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The Open Source Design Conundrum
Matt Asay writes "Walk the halls of any open-source conference and you'll see a large percentage of attendees with ironically non-open-source Apple laptops and iPhones. One reason for this seeming contradiction can be found in reading Matthew Thomas' classic 'Why free software usability tends to suck.' Open-source advocates like good design as much as anyone, but the open-source development process is often not the best way to achieve it. Open-source projects have tended to be great commoditizers, but not necessarily the best innovators. Hence, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently stated that Red Hat is "focused on commoditizing important layers in the stack." This is fine, but for those that want open source to push the envelope on innovation, it may be unavoidable to introduce a bit more cathedral into the bazaar. Without an IBM, Red Hat, or Mozilla bringing cash and discipline to an open-source project, including paying people to do the 'dirt work' that no one would otherwise do, can open source hope to thrive?"
Thing is apple laptops are usually pretty good in design, so even OSS people will buy one and then put distro of choice on it, problem? not really. Good hardware is good hardware.
This is already being done. Many of the most successful FOSS projects have corporate contributors, so this "design conundrum" doesn't really exist. As for the popularity of Apple devices among FOSS developers, well, a lot of Apple software is based upon FOSS. In fact Apple, like it or not, is a pretty good example of how to monetize FOSS. Can't say I'm thrilled with the methods they employ to achieve that, but it's still a fact that they do achieve it.
Caveat Utilitor
That many developers feel it is beneath them and gets in the way of them developing. In the commercial space, developers rarely interact with customers in a support role or in UI design. Many would quit before performing this role, but developers in some cases are the only ones who can properly address this.
In one company I worked for, developers had to eat their own shit in that they were forced into part-time customer support of their code. When your interaction with code begins and ends with the source code control system, you have one view. When you actually are forced to see where the rubber meets the road in your customer, you think much more about the interfaces, the update processes, and the support code and scripts that get working code into working systems.
In the commercial space much effort and resources is applied in these critically important areas. With the journeyman programmers, this rarely if ever happens.
It is only a small part of the Apple Mac software that is non-Free and you could even run Darwin which is Free. The bulk of the software on any Apple Mac is GPL.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
While this might be true for apps -- they change too much to settle on a thought-through UI concept, and new ones are constantly created for the same task by not so experienced UI designers -- I'd like to add that IMHO Linux has the best window managers out there. That is one of the reasons I don't use Windows and would put a Linux distribution on a Mac. Because I need to move and resize windows without finding the borders (e.g. Alt-click or Alt-doubleclick and drag). And I need sane virtual desktops for more screen space and for grouping my windows.
These are UI features lacking in non-open-source. Granted, it is not something the novice user will miss.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Also this whole "most people don't care" argument isn't a very strong one. Most people don't care where their food comes from until it stops coming. See the problem?
I see some Apples, but more often I'm seeing netbooks. It depends on the venue and demographic of the conference; student-heavy get-togethers only have Apples if the students can afford it, and despite Apple's best attempts to offer student discounts, their little white books are still too fuckin' expensive for most of us.
Of course, I should disclose that I boycott Apple for other reasons. :3
~ C.
Their is no one overseeing the whole thing.
There is no common goal.
There are more useless that useful programs.
Stupid little things never get fixed.
There are too many distro's.
Someone needs to get paid for the work they do.
Someone need to get the praise and encouragement they deserve for working so hard.
Do something, go to your favorite distro's website buy something. No one wants to work and have to survive on cup-a-noodle its gets real gross after awhile.
Give the people who make your free software something so they don't feel neglected, an unhappy programmer will code what he needs for himself then give it away for free because of his principals. Make it worth his while and he might make something you need.
I disagree with the premise that FOSS usability is always bad. I'm not a developer, I can't write code, but I use *nix exclusively for my home computers, running KDE. And they are WAY more usable than my windows computers at work. Small things make such a huge difference--with windows, when you move the mouse wheel, the active window scrolls, even if you have 2 open side by side. You have to click on the one you want to scroll. With KDE, the window that your mouse cursor is hovering over scrolls. This is so intuitive it took me a month or so to even notice. I've found all kinds of other small usability tweaks.
My KDE desktop at home is so much more usable and intuitive than my windows xp box at work that I often work at home just for the pleasure of using KDE.
That said, the entire Internet was built by FOSS and FOSS-like processes. From ftp and telnet through WWW/mosaic, it was all someone who had an idea and wanted to see if others liked it too.
For hardware, Apple's can be of higher quality because it is higher priced. It can be higher priced because it is perceived good value -- mostly the interfaces are less botched than their competition.
While I might agree about the UI & usability problems in OSS I can't agree about innovation. OSS licencing is being used by a very large number of IT research projects. Look at the work being done in areas like "single system image" (SSI). The serious work is all being done on Open source OSes.
It is the basic philosophical dilemma - freedom with or without the control? Imho, both have valid arguments, but Linux ecosystem is modular enough to allow both. But standards and common sense above all! For the specific topic of UI design, things got MUCH better over the last couple of years in OSS world ("Why Free Software usability tends to suck" document was published in 2002!). That being said, open source community should probably publish a document / wiki with reference basic, simple guidelines for designing user interface for OSS programs. And improve document gradually over time, so that it becomes bible / manifesto of making a consistent user interface. Also, make simple tests for programs - if program conforms to it, it can get certificate such as "This program has a sane user interface as determined by OSF".
Macs can run Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (duh). The machines themselves are crafted with attention to detail. Versatility in a neat package. What is not to like?
Bert
Commercial applications have long separated the appearance and behavior of the application from the implementation for good reason. The obligatory strained car analogy, I like cars that are quick and responsive, but I don't want one made by an engine designer. No matter how talented the engine designer is, s/he will most likely make a car suitable for engine designers.
Balancing the viewpoints of "real world users", experts, and various designers is required to do it properly. Are all these sets well represented in the FOSS contributors?
This isn't necessarily true. It's true that great design is typically the result of a unified vision but design focused companies solve this problem by having a lead designer establish guidelines and standards that are then used by the team to create all the bits and pieces. You don't need one person, but you need one person in charge. For an Ubuntu, RedHat or OpenOffice where you have a corporate structure behind you, this level of design quality is achievable and I think they have it now. For a project of volunteers or a team that's widely distributed this has to be much more difficult.
Without the ability to write code, designers depend on an organizational structure that recognizes and values good design and will work to make sure that the end result meets the design goals you initially set out. This can fail in a non-OSS project and could succeed in an OSS project but a hobbyist project will probably never have a structure that allows a designer to do great work.
Another issue that I think isn't addressed here is that OSS projects are typically (necessarily?) started by people who can code. Once you have something running it takes a huge amount of effort to redesign away some of those early design decisions. You'll also forever be in a mindset that views design as window-dressing that gets applied to APIs. I'm not familiar enough with the history of OSS projects but are there examples of projects that started with a design process?
It's fairly trivial for someone to reverse engineer and copy the way software works, but the proverbial "kid in a basement" can't just reverse engineer and fab their own chips. Hardware designs are also afforded more intellectual property protection than software designs.
While I haven't seen Apple laptops comprise a great proportion of machines at the FOSS conferences I've been to here in Europe, those I have seen are often running something other than OSX (if stickers and/or a peek at their WM is anything to go by). It's not so unimaginable that someone might choose to run something other than OSX on a Macbook especially if they have little need for proprietary software and prefer an OS tailored to their needs (or just don't like the design and feel of OSX altogether - some don't).
Regardless, in the last couple of years I've seen a lot of X and T series Thinkpads but moreso netbooks at hacker and FLOSS meetings in the EU. I hear from friends that the build quality of their MacBooks is a bit disappointing. Perhaps this is a reason, among others.
