True, writing good software is hard, because there's more to a good program than simply good coding. That's something the open-source community IMO is lacking: it's a bunch of programming freaks who can write complicated things such as kernels, but e.g. don't know what makes a good user-interface. A good interface is more than just fancy hover-buttons and such (the hoverbutton itself was introduced to reduce clutter from all the 3D edges on toolbars). This is not an insult, this simply something that I've noticed. When was the last time a changelog for an opensource project indicated something like "re-organized the configuration dialog to be more userfriendly" or "added an hourglass animation to indicate that the program is busy". Those kinds of things will undoubtedly make 70% of the people here think 'hah! run back to Windows if that's what you want', instead of considering exactly why Linux and its software is not as popular as expected. This goes for many other aspects, not just the interface.
The Gimp is intended to be a copy or replacement for Photoshop, but it only has most of the functionality, not all the other things that make Photoshop good.
Your every day hacker uses the console, because it's powerful and allows them to do whatever they want. Yet they fail to realize that those people who don't want the console are not 'wussies' or 'stupid', they are simply people who wish to use the basic functions of the computer through basic actions.
When the open source community manages to attract people who know more than just how to write code, the quality of programs should go up immensely.
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True, writing good software is hard, because there's more to a good program than simply good coding. That's something the open-source community IMO is lacking: it's a bunch of programming freaks who can write complicated things such as kernels, but e.g. don't know what makes a good user-interface. A good interface is more than just fancy hover-buttons and such (the hoverbutton itself was introduced to reduce clutter from all the 3D edges on toolbars).
This is not an insult, this simply something that I've noticed. When was the last time a changelog for an opensource project indicated something like "re-organized the configuration dialog to be more userfriendly" or "added an hourglass animation to indicate that the program is busy". Those kinds of things will undoubtedly make 70% of the people here think 'hah! run back to Windows if that's what you want', instead of considering exactly why Linux and its software is not as popular as expected. This goes for many other aspects, not just the interface.
The Gimp is intended to be a copy or replacement for Photoshop, but it only has most of the functionality, not all the other things that make Photoshop good.
Your every day hacker uses the console, because it's powerful and allows them to do whatever they want. Yet they fail to realize that those people who don't want the console are not 'wussies' or 'stupid', they are simply people who wish to use the basic functions of the computer through basic actions.
When the open source community manages to attract people who know more than just how to write code, the quality of programs should go up immensely.