Touche.:-) Still, I doubt that most people, most of the time would go to even that small amount of trouble to save themselves 10 bucks. iTunes' DRM keeps most people in line most of the time, given current technological limitations and social habits. Maybe not even "most," come to think of it. Enough people, enough of the time.
And that's really all DRM can hope to do, I think. Happily, that's still enough--apparently--to reassure content owners they can put their work online without the universe imploding around their heads.
That's what I used to think too, but I dunno... If it's iTunes you're thinking of, the "average Joe" already has a perfectly easy alternative to the music store--he can just go on Kazaa and download whatever he wants. Or on the rare occasion that Apple's DRM actually gets in the way of something you want to do, you can always just burn the track to CD and rerip. But in that case you've already bought the track, so it wouldn't matter.
So it's pretty easy to defeat the DRM, and yet iTunes is wildly popular. I think this is generalizable beyond iTMS.
On the contrary, DRM is amazingly successful at what it intends to do: make unauthorized copying annoying enough so that most people would rather pay 99 cents for a song or whatever it is.
DRM's just supposed to keep honest people honest. Nobody expects it to pose much of a barrier to people who are hellbent on getting a free lunch.
Of course, if the implementation is too restrictive, or incredibly obnoxious (like how you have to sit through 10 minutes of commercials at the beginning of the Lost In Translation DVD), then it'll fail in the marketplace. That still doesn't mean all DRM is a wasted effort.
As to your point (c), they're not necessarily inferior to CD. Remember CD audio is itself a downsampled version of the original master. So if you have access to the master DAT, you could theoretically make an AAC or even an MP3 with a signal closer to the original than the CD, even at a much lower bitrate. (Apple rips most of their iTunes tracks from the original master.)
That's the theory, anyway. In the real world I doubt the AACs in question are actually more faithful to the master than the CD versions. Do I care? Nah, I can't tell the difference. YMMV.
YAAHhahaH! pyou'r e ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. Howeer I efeel the need to p ouint out that in myY experinece FIrefox is absurd--ABSURD--to ues if you have a mac since safari is dozens of times better. Picture several dozens of urinals standing againtst a brik wall, or aseveral dozens of men urinating into said urine receptacles. This is how many times Safari bests Firefox over, at least on the Mac. Safari's closed and IFirefox is playing catch-up, which is sad snice there's so many talented edevelpoers working no firdefox.
How coem ther's no drunk girl in my apartment right now? Jjust drunk me. alone.
Dude, relax... I was just replying to the parent poster. My post didn't mean that OSS is "always one step behind."
That said, I find it sort of sickening how some people think OSS is destined to be superior, always, to closed software. The argument makes sense neither inductively nor deductively to me. I gotta run right now, but if you want more, reply to this and I'll hit you back.
"Do we give up on good technolgy simply because it comes from Microsoft?... I think we should because when the hardware stabilizes OSS will eventually catch up"
Although by the time OSS catches up, Microsoft's going to have come up with something even better and patented it. Well, maybe not Microsoft, but somebody.
You can't chase a moving target by aiming at where they were six months ago.
Programmers should definitely code with these questions in mind, but I think it's even more important to recruit people who are skilled in UI design so they can knock some sense into the coders every once in a while. Coders can't, and shouldn't, be expected to always focus on usability--for most engineers it's not their area of expertise. Likewise, UI people shouldn't be expected to have to code just to get a feature implemented the Right Way.
There's plenty of graphic designers and UI experts in the employ of Apple and Microsoft who probably couldn't code their way out of an infinite loop. I don't know that the same can be said of most open source projects.
I just don't see how OSS projects can hope to maintain an edge in usability. If software is to be a joy to use, you need talented UI designers and graphic artists (witness the TiVo remote control). And, for whatever reason, these people just don't seem to be attracted to the open source community in the same way as programmers--or if they are, they find themselves spurned and ignored because they're perceived as insufficiently geeky.