In business, you invest. That means you have a strategic goal you want to achieve with the input. That's what is missing most of the time in open source projects: goals. Most of these so called developers are actually just maintainers with no vision whatsoever. The business side also requires to build vision (or perish), yet another thing 9 out of 10 open source projects lack completely.
There is something extremely toxic to innovation in open source. One could solve the Ubuntu's #1 bug in 3 years flat if the way people worked and thought could be made to change. It's really not about resources or technology, just the fact that the progress is not being LEAD.
many companies, large and small benefit directly from open source.
Those companies making significant profits could be asked to contribute to a central pool, a non profit or mutual benefit co. - that hires small teams to make useful open source tools more polished, secure, and user friendly.
everyone wins.
Why link to the outdated version of Mathew Paul Thomas' article when he wrote a much newer one here: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability Appropriately, it's titled: Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it
Many of the UNIX command line utilities are based on open source projects covered by a BSD (or similarly entirely free license), and some are covered by GPL licenses (which are more restrictive and by simple definition are thus less "free" or "open"). The most important GPL software in Mac OS X is arguably the GNU compiler, gcc. Apple is a major contributor to the LLVM project, which will at some point replace gcc as the primary compiler tool chain on the Mac OS X.
Apple has also sponsored a few other interesting open source projects such as Darwin Calendar Server, WebKit, and of course the Darwin UNIX kernel. Most of these projects are covered by a BSD or similar license.
Apple's implementation of the Cocoa Framework is not an open source framework, but it is based on an open specification, OpenStep specification, although it has evolved past the specification. There is an alternative, open source implementation, GnuStep.
There. Fixed it for you.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
This is already being done. Many of the most successful FOSS projects have corporate contributors, so this "design conundrum" doesn't really exist.
That's not how I read it. FOSS projects have corporate contributors as a weapon used to commoditize their rival's products. (IBM versus Sun, to make it impossible to monetize Java) FOSS projects are also funded in order to create commodity complements to company's products. Sell servers? Commoditize software that runs on servers!
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
There's a problem with this. It reduces FOSS to ammunition. A tactical move. If FOSS can't produce really slick interfaces, then FOSS will always be a lackey of the corporations in order to achieve first-rate success. If the corporations don't like you or can't use you, then you're left out in the bush leagues, the farm teams. Just look at the software out there. Almost every piece of software that gets widespread corporate or consumer traction is being used as a weapon or market driver.
In fact Apple, like it or not, is a pretty good example of how to monetize FOSS. Can't say I'm thrilled with the methods they employ to achieve that, but it's still a fact that they do achieve it.
The problem is that it makes FOSS critically dependent on the corporate masters if a particular project wants to be "first-rate." It's as if FOSS is like indy music/film, and the corporations are the music industry, and everyone is trying to get signed. Maybe that's how things should be. But it would be better if we never had to admit, "can't say I'm thrilled," about how our funders are treating our ideals. FOSS needs its equivalent of bittorrent, Pirate Bay, and independent musicians who can give the finger to the big music distributors, yet still turn out first-rate product. Where's our Protools for interfaces? (Actually, the problem is likely cultural and not technological.)
You flunked the Sesame Street test. You meant to say:
Everybody vote for a favorite distro, then everybody go download that distro and live on it, and contribute to it, and buy a t-shirt from the same web site, supporting the same project and for Kernighan and Ritchie's sakes do not fork it under any circumstances, make it better.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Most attempts to make software easier to use fail because the developers try to wrap their minds around the "stupid" users instead of concentrating on the damn code and doing things properly.
If a system is so well designed that I can jump right into the middle of a startup script and instantly understand it without tracing obscure dependencies, then it's user-friendly for me. And I speculate that the cleaner the basis is, the easier it is to put a GUI on top of it without obscuring things.
See sig.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
The useability problems with Linux comes from several areas. One is the lack of hardware support which results from the lack of a stable binary driver ABI between versions. This is basically a great disincentive for hardware manufacturers to not support linux and providing a driver. The open source drivers are often late, becoming avialable months of years after the hardware was released, buggy and does not support many hardware features. Vendors tend to carry out a lot of testing on the drivers which they produce and are better able to write driver to fully exploit the features. All hardware vendors will never release driver source, thats not realistic and a pipe dream, and shows the arrogance and niave nature of some Linux developers. The only people that refusing to provide a stable ABI ends up hurting is users who cant use their hardware. Users dont want to wait months for the release of some crappy open source driver, they just want the hardware to work.
This support for backwards compatability does not necessarily need to go into the main kernel but could be provided by a compatability layer or module.
For any platform, backwards compatability is essential for useability and to get support for software and hardware companies. These companies are not going to want to support 15 different versions of software for each od the kernel/distro combinations that exist.
On linux, the package systems and program installation is also a mess. Linux developers make an arrogant and naive assumption that all programs that a user wants to run will be open source, and that they will be installed with the native package system. An effective OS realises that the program installers will vary and will not always be in the form of a native package, and makes sure that these can work, and also protects itself.
One solution to these problems is to utilise a filesystem overlay. If an installation program attempts to overwrite an existing library, for instance, instead of being overwritten, the old version of the library will remain visible to other programs that use it but from the perspective of new program, it will see the new version of the library. This prevents the DLL hell nightmare. Each version of a file and program would be tagged to environment overlays. This would also allow, every file in the system to be traced back to the program which installed it and all files the installer put in the system to be completely removed without even affecting other programs.
This would be secondary and used mainly with foreign installers, programs of the native package system instead linking to a shared version of the library that they need and with different versions of the library being stored with the version number in the file name.
Linux can and should be both user and expert friendly. There does have to be a focus on both providing a high level user interface and as well transparency of the underlying systems so that they can be better understood and services. Everything should be able to be done both at the command line, programming and GUI level.
THe key to designing useable software is not making software dumbed down or removing features. Doing this makes the software so inflexible that only an idiot can use it. Instead, the software needs to be configurable and flexible as possible, but useability is in the layout, more commonly used features are placed up front and less commonly ones placed in expert screens and so on .
Sometimes, people who know little or nothing about Linux or software development make badly informed opinions on software development. I have heard people both advocate actions that would cripple linux software by damaging backwards compatability or remove essential features and functionality making the software too rigid and inflexible. These badly informed decisions cause a significant degree of the useability headaches with Linux. One example of people who dont know what they are talking about is people who think X needs a built in widget set, or who complain
There are only, by my quick count, one hundred and forty one Linux distributions. Currently shipping. For the Intel platform. In English.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I would never buy a Mac especially not with all the reliability problems they have and mis-features like locking the SATA port to SATA 1 speed, disabling 802.11n on the older ones and requiring people pay to get the feature, etc. On top of that I would never run MacOS X, as I am a Linux developer, so why pay more (the Apple tax) for less hardware. I personally own a ThinkPad X200 which is much better and cheaper than anything I have seen from Apple.
As far as open phones go, there is really not much choice on that front. There is Openmoko which doesn't even have Edge/3G support or the T-Mobile G1 Android phone. It also looks like openmoko is dying off and they have canceled their phones planned to have Edge/3G support. Android looks promising but the phone still needs a lot more work and/or there needs to be more than one of them available. More Android phones should be available later this summer so perhaps it will gain more marketshare. So I am not surprised at all that currently people at open-source conferences are using iPhones. I recently bought one for myself after sitting on the fence about whether to continue to wait until a nicer Android phone became available. Hopefully in 2 years once my at&t contract finally runs out there will be much better Android phones available. With respect to at&t they are planning on releasing an Android phone as well but with crippled resolution only 320x240.
