Writing good UI/UX and having your software have a vibrant set of open source contributors are usually opposing goals, similar to how you don't see a lot of microservice devops architectures sold as on-prem products. It's certainly possible, but it has to be a fundamental decision and makes a lot of things harder.

Someone might contribute a nice screen layout, but actual design of a user experience involves design, which is usually a process of intelligently deciding on limitations.

Slack and iTunes often get smacked around for their designs because they are kitchen sinks of features, which makes them bulky and non-intuitive.

Open Source communities tend toward this sort of kitchen sink by default. This is because people are contributing the features they want and need, not the ones which fit into your product plan. So you typically see the most success for software that is under an open source license but has limited or banned the ability for people to contribute.

Rather what is considered good UI and ease of use is sub-optimal for people who understand tech, and those are the people who write free software for themselves and others like them. (Why would you spend months making some UI that in the end requires a minute of manual labor to do what some piece of syntax in a config file achieves in seconds, and which can be diffed to the previous version and so on.)

There are good examples of UI in free software. There are also terrible examples of UI in proprietary software. A lot of the peculiar user experience in GNU/Linux is that way because it was cloned quite exactly from a proprietary system called Unix. A lot of that bad user experience is standardized with an IEEE standard called POSIX, which isn't free.

> Rather what is considered good UI and ease of use is sub-optimal for people who understand tech

The widespread love of the Mac and OS X among techies on HN says otherwise.

It says nothing about whether it's optimal or not. You can't easily evaluate how good a UI is for expert users until you're an expert yourself, and once you've made that effort, will you really want to abandon all that hard-won skill to learn another system? I think many people use sub-optimal UIs because the short-term cost of learning a different one, which might not even be better, is too high.

True, and that includes me. My favorite thing to say about bad UI is "those designers should spend two weeks using a Mac from 1985". :)

Because companies that build consumer product spend tons of money on usability testing and people to work on the ui who are not developers. There just are not that many of these people working on oss projects. What ends up happening is features are just jammed in wherever a developer thinks they are convenient and you end up with an image editor that’s about as fun to use as the software your company has you filling out your timesheets on.