It's a shame, but as far as I can tell, it's the truth.
What are you talking about? I scatter Photoshop documents across my displays all the time, at least on my PowerBook. I can't speak for the Windows version of Photoshop, however.
"Software not conforming to the platform is, by definition, not sthetical."
I think you and I disagree here. I would submit that software can be aesthetically pleasing even if it breaks UI conventions of the host platform--in fact, I think the most aesthetically beautiful programs tend to do so, at least where it makes sense. A very trivial example would be the way you select the label color from a file's contextual menu in the Mac OS X 10.3 Finder. The label selections aren't regular menu items; they're horizontal boxes, which violates everything in the Human Interface Guidelines. Everything, that is, except the overriding maxim "Thou shalt be easy to use." And it works.
Sometimes, I think people forget they're the Human Interface Guidelines, not the Human Interface Commandments.
Incidentally, in my criticisms I am evaluating native Mac OS X software on Mac OS X. Unless you're suggesting that open source software, by its very nature, cannot possibly be Mac OS X native...? That seems rather extreme.
I'll admit GNUMail might have been at one time more NeXTStep- than Aqua-oriented, but my impression was (and is) that its developers are focusing on Mac OS X now. GNUStep apps do, by the way, inherit Aqua widgets when built against the Cocoa libraries and run on OS X, as far as I know.
I think brushed metal got off to a bad start when Apple first used it in the terrible QuickTime interface, years ago. Since then it's come to make much more sense, and I happen to think it looks really good on Safari and iChat, for instance. But I can understand how others might not find it so appealing.
As regards the menubar, I was not aware it could be placed at the top of the screen in Gnome, and I'm glad to learn otherwise. Still, that was only one of many, many things I found aesthetically distasteful about Gnome, and I see no compelling reason to subject myself to that work environment again until such time as I have evidence that OSS developers care about aesthetics--and, for what it's worth, my experience with OSS apps on Mac OS X does not bode well.
"Anyway, you have to take into account what I described before about there not existing an incentive to develop native versions of free software to a proprietary platform."
So what's MPlayer OS X, then? How about VLC? How about all the different open source VNC clients and servers? I don't really know why you brought this up--why is this relevant anyway?
Of course, if you just need to do those things you mentioned, there's free/open tools available for you on any platform. I suspect they're probably easier to use than The GIMP, too. (Not that I've tried the latest GIMP, so I could be wrong. I doubt it though.)
"Your question is another, the lack of standards (X, and Gnome or KDE integration) in your platform."
That's part of it, but it's not just a lack of standards. I don't doubt that other platforms have well-meaning standards (like Gnome's HIG). It's that most free software I've tried on my Mac isn't aesthetically pleasing.
Aesthetics isn't just about looks, by the way, to me. It's subtle, but there seems to be a certain guiding principle behind my favorite pieces of software to use (god, is this discussion getting anal or what?:-) Ultimately, they're power tools, and everything I need is immediately accessible; furthermore, everything I need and didn't know about is hidden in the first place I'd look. According to this perspective, for instance, the menubar in OS X is at the top of the screen because it's convenient there--not because it's self-consistent (it isn't) or logical (it isn't). It's there because my computer is a tool like a finely balanced katana.
Incidentally, Safari's rendering engine works fine for 100% of the sites I want to visit. I know there are websites out there that don't render properly under KHTML, so I keep a copy of Firefox around for those, but I can't remember the last time I needed to open it. Besides, embedded Java applets don't work in Firefox for some reason, and I don't have the time or the inclination to figure out why, since Safari handles them fine.
I think you may be underestimating KHTML's standards compliance nowadays. It's definitely improved quite a bit ever since Apple started contributing to it. Not to turn this into a KHTML vs Gecko flamewar.:-)
I have to disagree... Consider iTunes, for instance, on Windows. It's a port, obviously. None of the UI metaphors are consistent with what other Windows programs do. And yet... people generally regard it (in my experience) as an incredibly intuitive (and yes, "aesthetically pleasing") application. It works the way you expect a jukebox to work.
