A lot of open source projects suffer from “pet project” syndrome. Some maintainers have very strong opinions about how/what things should be done regardless of actual user demand or feedback, and there’s no one with the power to rebuff them because the product owners deciding what to implement and the engineers doing implementation work are one and same. Commit right makes might.

In a (healthy) company, you have PMs and executives who will tell the overly opinionated engineers to STFU and actually implement things that move the needle and solve problems users are facing.

This is also why most open source projects have terrible UI/UX and any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.

If maintainers are paid to produce a feature, they should produce it regardless. Otherwise they're breaking a contract.

> “and there’s no one with the power to rebuff them”

Except for those that discover the fork button. /s

In all seriousness I think that what you mean is that people rarely have the power to fork a project and drag all the users and development expertise over to their version. Especially if they are simply users of the system and not contributors. Users of commercial software can get companies to do stuff for them with their wallets.

It stems from a bias, developers are power/expert users and their interface behavior is likely matching, which means they are heavily reliant on keyboard shortcuts (Think Blender 1.x and Blender 2.x who leaned heavily and even exclusively on shortcuts)

This gives them the idea that their software is very powerful (and probably is) but this creates a cliff to the beginner and intermediate level users.

A lot of examples can be found in “About Face: On interaction design” by Alan Cooper.

In fact larger open source GUI projects also tend to suffer from the opposite: with multiple equally powerful maintainers, a good number of contributors, and no one to rally them behind a coherent design, you get a messy bag of poorly documented features spread all over the place. Design by programmer is usually bad enough; design by a loosely-connected web of programmers working almost independently is even worse. Also, a lot of the developers/users are ideologically motivated and heavily invested, when you point out how bad the software is for the average user, instead of reflecting on it they often get defensive.

> any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.

Ah yes, remember how long it took before image thumbnails appeared in the GTK file picker? Finally in 2022, but that was after countless forks and patches submitted that implemented them.

https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...

Well, Resolve suffers from the same attitude in places. While a good and usable product, it suffers from many design gaffes that go unaddressed year after year, despite denying users functions that are expected in any similar product.

The render-job UI is pretty shambolic (as is the treacherously inaccurate timeline on the same page), for example. And BMD refuses to add simple functions like "match timeline properties to clip." Instead they have a prompt that offers to match only frame rate, in contrast to just about every other media-editing app I can think of. Fixing that should be easy; and if it isn't, the codebase must be hopelessly inept.

The integrations of Fusion and Fairlight are buggy and exhibit nonsensical and misleading UI behavior. Resolve has a node view... oh wait, now it has two node views, which are not integrated with each other or with the editor. Fixing that should be priority one, which could create a truly excellent hybrid product that some of us have asking for for years.

And now they've ported the thing to the iPad. Really? I realize that from the outside we don't know how engineering people are allocated, but nonetheless it seems absurd to spend resources on that while the desktop product suffers from serious defects that have languished for a long time.

That is basically how we ended up with FreeCAD.

There is an old saying: "Time is money."

When you buy something, you are exchanging your money to obtain someone else's time. In this case, time that someone else spent to make sure a program works.

The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours.

> The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours.

Your conclusion generalizes to no-charge software, not to all FOSS. The "free" in FOSS stands for free software, meaning free as in freedom rather than free as in price.

If a program is free software [1] then a user of the program can read the source code, modify it, and distribute (including sell) unmodified and modified versions of the program/code. A user who lacks the program or the code isn't entitled to the freedoms but can get the software from someone else who has it.

Developers of free software can charge for it. One way of making money from free software is charging for access to the developer's server. Another way is charging for more expansive user support. (Alternatives to charging for the software itself include requesting donations and selling physical merchandise.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

I'm fully aware the F in FOSS stands for free-as-in-libre. I'm also aware that FOSS developers by and large refuse the exchange of any and all money both as buyers and sellers for services rendered.

You say developers of free-as-in-libre software can charge for them, but in practice any developer that tries to sell his free-as-in-libre software will be viciously laughed out of the room by everyone else.

The F in FOSS in practice stands both for free-as-in-libre and free-as-in-beer. And you don't get to talk about the quality of free beer.

Can you guys lemma know when is the year of the linux desktop? I wanna add it to calcurse.

If Micro$oft keeps enshittifying their OS at current rates, I bet a lot of people will get fed up and jump ship to Linux after one or two more windows releases.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Windows 11, for all its faults, enables me to do the things I want to do on a computer. Likewise Android, and to a lesser degree even iOS and MacOS I admit.

Linux however demands me to do the computer, it doesn't enable me to do anything because I'm too busy doing computer bullshit. This isn't necessarily surprising, since the goal of Linux (more accurately FOSS) is to use FOSS and isn't concerned about what I need/want to do.

So no, most people (or at least myself) will not move from Windows to Linux. I use computers to do things, not preach the holy scriptures of FOSS.

Which decade was the last one you used GNU/Linux in?

It’s getting better, and with more people working with browser based tools the underlying OS is becoming less relevant. That said, the Gnome folks do seem user hostile. And I get that most Linux distro users like to tweak their config (part of the joy of their experience), it does lead to choice paralysis for a lot of folks. Add that hardware support can still be hit and miss (I concede that it has improved massively), it’s still not the computing panacea that the more enthusiastic and vocal proponents would have you believe. Likewise, neither are macOS or Windows panaceas, nor are they as repugnantly shit as those same folk would like to tell you either.

People have thought the same thing with every version of windows, a word made up by a blogger last year isn't going to change that.

Linux's interface is still archaic compared to windows 7 unfortunately.

For me their high point was XP. It's downhill since then, in terms of dark patterns and user hostility.

>Linux's interface is still archaic compared to windows 7 unfortunately.

I'm amused that I find myself preferring Windows 11 Explorer with its bloody worthless context menu and taskbar to anything FOSS has to offer.

GNOME? It's sincerely cancer. KDE? No software actually uses it. xfce/LXDE/et al.? Look, I'm not going to use a GUI that demands I go CLI some plain text files to change settings.

I am guessing you mean you can not complain about edge case quality in Free Software. Because people discuss quality all the time.

Getting video crashless seems hard, I had problems back in 2006. Have not tried again.

I don't think it's unreasonable to demand that products and tools don't spontaneously combust frequently, so long as that demand is based on warranties and other such professional/commercial guarantees.

FOSS's primary problem is that the goal is the tool itself, rather than what is done with the tools: Commercial software exist to let the end user achieve something, which in turn generates profit for the commercial developers. FOSS exist to let the FOSS developers achieve their dreams, end users be damned.

A video editor crashing every hour is a problem for the end user, but if the FOSS developer doesn't care then that's that.

This is why Photoshop will continue to surpass GIMP, and why exceptional FOSS like Blender succeed where other FOSS do not.

> The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours.

This is why I really dislike the term "FOSS". It's both redundant and erroneously misleads people to thinking things like this. Free Software can absolutely be developed under contract, in which case yes, you are entitled to the developers time under the terms of the contract.

the "je ne sais quoi" is called money