One axis I've not seen discussed is that most developers are using textual languages. Most mathematics is essentially text based, not diagram based. One uses diagrams for intuition, but when the formal derivation or program must be done, it is done in text.
The problem then becomes that the concepts expressed in the software are most easily explained in terms of text, not diagrams. Guis are diagrams. Consider, just for a mental exercise, any of the unix shells and their languages. Most developers have no problems. Most users would rather gnaw off their right arm than go through learning a shell language and then relearn in it 6 months when they must use it again.
So, let's see what it takes to produce a gui for it. Apple used to have a system called MPW. You could hilite a command and call up its Commando interface. The commands themselves were rather textual and unixy, but the interface allowed you to click radio buttons, use pulldown menus, etc. to construct a command. The command constructed as text and shown in an editable window at the bottom of the dialog box for the Commando interface of the command. You could run the command right there or copy the text and run it in another window. That sounds about the right level.
Now we must think about piping. There was a language called Prograph, but now called Marten. It is an object orientied data flow language. It is a diagrammatic language and one draws lines to 'pipe' objects from one command to another, with some special lines for control ordering. There are mechanisms for recursion and the usual range of program construction artifacts.
One could combine the two, Marten and Command and successfully guitate unix shell languages (I'm sure there are other concepts that would need to gui equivalents for those languages). Now think about the amount of work necessary to do this. The point is that guis take an extraordinary amount of time and effort, and most of the skills are not the headless (non-gui) development most developers are familiar with and it is a paradigm directly at odds with their programming languages.
I see no entity within the FOSS community that could do such kinds of design and get it stick so that it becomes the faces of the OS or the applications for casual users who might wear an occasional python boot (think Frank Zappa). OpenOffice isn't an example, it is the usual retarded word processor editor that Microsoft pushes with the usual result that people would rather use Office since OpenOffice isn't buying them anything in which they are interested.
UI design isn't dirt work; it is actually very fun and rewarding. The thing is it is hard to wear both a "UI Design Hat" and a developer hat at the same time. Why? The UI guy in you wants a usable UI and the programmer wants a usable codebase--those two goals are often highly conflicting. Good UI design often requires code that often needs to deal with crazy edge cases, or code that has to turn fuzzy human illogic into clean, elegant programming. If you try to wear both hats, the developer in you will fight the UI guy in you because the UI guy wants you to create a feature that the programmer in you knows will be a messy pain in the ass.
Once an organization gets large enough, you can have different people wearing the hats. This works great in an environment where there is a communication process for the two to talk to eachother. In the open source world, such communication channels typically donâ(TM)t exist--there is no process that has really been established. You might get UI guys dropping golden nuggets on the project mailing list from time to time, but you donâ(TM)t have the UI guy meeting up with the developers on a daily basis.
If you want the UI guys to be in on the party, the culture of open source development will have to shift to make use UI guys are not only included in the entire development cycle, but more important--they are seen as equals in the process. If the UI guys says "this design sucks", the developers don't implement it. I dunno if that is part of the culture nor am I sure how or if such a thing could ever be pulled off. UI guys get the props they deserve in paid jobs simply because there is a financial incentive to listen to them. Without that financial incentive, the only incentive to spend your time working on open source is the joy of programming. When you are doing programming for the joy of it, you donâ(TM)t want some UI guy (even if it you) raining on your pretty looking, well designed code :-)
... making open source software work on closed hardware from non-cooperating manufacturers. If the manufacturers would open their hardware interface documentation, and avoid making all those little changes every month just for the sake of change, and deliver a stable platform (new major versions every couple years, with all documentation ahead of time) ... then all software can focus more on usability instead of battling with the hardware. And this includes YOU ... Broadcom.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
first off, the fact that an IBMer was involved in the discussion does a lot to discredit the whole article. they have really bad UIs! they, IBM, also fall into the traps he is talking about: designers are frequently not listened to, UIs are designed by the core engineers and influenced by marketing, they need to rush out the next release, the engineer needs some checkbox in place so that he can claim an accomplishment to justify his paycheck.
to be honest, my employer only issues Mac or Windows laptops. i started with a Mac and really tried hard a whole summer to use it, but in the end i dumped it for a Windows laptop over which i installed kubuntu. the help system in Mac OS is super crappy. the package management system is non existent. (the assertion that you just add and remove stuff from applications directory is naive. there is other stuff happening that leaves things broken if you ever update or remove packages.) as a developer it's just too hard to get a good development evironment setup (not just the IDE, but all the tools as well). getting network printers and storage setup on Mac OSX is a crap shoot: sometimes it is easy, but other times it is impossible!
to be honest KDE 4.0 was pretty lame, but i'm loving 4.2!
If you broaden the scope beyond "end-user software" and dive into things like protocols you might find some things. Usability doesn't just apply to the GUI--it helps when you have a well designed protocol or file format. Is EXT3 well designed? What about the FreeBSD ports tree--did that start with code or with design?
Walk the halls of any open-source conference and you'll see a large percentage of attendees with ironically non-open-source Apple laptops and iPhones
There are many "open source" developers. It wouldn't surprise me if Java or PHP developers use a lot of Macs. But what does that actually show? Just because people use or develop open source in one niche doesn't mean that they need to use open source for everything. And their reasons are probably the usual ones: Microsoft compatibility, appeal of Mac hardware, what they are used to, ... It does not show that Macs are easier to use than modern Linux desktops.
Open-source projects have tended to be great commoditizers, but not necessarily the best innovators
Really? Many innovations have first become available in open source form before companies like Microsoft and Apple finally managed to ship them as part of their commercial software. And what actual innovations have Microsoft or Apple actually created? I mean, much of Apple's platform is based on open source software.
I think the real reason it seems like Apple and Microsoft innovate so much is... because they spend billions of dollars to create that illusion.
I bought a Powerbook, for that reason. I figured, I'd never run Windows on it, so may as well put Linux on the best laptop ever, right?
Didn't work too well. I never quite got it working, and just ended up using OS X.
In fact, from personal experience, the reason people choose Macs seems to have less to do with the overall UI, and more to do with specific things Just Working that Just Don't on Linux. Example: Maybe it's gotten better, and there's a nice GUI for this somewhere, but when I plug in a second monitor to my laptop, I restart my X server -- I could never quite get Xinerama or the nvidia stuff to cooperate without a restart.
Contrast this to a Macbook -- just plug it in, and it works. Open System Settings if you want it to behave other than as a clone.
So, I still use Linux, and I really don't get the people who would be into open source and use an iPhone, but I can certainly see why people would choose a Mac. Everything just works, just about all the commercial software you want, and a decent (not great, but decent) Unix under the hood for development.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Cookie Monster? :)
Like all engineering, it is a tradeoff. I'm sure there have been many of whiteboard meetings to discuss this behavior. If you had sloppy focus between windows, yes it might be consistent, but it could also cause confusion of its own. You've got people like me who will play with the mouse wheel or people who are click/scroll happy and would accidentally alter the state of applications that they are not using "aka out of focus".
If you really want to bitch about inconsistent behavior, btich about what I assume are third party widget sets that dont even get the "sloppy focus within subwinows" bit right and require you to click on the widget before the scroll wheel works. Or worse, poorly implemented combo boxes that hog the mouse input while the mouse is outside of the widget so when you fidget with the scroll wheel, the combo box/list box changes the selected item when you didn't want it to.
In other words, the devil is in the details, and there is a *lot* of details to get right on something "simple" like handling the scroll wheel. If you read my post carefully, you see I contradict my own statement about when to accept scroll wheel events. Most UI design is like that. *Lots* of details with lots of things that conflict.