In other words, it's not iTunes' fault that Windows has a misguided philosophy, that of "consistency over usability.":-)
"Never intended to mean that. Only that you can't evaluate (Gnome|KDE) software from some other platform than (Gnome|KDE)."
But I'm not evaluating Gnome/KDE software on my Mac. I'm talking about open source Aqua-native applications like GNUMail.app, Camino, a dozen HTML editors I've forgotten the names of, Mactella, MPlayer OS X, and on and on. These are native Aqua applications (in some cases with a backend designed for other Unixes, e.g. MPlayer) that still manage to miss the mark on aesthetics. Of course, there's plenty of closed-source software out there that's ugly too.
You know, I think it all comes down to personal taste. I happen to think OS X has an aesthetic that is more beautiful and elegant than any other platform's--it's certainly the one that causes me, personally, the least amount of head scratching and frustration--and I'm sure a lot of people would agree. But others may have different work habits and different expectations, and therefore are happier with other operating systems.
As I've said before, Gnome and KDE give me a choice between 10,000 mediocre UIs, but Mac OS X gives me one superb UI. By which I mean it fits the way I think and work like a glove. I feel rather dirty saying this now, since it's been several months since I had to work with a Linux workstation, but I suspect it remains true (for me, if not for most people).
This may be news to you, but you can do that with Photoshop too. In fact, I have all my Photoshop palettes on my second monitor (my PowerBook's built in display), freeing up my entire external monitor for the document.
Yeah, the Mozilla port to Aqua was called Camino. It seems to have mostly died, although the project page just got updated... a little over a month ago. It's been nearly a year since 0.7 was released.
Camino was (is) better looking than most, but it was (is) still fairly clunky UI-wise. And when Safari was released, the Camino project quickly turned into a game of catch-up with Safari, what with the bookmarks menu, the Google search box, etc. Why wouldn't I just use Safari under these circumstances?
As for my running non-native apps, I have to say 99% of the time I'm a user, not a developer. I don't care what is and isn't "native"; at the end of the day, I just want programs with well designed, aesthetically pleasing interfaces. (I do not want to spend my workday in a sewer.) Almost all open source software I've tried fails miserably to meet this one requirement, and that's a showstopper.
Actually, Cocoa lends itself quite naturally to a MVC paradigm, so for most well-designed programs it should be relatively easy to maintain a native Aqua port (for some definitions of "well-designed," of course).
As for me switching to Gnome, that's out of the question. Whenever I've sat down to work in front of a Gnome desktop, I've felt like I might as well be in front of a Windows box--the taskbar, the menubars at the top of each window, the window widgets (at least in the default themes) in the exact same places. In short, not attuned to the way I work. And just plain not as pretty and polished as Aqua. No systemwide animations, no alpha channels on windows, no double-buffering. (Is all of this still true in Gnome 2.6?)
"Ah, but you're attuned to the Mac because that's what you're accustomed to!" you say. Guilty as charged. But it doesn't matter to me. I'm willing to change my work habits if I'm convinced I'll derive some benefit from doing so, but based on what I've seen so far from open source software, I'm highly skeptical of that claim. (Mostly because I place inordinate value on good user interfaces--that whole "not mucking about in a sewer" thing I mentioned earlier.)
You know, I just remembered there IS one excellent open source project I've encountered, and that is MenuMeters. Intuitive, well designed. Fantastic job, Mr. Alex Harper. Veering offtopic for a minute, I find it significant that Mr. Harper specifically distances himself from the political blather of the OSS movement, to wit: "... both 'free' as in beer and 'free' as in speech, for those who partition the world using that terminology (I am not one of them)." I don't know why it doesn't surprise me that someone with aesthetic sensibilities would disavow RMS's political philosophies, but it doesn't.
I'll admit it's been a few months at least, and I'm not even sure which version of Gnome was installed at the labs here at school. Since I finished my comp sci concentration (I'm in college) there's been no reason for me to go back to the public labs.
