Sploosh the Water

Dive into the Fediverse.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Part of the Capitalist mythos for sure, “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.” There’s a rejection of the idea that you could reach a healthy equilibrium of size and just remain there.

    And because of the way the rest of the market works, it forces everybody to act like that or get beat out completely. Vicious feedback loops.





  • Yeah makes sense. I wish there was a FOSS UX design philosophy that had caught on. For app design, the Unix philosophy has driven development even to this day, although not as popular now as it once was.

    We sort of have bits of it, with the GTK framework and KDE styling. But those ecosystems don’t extend outwards enough, and still allow far too much leeway to the UX design to ensure nice looks/function.

    Maybe the nature of the widely distributed development makes it overall impossible. The goal of FOSS makes that kind of universal look and feel largely impossible. Heck, even Microsoft can’t get that to happen in their own OS. There are many applications/utilities that look pretty much the same now as they did on Windows XP or even earlier.

    The general attitude of function over form in our community also makes it hard, and I get that. Especially with limited dev resources as you pointed out. Would you rather have better functionality, or a prettier interface? Tough choice sometimes.


  • Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.

    The general public isn’t interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.

    Say what you want about that, I’m not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn’t the world we live in right now.

    The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.

    Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don’t know what is the correct approach. All I know is I’ve heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.

    Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.

    Sad truth. I’m super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I’m also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.

    OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.

    My choice is Vim and its variants. Add some plugins, it’s a really great way to write code. I have no interest in GUI IDEs anymore since getting my NeoVim installation set up and tuned.