And it follow then that OSS generally only will thrive as long as there's a commercial flavor to commoditize. If OSS were to start killing off commercial software, that could prove to be the great stifler of innovation, not MS in the 90s.
Give me one good reason a device shouldn't automatically flip from portrait to landscape based on how it is oriented in your hand. I'd say if the device doesn't know how it is oriented in your hand, the said device is pretty... well.. stupid.
Free software usability doesn't tend to suck. Software usability in general tends to suck - but free software doesn't suck any worse than any other sort.
The whole premise that better usability will come out of getting usability designers involved in the free software development process is fundamentally misguided. It's really easy to get such feedback for most open source software. Just look at the forums and mailing list of people using the software, and it's trivial to find out exactly what are the confusing parts and what really needs to be improved. As for motivating improvements, most developers working on open-source software want their software to be better. But what does "better" mean?
The problem is that the developers working on the software don't use it the way everybody else does, which means there will always be a clash between their priorities and tastes and what regular users want. This means the people capable of fixing the usability problem believe many requests are misguided, and therefore don't do anything about them. I see this all the time, in projects big and small. On the open source project I contribute the most to, PostgreSQL, some of this disconnect is warranted. For example, users want the software to be super easy to use out of the box, while developers want it to be secure out of the box; that's a very hard split to reconcile. Sometimes instead you'll see features requested by DBAs that make perfect sense to other DBAs, but are shouted down as a bad idea too. This is because many of the most influential developers are not DBAs of large databases, which you'd expect almost by definition. They don't have the right context to fully appreciate some usability decisions. If the development community is healthy, when enough such requests come in eventually some concessions will get made, even if some of the developers don't quite get the motivating reason fully. Enough people complain about something, you just accept that's what everybody wants and bow to community pressure.
But there are plenty of communities where this doesn't seem to happen, and usually it's due to arrogance on the part of the developer rather than them not having design feedback. A classic example was last year's Pidgin UI disaster. Look at that ticket--the entirety of the user community was lined up against the developers, and the lack of response to that feedback even forced a fork whose tagline was "we work for you" as a noteworthy difference from the original project. Completely ridiculous.
I'm suffering from a similar bit of developer arrogance right now, with the standard GNOME terminal app. A change was made recently, first showing up on a lot of people's desktops via Ubuntu Jaunty, which reduces the ability to overload common function keys (like control-C) to either execute terminal functions (like "copy") and still work as terminal input if no text to copy has been selected. There's been a stack of bug reporters, and it turns out the only reason for the change was the developer thought it was a bug--there were no user complaints driving the change. The only right response in this situation, which is strictly a UI decision, is to man up, admit the change was wrong and you were wrong for thinking it, and thank your community for pointing it out. As you can see, that's certainly not happening here. (Yes, I can fix it myself. Not, that doesn't matter, because the thing I'm annoyed about is that it's a step backwards on the most popular default terminal people new to Linux use, which hurts the OS as a whole.)
You can collect usability data all day, that's easy. Doesn't take a designer, it just takes listening to your users. From where I'm sitting it looks like the hard problem is getting open-source developers to pay attention to what they're saying.
Without an IBM, Red Hat, or Mozilla bringing cash and discipline to an open-source project, including paying people to do the 'dirt work' that no one would otherwise do, can open source hope to thrive?"
Maybe not to the degree it has... Linux has certainly greatly benefited from the commercial distros and supporters (e.g. IBM) that have committed cash to adding polish and filling gaps. Unfortunately of course there's only so much they can do - they can commit manpower and technology to individual projects of strategic interest to themselves, but the overall degree of polish of a distro is necessarily heavily reliant on the individual pieces. Each appication/subsystem may be a gem on it's own, but without sufficient standards to guide them (or even desire to adhere to someone else's standards when it's your hobby project done on your time), the resulting pile of gems may be an incoherent and inconsistent mess.
But OTOH, open source thriving and the success of Linux on the desktop (which is the area where the inconsistency and lack of polish hits) are two different things. Linux is already thriving in other areas such as servers and embedded use, and many open source projects such as GNU are used on many platforms other than Linux.
Linux on the desktop is already, and has been for a while, plently good enough (much better than Windows, as is the nature of Unix) for developers who want to use it as a development environment, and seeing as these are the people who created it, that's good enough. If Linux on the desktop never becomes polished enough for a commercial distro to make big bucks off the back of open source developers, then why should we care?
Ben
Many many many years ago I installed Mandrake on a desktop PC with two CD drives (one was a reader and one was a reader/writer). I was installing it from the reader because it was a lot faster.
During the install process, it asked for the second CD. Helpfully it also ejected the CD drive, except that it ejected the reader/writer - the one I wasn't using. So I put CD 2 in there, closed it and it reported that there was a problem with my CD and it couldn't install the operating system and applications.
So I go back to Windows, re-download CD 2, re-burn it and try again. Same problem.
So I re-download from a different mirror, burn and try once more. Same problem.
I'm about to assume that my CD's are all duff when I suddenly have a brainwave. I close the opened CD drive, open my original one and replace the CD. Lo and behold, it worked.
From that day, I could never get over the fact that when asking for the second CD, the installer ejected the tray on the wrong CD-ROM. Not only that, but when it saw that the CD hadn't changed, it reported an error rather than pointing this out and giving me the option to try again.
It took a while before I could look back and laugh.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Yeah. It's totally insane. It's also unfair that your observations were modded "flamebait". The only thing you missed was failing to connect the dots between your advice and the problems you listed.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Most Mac users are perfectly happy with Safari.
Some Windows users are also happy with Safari.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Ubuntu, Apple products and the Python programming language have all stood out with their exceptional usability because of their "benevolent dictators." When everything's decided by committee (even loose ones like in FOSS), every drastic but beneficial change will be pecked down by the naysayers. Something like Python 3's intentional backwards incompatibility, done for the sake of a vastly cleaner language syntax would never had made it without Guido's spearheading of the effort.
We hashed this out before on slashdot, and it seemed a consensus formed that the "problem" is that commodity ideas are easier to coordinate with open-source, not that there's less creativity. If there is a reference standard, then everyone knows the goal and works toward it. With new ideas, different people will inject their own view into it and it never gets done.
Table-ized A.I.
I agree. I think there is untapped energy that can be used without resorting to private companies for every software design. There is so much energy from users reporting bugs etc. There is so much development all over the place. What we need is a system to help focus those energies together. To make the bug reporting user feedback less annoying or overwhelming. To make development that meets public goals more satisfying. It's hard but not impossible. It's about managing information so that it gets where it should. Most developers are driven by the idea of people getting satisfaction from their projects. But right now, often the feedback isn't helpful.
Also, getting more newbies into development is a great thing. Still it is too involved for most to make the leap into development. I've tried a few times but I just can't hack it (so far)... but I know that at some point I will get there.
Also, these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day. FOSS is not old. In computers people think too short term still. Over time as technology and everything matures we'll get this right.
Stupidity is its own reward.
Proprietary interfaces tend to look good but the underlying code sucks even more, creating vulnerabilities and making systems unstable. I far prefer less pretty but dependable applications over pretty but useless ones.
Examples of stuff that still doesn't work on Kubuntu Jaunty:
...
transcoding in Amarok
I'm no expert and am just going on what I've read but have you tried Ubuntu Studio? It uses the RT kernel which should make Amarok run better.
I've been looking into installing Ubuntu on my Mac, unfortunately one reason I first wanted to was because I wanted to use CinePaint however Ubuntu dropped it. Ubuntu Studio still has it though.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Or at least becomes a mushy mishmash with no consistency.