When I'm talking about "in my experience," I'm mostly talking about the dozens of open source projects I've tried to use on my Mac, which have ALL been sorely lacking from a UI perspective. Firefox is rather tastelessly done up in a horrid Frankensteinian amalgam of metallic accents and Aqua-esque, but not quite Aqua, widgets, and the preference panels and buttons are poorly designed; even so, it's a billion times better than the Mozilla interface, which makes me feel like I'm exploring the cellar from one of the Marquis de Sade's wet dreams. (Many of the Mozilla themes are pretty enough, but still fail to address fundamental inadequacies of Mozilla's badly bungled UI--and why should I have to spend an hour downloading and installing a nice interface, anyway? Customizability? That's just a poor rationalization, IMO.) As for the free email clients I've tried, they have all been utter shit, as have the open source text editors and calendaring/scheduling programs. The open source music players, too. Even the open source terminal I've tried was fucking ugly (sorry, no other way to describe it).
And this is open source programs on my Mac. This does not bode well for open source UIs on other platforms.
About the only well-designed program from a UI perspective I've found is nmap, and that doesn't even have a graphical interface. It's a frigging command line tool.
Also, as I've said elsewhere in this discussion, claiming that there exists no difference between the two "establishment" parties and using that as an excuse to cast your vote for a third-party candidate is selfish, and only demonstrates how out of touch you must be with reality. Especially in an election as close as this one is gearing up to be.
So you really believe that out of everyone who voted for Mr. Nader in Florida, if they had instead chosen either not to vote or to vote for an "establishment" candidate, Gore would not have won the election handily? Certainly many would voted for Bush, and even more would probably have stayed home. But to think that Gore wouldn't have won Florida had this been the case is dangerously delusional.
According to exit polls, almost half the people who voted for Nader in 2000 would have voted for Gore instead, had the consumer advocate not been on the ballot. Around 20% would have voted for Bush; most of the rest would have stayed home.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha, so true! Just pick a random building and walk five feet into the lobby. Guaranteed dropped call. I do this all the time.
Touche. :-) Still, I doubt that most people, most of the time would go to even that small amount of trouble to save themselves 10 bucks. iTunes' DRM keeps most people in line most of the time, given current technological limitations and social habits. Maybe not even "most," come to think of it. Enough people, enough of the time.
And that's really all DRM can hope to do, I think. Happily, that's still enough--apparently--to reassure content owners they can put their work online without the universe imploding around their heads.
yours
Will do. :-)
That's what I used to think too, but I dunno... If it's iTunes you're thinking of, the "average Joe" already has a perfectly easy alternative to the music store--he can just go on Kazaa and download whatever he wants. Or on the rare occasion that Apple's DRM actually gets in the way of something you want to do, you can always just burn the track to CD and rerip. But in that case you've already bought the track, so it wouldn't matter.
So it's pretty easy to defeat the DRM, and yet iTunes is wildly popular. I think this is generalizable beyond iTMS.
On the contrary, DRM is amazingly successful at what it intends to do: make unauthorized copying annoying enough so that most people would rather pay 99 cents for a song or whatever it is.
DRM's just supposed to keep honest people honest. Nobody expects it to pose much of a barrier to people who are hellbent on getting a free lunch.
Of course, if the implementation is too restrictive, or incredibly obnoxious (like how you have to sit through 10 minutes of commercials at the beginning of the Lost In Translation DVD), then it'll fail in the marketplace. That still doesn't mean all DRM is a wasted effort.
yours
As to your point (c), they're not necessarily inferior to CD. Remember CD audio is itself a downsampled version of the original master. So if you have access to the master DAT, you could theoretically make an AAC or even an MP3 with a signal closer to the original than the CD, even at a much lower bitrate. (Apple rips most of their iTunes tracks from the original master.)
