At least for Unity and Gnome 3 (including GTK3) I'd rather say: Great ideas but they're evil because they are badly designed, full of bugs that don't get fixed due to complexity, constant API changes, almost no documentation or only wrong and outdated documentation and a lack of flexibility that annoys even the casual Desktop user.

Nobody is against progress - most people love to use OS X as a UNIX GUI these days... it's not perfect but it's not that bug ridden mess GNOME became.

You'd be surprised. Just listen to the arguments against giving Linux a more logical directory setup (somewhat like OS X's).

Personally, I think the various flavors of directory setup are already so divergent that tradition no longer holds massive value, but that's not something to be proud of.

The problem is the comparison point.

When original Gtk/Gnome came out, it was a WAY worse BPOS than Unity or Gnome 3 are today.

The trick was that when Gtk/Gnome came out there was no existing solution. So, even a bad one was okay.

The problem is that the new solution is competing against an existing solution that has more than a decade of development behind it.

It would take a Herculean effort to win that comparison.

There were existing solutions, e.g. Motif or Athena widgets if you wanted a GUI library, or FVWM if you wanted a desktop environment. Of course, GTK/GNOME was a significant improvement.

Qt and Gtk were a breath of fresh air. And Qt got everybody's dander up due to 1) license and 2) C++ requirement.

So, Gtk basically stepped into a vacuum.

I sometimes wonder if good visual and interaction design can succeed in the open source model. In software development, tasks can be parcelled out in a modular way to many developers. But this model doesn't work well for visual and interaction design. If you want all the parts of an Operating System or piece of software to feel consistent and cohesive, you need a more focused approach. And that means handing design tasks to a designated design team and entrusting them to make the UX decisions. But with open source projects, we all want a say in the UX (me included); thus the endless (and often bitter) discussions about how a piece of software should behave.

The model of open source code has influenced and inspired countless companies. But who can point to examples of visual and interaction design from open source software that has had a similar effect? I see the influence going much more the other way i.e. open source software often follows ideas or conventions from commercial companies. I'd love to see this change. But how?

I think, the same thing works with visual and interaction design. But you'd need a small group of people to make the basic UX decisions and write concise guidelines others can follow. Like Apples «Human Interface Guidelines»[0].

This isn't really purely democratic, but I think it's almost impossible to find the "one way of doing things" if everyone has their say in every micro decision.

For me its much more important to have consistent user experience than the details of it. Its like tab vs spaces in programming or semicolon vs no semicolon in Javascript. I have my personal preferences, but i'm fine with either one as long as it is consistent at least within the project.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/Documentation/UserEx...

The same goes for any democratically appointed UX team.

On the other hand, we, the people are soon to vote whether Switzerland should terminate european human rights contracts. It's insanely democratic and it scares the shit out of me because it might actually get a majority.

You can shoot yourself in the foot with too much democracy.

The right wing fear machinery fed with millions of donation money has really poisoned the political climate over the last decade. Whether you agree with their points, a system like ours, where basically every citizen can trigger a nation wide vote about almost anything (e.g. reintroduction of death penalty) only works if the debates are driven by reason, not populism. The other parties recently jumped on the same train, saying it's the only way to defend against those scare mongers … sigh

I still love our system, it gives the people not only power but also a sense of responsibility. It's not the government that fucked things up – you did. But it doesn't make a country completely immune to dedicated actors with enough influence and money like many believe.