Table-ized A.I.
The thing is it is hard to wear both a "UI Design Hat" and a developer hat at the same time.
This is nothing new however others are able to do it. What it requires is to separate design from programming. As an example take writers. Good writers separate getting words on paper, or disk, from editing. You need the words before you can edit. Some take a recursive route, get words down then edit. Add more words then edit again.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Maybe they meant "chef"? But the "chief" saying likely came about when kids used to play "cowboys and indians". Everybody wanted to be the chief because the power-structure was clear-cut: the chief wore a full-feathered headdress. Rank was not so clear on the cowboy side.
Table-ized A.I.
I think Thunderbird is a good example of this. There are plenty of places where the UI is unpolished and poorly presented (the default button layout, the displaying of the message details when editing an email and when managing your contacts are three good examples).
I'm hoping that some of the Firefox UI team eventually get around to Thunderbird as it could do with some TLC.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
"Why free software usability tends to suck"?
Rather all usability tends toward suckishness. It's called entropy.
MPT's later essay "Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it", immediately rejects its own premise and points out that the real issue is coherent management for volunteer projects. This is surprising?
F/OSS projects are not always staffed by volunteers. And volunteer projects - in software or elsewhere - are not always amateurishly managed. The defining characteristic of Free or Open Source software models is paradoxically a restriction on how work products can be used - that is, it is a restriction on the output of the project. It may also be true that such a project may choose itself to use restricted inputs - perhaps including its own output recursively. It is only by comparison with proprietary software that F/OSS can be called open or free, as the case may be.
Usability may be a strong requirement on a project. Usability itself has many dimensions. Many here appear to think usability is synonymous with GUI technology. Far from it. But even if GUIs are given specific attention, the discussion is rather naive. Pointer focus is not always better than click-to-focus. Otherwise desirable features often interact - should the window with focus automatically move to the front while your mouse traverses 8 intervening windows?
But usability is never the only requirement. Requirements must be interpreted in some context. A project without a coherent context is going to produce poor requirements. Whatever software process is followed, failing to capture solid requirements will result in a weak differentiation between proposed solutions. Unless there is a self-consistent solution, the usability of that solution never even becomes a realistic point of discussion.
A project addresses a single problem - whether that problem is well described or not. Any problem has several good solutions - and many, many, many bad solutions. Design is an exercise in rejecting bad solutions and retaining good solutions, that is - survival of the fittest. A project can pursue design faster than natural selection or slower than natural selection. Ultimately it will be the selection pressure arising from a community of users (whether skilled or naive doesn't really matter) that will drive convergence to an acceptable solution. Some users will always find solutions acceptable to the community to be bad solutions from their own point of view.
Without free BSD unix Steve Jobs would not have a second act, Apple wouldn't be enjoying its 2nd success and without free liver Steve Jobs wouldn't have a second Life.
Its not about closed Apple software. Apple can't support an open system and deliver insanely great products. Great products are about what is missing i.e. chaos, cults, diversions, forks, etc...
"interface design ends up too complicated for most people to use"
The Gnome menus and Applications seem easier to use than Windows versions, I've used both. Openoffice seems more consistent (as far as menus go) than MS Office but first you have to turn off "Hide Menus" in MS Office to compare.
KDE guys speak up.
This politics of innovation/change in the UI of KDE or even MS Office is interesting to me. The updated version of the Matthew Paul Thomas critique on free software usability that someone mentioned has several points in the ballpark, here's one that's relevant:
Basically, once you've implemented something, some users will strongly resist change even if it is better.
That's one of the things that makes it tough to change the course of a big tanker like a Linux desktop environment, even if you do have someone at the helm punching in coordinates for the promised land.
I think most would agree that to say "FOSS usability sucks" is an over-generalization. A lot of free software is not targeted at an end-user audience anyway. In my experience, FOSS usability shines in that non-end-user space. So if we broke down the user space like this..
I think, FOSS usability is good, if not often superior to commercial software, for the first two categories of users.
So (again, an over-generalization) why does FOSS suck for end-users? I don't imagine it's because the end-users aren't geeky enough. It's not like only uber-geeks post to user mailing lists of successful FOSS projects: you'll find a big mix of expertise (programmers and non-programmers) in users posting to the Apache mailing lists, for example. Rather, I guess, the reason why end-user-facing FOSS projects often fall short on usability is that the user-feedback loop is somehow broken.
Here are some ideas off the top of my head on how to improve the situation:
If those are good/ok suggestions, then the good news is that much of the infrastructure for this feedback mechanism already exists in off-the-shelf FOSS components.
* *
On a tangential note, I don't quite buy in to the argument that FOSS usability suffers because it's boring. First, it's not boring to everyone, and second, depending on the perspective, there are lots of boring tasks involved in maintaining a FOSS project, and third, most UI projects want to be as user-friendly as possible--so there is no lack of motivation.
There are only, by my quick count, one hundred and forty one Linux distributions. Currently shipping. For the Intel platform. In English.
Based on Ubuntu. But are really just a modified version so. That it's. Not. Brown.
Yeah, but it doesn't suck. Sumatra PDF tools Adobe Acrobat. Firefox tools every other browser. The GIMP uses way less resources than photoshop and for everything *I* need is a drop in replacement.
7zip absolutely schools every compression program ever written.
I even like Open Office Writer more than Word, though I'd forgive dissenting opinions on this one.
The ONLY non FOSS I use is Nero. I use a portable version I got on bitjunkie.
Oh yeah, and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
And why wouldn't there be rivalry between FOSS solutions?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
This article has a crucial flaw. It merges the concepts of innovation and polish.
Much of the FOSS software is lacking in polish. The interface may not be pretty or there is a single feature that is a bit hard to set or whatever; however, that has nothing to do with innovation. Innovation is the moving forward into new features and capabilities. In that realm, FOSS is frequently the leader. Why? Because in many cases the proprietary systems look at what the majority of users will want and ignore the minority groups. When you do this, you end up with the worst of all worlds from a feature standpoint. It is a challenge to support the beginning user and the advanced user at the same time. It's a challenge to allow the business user to utilize the same product as the technical users or even home users. The place were FOSS most shines is in the fact that the products are open so that a developer can step in and say, "This product would be better for group X if we added this functionality so I'll add it." In some cases that developer is in group X.
I am an owner of an Ipod Touch. I absolutely love the thing. I can do about 80% of what I want on it. Why only 80%? Not because the capabilities I want are complicated or costly to employ. Because the manufacturer feels that my use of the device is a minority use so they never developed the features. For example: I heavily use my Ipod Touch as what it is (an Ipod ... read the term pod as in podcasting). I listen to multiple podcasts daily. I can now download podcasts directly over wifi; however, the feature is crippled by the fact that the Ipod Touch will not keep a list of your podcasts. The only way to keep a list of the podcasts you listen too on the device is to keep around an episode of the podcast. That combined with the fact that the device allows no feature for "download all new episodes of my podcasts" (which it couldn't do without the list or you would have to keep around old episodes for it to know what podcasts you listen too) make the device a pain to work with. As an alternative, it would be great to sync over wifi with my computer, but that's not possible either. So, a device that is meant to listen to podcasts on the go and has wifi support and the ability to download over the air makes it painful to do so without a frequently cabling. This is the exact place where a FOSS approach would shine. A developer would be able to add one or more of these features without having to get the original developers to "come around".
So, I can see that FOSS sometimes fails on the polish side and may not always produce the best interface, but the idea that it lacks in innovation simply put does not make any sense.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'll sign on to being one of those users who resist change.
some users will strongly resist change even if it is better.