That's the theory, anyway. In the real world I doubt the AACs in question are actually more faithful to the master than the CD versions. Do I care? Nah, I can't tell the difference. YMMV.
yours
YAAHhahaH! pyou'r e ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. Howeer I efeel the need to p ouint out that in myY experinece FIrefox is absurd--ABSURD--to ues if you have a mac since safari is dozens of times better. Picture several dozens of urinals standing againtst a brik wall, or aseveral dozens of men urinating into said urine receptacles. This is how many times Safari bests Firefox over, at least on the Mac. Safari's closed and IFirefox is playing catch-up, which is sad snice there's so many talented edevelpoers working no firdefox.
How coem ther's no drunk girl in my apartment right now? Jjust drunk me. alone.
Dude, relax... I was just replying to the parent poster. My post didn't mean that OSS is "always one step behind."
That said, I find it sort of sickening how some people think OSS is destined to be superior, always, to closed software. The argument makes sense neither inductively nor deductively to me. I gotta run right now, but if you want more, reply to this and I'll hit you back.
yours
"Do we give up on good technolgy simply because it comes from Microsoft? ... I think we should because when the hardware stabilizes OSS will eventually catch up"
Although by the time OSS catches up, Microsoft's going to have come up with something even better and patented it. Well, maybe not Microsoft, but somebody.
You can't chase a moving target by aiming at where they were six months ago.
I agree 100%. Aesthetics is more than just skin deep.
Programmers should definitely code with these questions in mind, but I think it's even more important to recruit people who are skilled in UI design so they can knock some sense into the coders every once in a while. Coders can't, and shouldn't, be expected to always focus on usability--for most engineers it's not their area of expertise. Likewise, UI people shouldn't be expected to have to code just to get a feature implemented the Right Way.
There's plenty of graphic designers and UI experts in the employ of Apple and Microsoft who probably couldn't code their way out of an infinite loop. I don't know that the same can be said of most open source projects.
yours
Can you give a specific example or two? I'm not saying you're full of shit, but I'd like to look into this if it's true.
Look, anyway, to get back to my original point...
I just don't see how OSS projects can hope to maintain an edge in usability. If software is to be a joy to use, you need talented UI designers and graphic artists (witness the TiVo remote control). And, for whatever reason, these people just don't seem to be attracted to the open source community in the same way as programmers--or if they are, they find themselves spurned and ignored because they're perceived as insufficiently geeky.
It's a shame, but as far as I can tell, it's the truth.
Would you disagree with this assessment?
yours
What are you talking about? I scatter Photoshop documents across my displays all the time, at least on my PowerBook. I can't speak for the Windows version of Photoshop, however.
yours
"Software not conforming to the platform is, by definition, not sthetical."
I think you and I disagree here. I would submit that software can be aesthetically pleasing even if it breaks UI conventions of the host platform--in fact, I think the most aesthetically beautiful programs tend to do so, at least where it makes sense. A very trivial example would be the way you select the label color from a file's contextual menu in the Mac OS X 10.3 Finder. The label selections aren't regular menu items; they're horizontal boxes, which violates everything in the Human Interface Guidelines. Everything, that is, except the overriding maxim "Thou shalt be easy to use." And it works.
Sometimes, I think people forget they're the Human Interface Guidelines, not the Human Interface Commandments.
Incidentally, in my criticisms I am evaluating native Mac OS X software on Mac OS X. Unless you're suggesting that open source software, by its very nature, cannot possibly be Mac OS X native...? That seems rather extreme.
I'll admit GNUMail might have been at one time more NeXTStep- than Aqua-oriented, but my impression was (and is) that its developers are focusing on Mac OS X now. GNUStep apps do, by the way, inherit Aqua widgets when built against the Cocoa libraries and run on OS X, as far as I know.
I think brushed metal got off to a bad start when Apple first used it in the terrible QuickTime interface, years ago. Since then it's come to make much more sense, and I happen to think it looks really good on Safari and iChat, for instance. But I can understand how others might not find it so appealing.
