional apps are destroyed by these incentives. There is literally a "skill issue" but in the opposite direction. The design is either purposely malicious in a subtle way with "dark patterns" (something Amazon is insanely guilty of. Literally just go try and return and item.) or is purposely annoying trying to ensure the user purchases the "free trial" to actually make the app functional. Knowing a lot of users will be charged at least once for the free trial.
I guess my point is that there is so so so so much wrong with UX design today. But for the majority of people that's not because of a bad programmer with no design knowledge. It's on purpose in most cases.
people always mention blender when talking about good ux in open source software, but i feel like the godot game engine doesn't get enough love. it's miles above of unity in terms of intuitiveness for me personally. plus it's entirely customisable since it's built in godot itself.
Godot is something I can still be super newb at and yet straight up admire. The nodes tree / scene system is a work of genius and I love it so much.
I do feel like a lot of inspector bits suffer from unintuitive "hard to distinguish menu to sub-sub-sub-sub menu" UX, but I think the editor's "expand all inspector headings" (or something) option is really handy for knowing what you're working with, and mitigates that a little.
Remember when selecting something was done with the right mouse button in blender. That was great UX for beginners.
Every Microsoft product.
But also Gimp.
Engineers don't let engineers design interfaces.
smh skill issue
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