And, even more so, some users will strongly resist change even if they're repeatedly told that it's better. Because, actually, we've heard it before. You know, everybody says that their changes are "better."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The reason that open source sucks is that it is tied to Linux, which is a derivative of UNIX. Devotees of the Cult-of-UNIX believe that gui interfaces are positively evil, because users should have to EARN the right to use software by memorizing an arcane and poorly documented command line syntax.
This is what has kept all versions of UNIX, including Linux, in the murky shadows of the IT world for decades...
The open source world needs a mental high-colonic. They need to purge the computer-science major arrogance out of their mindset and realize that ease of use trumps all other concerns in software design.
Following the proverb - "He who would be first amongst you must be the servant of all", open source developers need to finally admit that only software that makes features accessible to their grandmother *MATTERS*.
Everything else is just- well - j@rking off...
This used to be true in the 90's. Now that more people are aware of open source, more designers are involved in open source projects.
Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsZvwyxJ9vk&feature=player_embedded
I run mostly Apple machines myself. I have installed Linux distributions on them, but I wind up running OSX in the end. It does indeed "just work" better when it comes to peripherals and hardware features (sound, external video, power modes, etc).
Here are my favorite applications for the Mac (as measured by frequency of usage):
* Firefox
* bash (and all those lovely utilities one uses in bash: ls, grep, cut, head, vim, cat, find, wget, etc)
* Python (often iPython)
* jEdit
* OpenOffice.org (or NeoOffice)
Notice anything they have in common? They are all Free Software
There are a few proprietary applications I also keep in my Dock:
* Safari
* Mail.app
* GraphicConverter
* Preview
* iCal
* iTunes
These have something in common too. They are proprietary, but they are applications whose whole purpose is to manipulate or utilize files in non-proprietary data formats (HTML, mbox, PDF, png, jpg, CAL, mp3, etc... OK, I know mp3 is a little bit proprietary). If I were to need to give up any of these, nothing would stand in the way of manipulating the data files I had created using other tools.
There are a few other applications I use that are less clear, and that I don't feel quite so good about:
* Dictionary.app
* VirtualBox
* Acquisition
* Skype
* Finder
Well, the dictionary is handy, and the way the data is stored is probably not very open. But if I didn't have it, I'd use some other dictionary; there's not any bad lock-in there. VirtualBox is free-of-cost, but proprietary format; I'm not so happy about that, but it does let me run Linux in a VM. Acquisition is a nice (shareware/nagware) fileshare program that I paid for... well, I use to download non-proprietary data files. I could use something else if I wanted to to get the same data. Finder is... well, I could use a different file manager if I wanted. I don't love it, but it's there and is basically fine. The only really locked-in program on my list is Skype. It's hard to get around that... but it's the same story on my Linux machines.
Buy Text Processing in Python
n/t
I gave an impromptu talk at an EuroFOO conference 5 years ago about exactly this problem: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~jack/presentations/OpenSource-EuroFoo.pdf.
My feeling is that the basic problem is that, in open source, at most 5% of the people involved are non-programmers (read: non-geeks). And for most projects the number is probably exactly 0% of the people involved. for shareware projects it's close to 50% (half of the developer:-). For commercial projects it's somewhere in the range of 20% (small vendors) to 99% (Microsoft, big software houses).
The input of the non-geeks, while usually dismissed by us geeks as fluff, can be really, really important. Because their interested in such technical trivialities as documentation, ease of use, learning curves, market acceptance (and, yes, financial bottom line too). Those trivialities are important even to hardcore geeks when the software in question is just a tool you need to get the job done (as opposed to the labour of love you've been spending years of your life on).
This is almost, but not quite, what I want. I want sloppy focus for mouse-wheel scrolling only.
Is anyone aware of such a thing? It would make my windows work just a wee bit less bothersome...
OSS can be innovative. To do so, people have to discuss these innovations on conferences IRL and online. For example, there are several interesting ideas available for the next GNOME environment which are very innovative [http://live.gnome.org/BrianMuhumuza/ToPaZ]. No other system provides them. Of course these ideas can only become reality when more people are starting to support them.
All I know is that when people come by my office, or watch me present, and have a chance at my Ubuntu install on my laptop -- every single person says "THAT'S COOL". From wobbly windows, transparency, 3D cube... to simple things like my theme, and the invariable query, "How did you get your wallpaper to span two monitors?" -- people wish that they had it.
Then the tech-savvy come by and see that I'm doing stuff with sed and text processing applications -- and running some windows binary-to/from-text filters with wine in the mix... that updates are just taken care of... that it's virus free... that new applications are available with the click of a radio button... and that I can _natively_ display X business critical applications on my desktop running on a remote server... That all the drivers for any hardware that I would want to install on my computer is likely already there and in place... They _all_ would rather scrap their current setup for something like what I have.
The chief problem though is fear. There's fear of messing something up royally, and fear of having to learn something new, and having to rely on something as nebulous as the WWW for their support (cause Darned if IT is going to support them doing this). There's also the fear of not being able to use a key application, interoperability, or of of finding something critical can't be done (like watching Netflix "Watch Instantly" movies).
The other problem is _3d_games_ -- and Windows has all but sewn up this market. Open Source Linux Video Graphics drivers are still not up to snuff, and neither are the proprietary drivers really good. If people can't get good frame rates in Linux, or they're going to have to jump through hoops to get their game of choice up and running on their (work) laptop, they're not going to want to use it. So Linux kernel infrastructure is improving here, and some HW vendors are gradually opening to the idea of Open Source drivers, but it will be a while before the gaming industry warms to the idea of supporting Linux as a platform.
Anyway, I've got one guy at work so far that has started to learn about his computer & has installed Ubuntu on his new laptop. My laptop is still dual-boot, but I haven't gone back to Windows for ~2 months at the very least... I can get everything I need to do done on my Linux workstation and more, and am /almost/ ready to dump windows completely.
So, from a guy that is actually using it, I am more than happy. I think that if the tech was packaged with PC's and there was a little bit more education out, or perhaps a better "safe mode" packaged with every install, that it should really be a no-brainer for grandma and the tech-savvy to be able to use.
For hardware, Apple's can be of higher quality because it is higher priced.
2009 calling. Apple hardware prices have been comparable to Windows PCS for years. At least comparing specs for Mac Pros. The problem is that you will not find a low cost tower or other expandable Mac. I've also heard here and elsewhere that the Mac Mini is under powered. However yesterday I came across some threads on Photo.net asking whether the Mini is any good for photography, which is demanding in specs, and repliers have said it is in fact good for it. I was surprised by this as I thought the Mini was underpowered too.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I know what you mean, but the ability to do that consistently well isinnovation, every bit as much as wavelet compression or microkernels or whatever technical innovations you were thinking of when you wrote that.
Sure, you can say that all they're doing is combining other people's innovations. Great. My Commodore 64 ran software consisting of byte values 0-255, just like Linux does; the rest is all refinement, combination and Moore's law.
I've used handhelds every day since the original Palm Pilot came out; then I tried a few Pocket PCs and PPC phones. All of them could do things that the iPhone didn't do, including a few like cut-and-paste that fall into the "unconscionably absent" category.
But my iPhone does more than any of them. Not "can do more" (it can't); it does more. My Palm Pilot could be my universal note-taking device, and I tried over and over to make it one - but it wasn't, because Graffiti is slow, and so's whipping out a stylus. My Clie could have been my main music player, but it wasn't, because memory sticks are overpriced, playback was unreliable, and that stylus again. My iPaq could have been my main camera and voice recorder, but it wasn't. And so on.
