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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?"
It is very possible to make good and usable FLOSS software - you just need a project leader who knows about usability. I find that reading and understanding Gnome HIG is a great first step.
The 'problem' is that in most cases the main programmers in FLOSS have little knowledge about HIG, while a lot of commercial software is designed by sales people, who know HIG, but have very little knowledge of programming. So the situation is that FLOSS often has great code, but bad interfaces, while commercial software often has good interfaces, but crappy code. In both cases the situation can be improved by having people from the other side join in and contribute. In commercial software that means that the manager hires some good coders, while in FLOSS side it means that users file bugs and sometimes send patches or UI mockups.
It is not an unsolvable problem, it is just an existing problem that takes effort to solve.
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.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Why link to the outdated version of Mathew Paul Thomas' article when he wrote a much newer one here: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability Appropriately, it's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
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Damn, one more thing I forgot:
Know the capabilities of the OS/DE you're running in. I don't use GTK+ apps on Windows, because they don't work with Microsoft's voice recognition or handwriting recognition features. Which is really a shame, because those features work automatically if you use the native widgets. (Heck, they work in Firefox and I'm pretty sure they aren't using native widgets.) It's a huge pain on my tablet.
Open source projects almost never support drag&drop, but drag&drop has been around long enough that it should just be expected to work. (Kudos to the open source projects that get this right, BTW.)
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Yep. I think some people just need to realize that there are lots of people that use OSS simply because it is good software and not because we are zealots that hate Microsoft or Apple or whatever.