As regards the menubar, I was not aware it could be placed at the top of the screen in Gnome, and I'm glad to learn otherwise. Still, that was only one of many, many things I found aesthetically distasteful about Gnome, and I see no compelling reason to subject myself to that work environment again until such time as I have evidence that OSS developers care about aesthetics--and, for what it's worth, my experience with OSS apps on Mac OS X does not bode well.
"Anyway, you have to take into account what I described before about there not existing an incentive to develop native versions of free software to a proprietary platform."
So what's MPlayer OS X, then? How about VLC? How about all the different open source VNC clients and servers? I don't really know why you brought this up--why is this relevant anyway?
cheers.
Are you voting for Nader by any chance?
Yep. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Of course, if you just need to do those things you mentioned, there's free/open tools available for you on any platform. I suspect they're probably easier to use than The GIMP, too. (Not that I've tried the latest GIMP, so I could be wrong. I doubt it though.)
cheers
Aesthetics isn't just about looks, by the way, to me. It's subtle, but there seems to be a certain guiding principle behind my favorite pieces of software to use (god, is this discussion getting anal or what?
Incidentally, Safari's rendering engine works fine for 100% of the sites I want to visit. I know there are websites out there that don't render properly under KHTML, so I keep a copy of Firefox around for those, but I can't remember the last time I needed to open it. Besides, embedded Java applets don't work in Firefox for some reason, and I don't have the time or the inclination to figure out why, since Safari handles them fine.
I think you may be underestimating KHTML's standards compliance nowadays. It's definitely improved quite a bit ever since Apple started contributing to it. Not to turn this into a KHTML vs Gecko flamewar.
I have to disagree... Consider iTunes, for instance, on Windows. It's a port, obviously. None of the UI metaphors are consistent with what other Windows programs do. And yet... people generally regard it (in my experience) as an incredibly intuitive (and yes, "aesthetically pleasing") application. It works the way you expect a jukebox to work.
In other words, it's not iTunes' fault that Windows has a misguided philosophy, that of "consistency over usability."
But I'm not evaluating Gnome/KDE software on my Mac. I'm talking about open source Aqua-native applications like GNUMail.app, Camino, a dozen HTML editors I've forgotten the names of, Mactella, MPlayer OS X, and on and on. These are native Aqua applications (in some cases with a backend designed for other Unixes, e.g. MPlayer) that still manage to miss the mark on aesthetics. Of course, there's plenty of closed-source software out there that's ugly too.
You know, I think it all comes down to personal taste. I happen to think OS X has an aesthetic that is more beautiful and elegant than any other platform's--it's certainly the one that causes me, personally, the least amount of head scratching and frustration--and I'm sure a lot of people would agree. But others may have different work habits and different expectations, and therefore are happier with other operating systems.
As I've said before, Gnome and KDE give me a choice between 10,000 mediocre UIs, but Mac OS X gives me one superb UI. By which I mean it fits the way I think and work like a glove. I feel rather dirty saying this now, since it's been several months since I had to work with a Linux workstation, but I suspect it remains true (for me, if not for most people).
yours
Funny... I'd have said "therefore, I can't use Linux." :-)
Most people choose their OS based on the tools they need to use, not the other way around. I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'm just making a point.
yours
This may be news to you, but you can do that with Photoshop too. In fact, I have all my Photoshop palettes on my second monitor (my PowerBook's built in display), freeing up my entire external monitor for the document.
Yeah, the Mozilla port to Aqua was called Camino. It seems to have mostly died, although the project page just got updated... a little over a month ago. It's been nearly a year since 0.7 was released.
Camino was (is) better looking than most, but it was (is) still fairly clunky UI-wise. And when Safari was released, the Camino project quickly turned into a game of catch-up with Safari, what with the bookmarks menu, the Google search box, etc. Why wouldn't I just use Safari under these circumstances?