The iPhone is the first device I've owned that truly had the potential to be that "universal pocket appliance" I've wanted for a decade. The 3GS really nails it, but even the slower, clunkier 3G was far more (yes) usable than any of the other palmtops. The combination of always-on Internet, a real web browser, slim form factor, App Store, sync and true touch screen with finger-oriented UI pushed it over the tipping point.
None of those technologies are particularly novel (though I wasn't expecting to like the touch screen nearly as much as I do), and I didn't know that this is what I've been waiting for. In theory, someone could have introduced such a device any time in the past ten years. But nobody did - and it's taken two years for anything remotely similar to come to market, so clearly nobody had it in the pipeline, either.
If that's not innovation, I don't know what is.
FOSS can innovate much more than proprietary software because there is no incentive other than to provide a functionality the dev desires.
That's the key, functionality devs want, not end users. Commercial businesses have to provide software end users are willing to pay for but FOSS projects only deliver what the devs want. An excellent example of this is Photoshop vs the GIMP. PS offers 32 bits per colour channel, and print artists need at least 16, whereas GIMP only has 8 bits. They have been promising 16 bits for about 10 years but still have not delivered it. And not because they couldn't, one developers offered them 16 bits but they turned it down. So he forked it and started FilmGIMP, now called CinePaint which offers 32 bits per channel and is used in the movie industry.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
how can the price/performance ratio be unbeatable, when they use the same products, but charge more for them?
2009 calling. Mac prices have been relatively comparable to Windows PC prices for years, why does this mime not die? Of course a buyer has to start with a Mac then configure a PC for similar specs, you can't just say you want a mini or mid tower then try to get a Mac version. Apple doesn't make one.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Here's a typical bit of Open Source design suckage.
I just installed the latest version of Blender, over an existing installation. The installer can't find the exact version of Python it wants (which, incidentally, is not a currently supported version.) The program itself can, it's just the installer that's broken. Typical.
Now I want to draw a spiral spring. Naturally, that's not built-in; I'll need a third-party plug-in. So I find the Blender Plug-In Repository using Google. That says "The main page for Blender python scripts is now: here. That gets "If you are not redirected within 5 seconds, click here", which then redirects to a dead link.
OK, let's try Blender's main site and search for "plugins". That leads to documentation on how to code a plugin. Another search result returns "Plugin functionalities varies so much that it is not possible to describe them here. Differently than Texture Plugins Sequence Plugins do not have a Buttons in any Button Window, but their parameters are usually accessed via NKEY." Really.
OK, let's just try "blender spiral" in Google. This gets a script for drawing spirals. That's nice. But it's a ".rar" file. That's not something Blender-specific. It's a proprietary Russian archiving format. The RAR site promotes something called "RegistryBooster", which is a strong indication of involvement with hostile code. So I probably don't want to buy the WinRAR product so I can decompress something which is a few lines of Python. This
Typical.
While some open-source development is definitely paid, most of it has got to be being done by volunteer programmers.
A volunteer (on any project, software or not) is going to be working on what he or she wants, and I'm speculating that that's the crux of the problem - here, the techies in question either isn't good at userfriendly interfaces or doesn't care about newbie-friendly interfaces, plain and simple.
The "RTFM n00b" types likely aren't going to work on interfaces for said n00bs.
Sure, there are some 'good people' out there on this issue (think of the pushing behind *ubuntu, for instance), but an awful lot are not. :(
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
i've never understood why people mistake cool for good.
apple makes stuff that has a definite look - if you like it great, if you don't not so great. But their hardware is not "good" - it is full of flaws - just look at the gen one ipod battery disaster; my wife had a very $$ laptop where the rubber keys stuck to the screen, and the power cord plug did nothave any strain relief.
I could go on quite a while; the point is, if any other vendor shipped stuff with these problems, the /. crowd would jeer with dersion. why does apple get some sort of free pass on this ?
Apple doesn't make good hardware - they make good user interface systems; if you look at apple, everything they do revolves around some system and the user interface.
Instead you dismissed it. Again, give me *one* good reason why the damn thing *should not* orient itself to how I hold it.
Dismissing it as a gimmick or cool trick makes you a developer who doesn't understand anything but coding.
this is called "sloppy focus" it's available on windows but you have to download and install the feature. It's the one of the first things i put on new windows installations.
But can I get sloppy focus for the mouse wheel and click to focus for the keyboard?
Again, give me *one* good reason why the damn thing *should not* orient itself to how I hold it.
Because the device can't always detect how you hold it. An accelerometer isn't enough: Zerth pointed out that if you're oriented oddly, how you hold it relative to your eyes might not match how you hold it relative to the center-of-mass of the earth.
If yu purchase with care you will have no trouble under Linux. If you fail to do so you will have trouble on any system.
A lot of organizations do not purchase with care because they do not purchase. Instead, they rely on in-kind donations of hardware. Likewise, a lot of people who switch from Windows to L*n?x do not purchase with care because they do not purchase. Instead, they rely on the paid-for hardware that they already own. Are you recommending making the experience of switching to Linux more like that of (legitimately) switching to Mac OS X, which necessarily involves buying a new computer? For one thing, that switching use case would appear to require the cooperation of brick-and-mortar stores where prospective users can try out the product, especially its keyboard and screen if it is a laptop computer.
Yeah, so it's less efficient, you have to download the same libs several times
I've developed applications where I can demonstrate that 90 percent of the code in the statically linked binary comes from libraries that I did not write: Allegro library, libjpeg, libpng, libvorbis, DUMB mod player. Lots of Internet connections, especially satellite and mobile broadband, are still capped at only 5,000 MB per month.
Isn't it desirable to outsource FOSS UI Design to Proprietary Software Vendors?
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Sorry, but based on my experience, I disagree with the point of this article.
I find both Gnome and KDE far more usable than the commercial offerings that are available. Specifically, I find the following features really useful:
These are features that I have yet to see on a widely used commercial offering out of the box and features that I find really boost my productivity. Yes, there are commercial add-ons (such as StarDock), but they're buggy as all get out and generally suck compared to what I can get on a standard Linux install. One feature that generally makes me tend towards KDE over Gnome is the ability to place the taskbar on the side of the screen instead of the bottom and still have something that is very usable. When you write lots of code, you want more height, not width. Wide screens are great for multimedia but are generally poor for code development. For coders, placing the taskbar on the bottom makes less efficient use of the screen.
Relating to innovation, the FOSS movement has certainly been the source for lots of innovation. This "lack of innovation" seems to be a recent mantra being thrown out against the FOSS movement. Consider:
Sorry to burst the article's bubble, but FOSS has been the source for a huge amount of innovation. What I see coming from the commercial offerings has been, to a large extent, an apeing or imitation of ideas started by the FOSS movement with some incremental improvement on the original idea.
I don't even think that it's "gotten better", I think you just have terrible luck. I've never had an issue with plugging extra monitors in with Linux (from adding new ones to my main PC back in 2003 when I first started using Linux, out to when I bought myself a new projector and on-the-fly set up a dual-monitor display with FreeDOOM from my Acer Aspire One to test it out....pixels as big as my hand!). Windows is another story, mainly having to do with crashes and absurdly irritating bugs; dual-monitor support and how it gets handled is one of the main reasons I switched over to Linux full time back while I was living in University Residence.
;) Maybe that's just me, though; I've always got a kick out of the visceral feel of hitting that key combination and watching everything blink out of existence and then back in.
