• 0 Posts
  • 510 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • I think part of the problem is that “good” UX isn’t a single thing but a continuum. It’s very dependent on the skill level of the user. Often what makes a good UX for a newbie is a bad UX for a power user and vice versa. OSS tends to attract power users and particularly the ones working on some software in a particular area tend to be domain experts. That in turn can lead to designs optimized for very advanced use cases that end up being frustratingly opaque to an “average” user or even worse a newbie.

    Blender is an excellent example of this. It’s regarded as one of the best 3D programs out there but it’s far from a simple piece of software to pick up. What saves it is that all the commercial alternatives are just as obtuse as it is and so the ground level expectation is that it’s going to be complicated.

    Likewise many OSS and Linux tools expect or even require CLI usage which while great for power users putting together scripts and pipelines are often opaque and unintuitive to someone who is still learning the domain.

    This focus on power users leads to turning newbies away and funneling them towards the commercial offerings where they then get used to their quirks and limitations of those apps so that when they do eventually become power users the quirks and limitations of the OSS alternatives feel strange and off-putting to them.





  • File format standards certainly, and OSS generally embraces those (at least if they’re non-proprietary), but UI doesn’t have to be standardized. On the other hand though not everything needs to be a unique snowflake. UIs should take the things that work well and experiment with what doesn’t.

    Lets also not pretend that proprietary apps don’t screw around with UI design just as much. I can’t count how many times now Microsoft has redesigned the UI of something that was perfectly fine and didn’t need redesigning only to end up making it worse.




  • Essentially Congress got tired of having to do actual work because it was taking time away from them soliciting bribes from corporations, which is the profitable part of the job, so they abdicated most of their responsibilities to the president.

    Constitutionally the President doesn’t really get to do much except work out the administrative details of everything Congress has ordered him to do. Since Congress abandoned that responsibility the president has a lot more control.

    Trump still doesn’t actually have the authority to do most of what he’s doing, but he’s abusing emergency war time regulations as justification despite this not actually being an emergency or war time. Everybody is just too chicken shit to call him on his bullshit though because then they’d have to own up to all the times previous presidents over the last few decades abused the same loopholes.