As for my running non-native apps, I have to say 99% of the time I'm a user, not a developer. I don't care what is and isn't "native"; at the end of the day, I just want programs with well designed, aesthetically pleasing interfaces. (I do not want to spend my workday in a sewer.) Almost all open source software I've tried fails miserably to meet this one requirement, and that's a showstopper.
Actually, Cocoa lends itself quite naturally to a MVC paradigm, so for most well-designed programs it should be relatively easy to maintain a native Aqua port (for some definitions of "well-designed," of course).
As for me switching to Gnome, that's out of the question. Whenever I've sat down to work in front of a Gnome desktop, I've felt like I might as well be in front of a Windows box--the taskbar, the menubars at the top of each window, the window widgets (at least in the default themes) in the exact same places. In short, not attuned to the way I work. And just plain not as pretty and polished as Aqua. No systemwide animations, no alpha channels on windows, no double-buffering. (Is all of this still true in Gnome 2.6?)
"Ah, but you're attuned to the Mac because that's what you're accustomed to!" you say. Guilty as charged. But it doesn't matter to me. I'm willing to change my work habits if I'm convinced I'll derive some benefit from doing so, but based on what I've seen so far from open source software, I'm highly skeptical of that claim. (Mostly because I place inordinate value on good user interfaces--that whole "not mucking about in a sewer" thing I mentioned earlier.)
You know, I just remembered there IS one excellent open source project I've encountered, and that is MenuMeters. Intuitive, well designed. Fantastic job, Mr. Alex Harper. Veering offtopic for a minute, I find it significant that Mr. Harper specifically distances himself from the political blather of the OSS movement, to wit: "... both 'free' as in beer and 'free' as in speech, for those who partition the world using that terminology (I am not one of them)." I don't know why it doesn't surprise me that someone with aesthetic sensibilities would disavow RMS's political philosophies, but it doesn't.
yours
I'll admit it's been a few months at least, and I'm not even sure which version of Gnome was installed at the labs here at school. Since I finished my comp sci concentration (I'm in college) there's been no reason for me to go back to the public labs.
When I'm talking about "in my experience," I'm mostly talking about the dozens of open source projects I've tried to use on my Mac, which have ALL been sorely lacking from a UI perspective. Firefox is rather tastelessly done up in a horrid Frankensteinian amalgam of metallic accents and Aqua-esque, but not quite Aqua, widgets, and the preference panels and buttons are poorly designed; even so, it's a billion times better than the Mozilla interface, which makes me feel like I'm exploring the cellar from one of the Marquis de Sade's wet dreams. (Many of the Mozilla themes are pretty enough, but still fail to address fundamental inadequacies of Mozilla's badly bungled UI--and why should I have to spend an hour downloading and installing a nice interface, anyway? Customizability? That's just a poor rationalization, IMO.) As for the free email clients I've tried, they have all been utter shit, as have the open source text editors and calendaring/scheduling programs. The open source music players, too. Even the open source terminal I've tried was fucking ugly (sorry, no other way to describe it).
And this is open source programs on my Mac. This does not bode well for open source UIs on other platforms.
About the only well-designed program from a UI perspective I've found is nmap, and that doesn't even have a graphical interface. It's a frigging command line tool.
Also, as I've said elsewhere in this discussion, claiming that there exists no difference between the two "establishment" parties and using that as an excuse to cast your vote for a third-party candidate is selfish, and only demonstrates how out of touch you must be with reality. Especially in an election as close as this one is gearing up to be.
So you really believe that out of everyone who voted for Mr. Nader in Florida, if they had instead chosen either not to vote or to vote for an "establishment" candidate, Gore would not have won the election handily? Certainly many would voted for Bush, and even more would probably have stayed home. But to think that Gore wouldn't have won Florida had this been the case is dangerously delusional.
According to exit polls, almost half the people who voted for Nader in 2000 would have voted for Gore instead, had the consumer advocate not been on the ballot. Around 20% would have voted for Bush; most of the rest would have stayed home.