As for Macs, my success rate with plugging them into secondary displays is hit and miss, about 25% complete success, 25% failure, and 50% took a bit of effort and fiddling. That's not counting the times I tried to help people hook their Macbooks up to classroom projectors or such and then realized that they didn't realize they needed a proprietary adapter cable to do so, at which point I laughed at their $1200 new 15" Macbooks and smugly offered them the usage of my $200 13" shitty laptop that I installed Kubuntu on. Yeah, I'm the kind of person who can't stop from helping people but also can't stop from being a bit of a dick about it.
Also, what's the fear of Ctrl+Alt+Backspace?
I'm not saying I entirely disagree with you, to be clear. Luck of the draw has a lot to do with user experience, for one (nvidia-settings has rarely let me down, but I'm not going to pretend you're lying about having issues with nvidia and on-the-fly adding displays), and secondly I've recommended Macs to people before, convinced them to go over to that platform in fact. It's just that in my experience Macs seem to suffer when they go out of their comfort zone; they may often Just Work when Linux doesn't, but there's also times Linux Just Works when Macs don't, it's just that those scenarios tend to skew more towards power user stuff.
P.S. I notice that you said "Powerbook", so I'm guessing when you say "nvidia stuff" you were running Linux on a PowerPC computer. That's probably where our experiences diverge so harshly; Nvidia has never had an official, fully-supported Linux driver for PowerPC, right? AFAIK to a large degree it's a port of, or at least shares development with their Windows driver (on one occasion I ran into a big issue on my Linux install which was identical to the problem a friend had in Windows...unfortunately for him the trivially simple Linux fix had no Windows analogue), so it was fated to never come out for PowerPC. I actually have a friend who owns and loves a small old Powerbook that he dual-boots, and he mainly uses OSX because with Linux+NVIDIA on PowerPC you're stuck with the feature-incomplete drivers. Alas!
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I wish I had mod points. In fact I wish I had spare accounts and they each had mod points too, so that I could single-handedly mod you to a +5 Insightful. Parent, I salute you and the truth you speak.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
As in, the port of KDE 3.5.10 for Jaunty (*buntu 9.04) backported PDF rotation into KPDF, among other things (it's mentioned in the release notes that were linked to on the front page of Kubuntu.org back right before Jaunty Final came out). With those packages you can run KDE 3.5.10 as your DE but still load KDE 4 apps when they're preferable. I know I've now responded to two of your comments and mentioned the KDE 3.5 Jaunty Remix in both comments, but I really wanted to be sure you noticed its existence!
As to NetworkManager, unfortunately current developments in NetworkManager have broken KDE 3.5's KNetworkManager, which is the main problem with running KDE 3.5 on Jaunty. It's fairly easy to get around, though, by just either installing network-manager-gnome and running nm-applet, or (and this is what I've been doing on my netbook) installing Wicd, which is in the repos for Jaunty.
All that being said, although I'm running Jaunty on my laptop, netbook, backup PC and projector computer (albeit that's just an Openbox session and XBMC, not even a DM is running), and gone the Jaunty-KDE3-remix route with two different friends' netbooks, on my main PC which is also my duplex's file server I'm riding out this LTS to the next LTS if I can (and I might not even reboot until then).
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I would be rich by now if every Windows and Linux user that could not find his way around an Apple machine would have given me a penny.
I have seen many times how people used to one environment move their sorry digital ass around an unfamiliar place without any hope of finding how do do a certain task. They will eventually succeed of course, after all desktop computing is based broadly around the same principles, but watching people trying to adjust to an unfamiliar environment should dispel the myth that a given environment is better than others.
Linux and Unix users are notorious for feeling comfortable using the command line for many tasks, other people roll their eyes thinking that user friendliness requires a mouse and shiny icons, in reality the command line can be very user friendly, specially if you have spent a lifetime building habits around it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
GPL license is more open and free, if what you are thinking about is the availability of software.
If software is not available to be adapted, modified, and adopted once it has been modified, then I fail to see how the lack of such freedoms make people freer.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Says who?
If your previous assertion is true, then whey did they adopt the inferior beige method? RDF aside, they can't be right both ways.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm not sure I know what the fuss is about - I have been on Linux only for 10 years or so, and I don't think there is anything I feel is missing. In fact, I think there is lot of functionality I'd rather not have, which gets installed by default, but fortunately, this being Linux, I can just remove it again.
I think FOSS is more or less where it should be, now. We have the functionality that matters, and while thre are still things that could be improved, I don't see much of a problem. The only nuisance I have come across in the last several years is the fact that there is still no way of ensuring that all desktop programs use the same file dialog, but that really is a small issue.
And what is wrong with the design of open source? All software and open source more so, gets used or not depending on whether the users like it - the design is part of that, and probably often a major part, so in the end the designs that are still in there are the one that were good enough to survive. Pure evolution at work.
The comments in that article are utter bullshit.
Opensource is in many fields way ahead op the pack in both features and innovation.
Just because graphicaly and user level experience wize its not doesn't mean that 99% of the rest that makes up an OS and applications aren't.
The true problem is that developers in open source generaly do not have "computer illiterate" people above them like CEO's, Directors, Managers and Graphics designers and with that don't have a clue what general users need or want from their app other then the feature wize.
A developer can work with most if any application and doesn't know that a normal user is to stupid to work with the frontends to the apps he develops.
The UK JISC are a funding body. My open source project received 6 months funding and I'm half way through. We have worked carefully to ensure that sustainability is high on the agenda. We have contingency for tackling the more mundane tasks; good communications, collaborative processes and quality development tools. Design has been a fundamental part of the process. I strongly believe open development methodology only needs a small amount of quality guidance. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ http://www.diaser.org.uk/
STFU, retard.
I can deal with beating up on the OS to get dual monitors working. I can live without flash working. The last update broke sound, and so far I can't get it working.
What I can't deal with is the lack of specific applications.
Gimp != photoshop.
No equivalent for Mapmaker Pro.
No working equivalent for Access. (I spent a week looking and trying.)
No equivalent for Omnifocus. (Mac/iPhone/iTouch todo/project manager software)
No working equivalent for iTunes that works with my iTouch.
So I run a mac in addition to my linux box.
I run WinXP in a VirtualBox.
Linux is still the underdog. To win adherents, it has to do everything that both Mac and Windows does and do it close to as well and as fast.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
The two simple reasons for this are/have been:
Close the lid, open the lid, and sleep and resume actually worked.
The battery life was better in OS X than linux.
That is really all that there was to it, that and X11 plus gcc with the stuff in /usr/bin was good enough. It has nothing to do with UI, cause there were a whole lot of people that used fvwm+xterm+vim or whatever they are accustomed to in full screen X11.
where the integration and form factor are hidden behind a desk or in a server room, I could just as well grab a non-Apple machine and be just as happy. But for laptops, imacs, and even powermacs, you just can't get a machine with matching integration and ergonomics from commodity components as such.
Depending on who makes the server hardware OEM prices can be either less or more than Macs. The Mac Pro is a good workstation and when I configured Dell and HP workstations they cost considerably more than the Mac Pro. And what many may not know is that Apple also makes some good mass storage systems, such as the Xsan, and servers like the Xserve.
But for laptops, imacs, and even powermacs
Personally I think the all-in-ones, whether the iMac or Dell's or HP's offerings are a waste. As is the Mac Mini. The integration of the various lines are pretty good though I don't care about some of them. Such as the built-in iSight camera. Others obviously love it though, any number of tymes I walked into an Apple store and saw teens playing around with them.
Personally if I wanted a web cam I'd prefer one with higher resolution. That's why I haven't gotten a digital camera yet, I want one with high res. Then again I want to start working as a photographer. So until I can afford a good DSRL I'll stick with my 35mm and scan my film.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If you count every person who customizes somebody's Windows installation there must be tens of thousands of versions of Windows, too.