If the goal is to encourage the general public to use general purpose computers, then I suggest the community try to temp some good UX designers to take part in foss projects. I suspect they many UX people are not extremely informed about foss and it would benefit the community a lot to have a reputation for programs with great workflows
From the 2.0 version on, GNOME based many of their UI changes on research studies of what ordinary computer users want, chasing after the corporate desktop and tablet markets. The result was something that alienated many techies, but failed to see much mass-market adoption.
I don’t think the problem is UI. I think the problem nowadays is that many people are so used to an Android phone (with Google Play Services and all apps sourced through the Play store) or iPhone that they are increasingly forgetting that ordinary computers exist at all.
Your argument reads like a fallacy (over-generalization): "UI/UX modifications were carried out on a single project with terrible results, so all UI/UX changes must be useless on any other project".
Look at it this way (taking a decentralized network as an example): either one of I2P's two most used implementations (Java & C++) would greatly benefit from adding an informative configuration wizard to set speed limits, enabling or disabling features, help set up UPnP or manually forward ports, etcetera. Such a small addition would make wonders for adoption. UX improvements cannot be ruled out, especially not that hastily.
Ironically, setting up UPnP or manually forwarding ports is hard in some countries today because the ISP insists you use their broadband router, and it runs a locked-down firmware where those settings are not available to end users (unless customers upgrade to their more expensive business plan). So, another example where it is the ecosystem that is biased against general-purpose computing – or at least general-purpose networking – and UI tweaks can’t change that.
You are talking about UI though. UI is not UX. The last time I was forced to use a Linux desktop environment for work, the resolution that I needed it to run on was not supported. It took me 10 minutes of googling to find the arcane invocations to perform this simple task. The UI looking really pretty did nothing to improve the situation.
Normal people outside of tech just want their problem solved. They couldn’t care less about some theoretical software freedoms. For them, freedom is being able to accomplish work without fiddling, close their laptop and have a beer. And I think this is fundamentally incompatible with what FOSS advocates are trying to accomplish, which is why we will never see the year of the Linux desktop.
Put another way: computers are just tools. The less fiddling my tools take, the better. I don’t want the freedom to modify my hammer, I just care about how easy it is to drive nails with. Linux desktops are a bag of disjointed wood and metal which in theory can be used to assemble the perfect hammer. Completely free of charge, if your time is worthless or you’re really into building hammers. I want to build a shed quickly though, so I’ll just pay for a readymade decent hammer with manufacturer warranty.
> The last time I was forced to use a Linux desktop environment for work, the resolution that I needed it to run on was not supported. It took me 10 minutes of googling to find the arcane invocations to perform this simple task
What do you do if the resolution you want isn't supported on other platforms?
Is that a rhetorical question? I have never ran into the issue of my native screen resolution not being there on MacOS because the hardware and software are built in tandem. I haven’t used Windows in the past 10 years but I would safely bet that the panel’s native resolution will work out of the box.
It is a rhetorical question, but to illustrate a point.
One way to look at it is that the OS is not good because it didn't support the resolution out of the box. Another way to view it is that all it took was a measly 10 minutes of googling to enable features that the OS doesn't natively include. You're right, the macOS probably would have an easier job at handling your monitor's resolution.
Fair point, I have to admit. And I do appreciate that to some degree, but it’s not what most people want out of a desktop environment since they do not have the technical know-how to do it anyway.
It's the ecosystem. Niche phone OS is not going to dominate the market until they have a competing app store that as good as Android's or iOS's. People uses Adobe will forever bounded by whatever OS Adobe truly supports. People uses MS Office will forever bounded by whatever OS MS Office truly supports.
Nobody really cares about UI. Everybody hates new UI. Once you are settled in the local comfort zone of the app that you use the most, nothing else would replace it unless that app goes out of support.
My laptop and desktop broke around the same time. I had an iPad Pro for work and next thing I knew I was just living in iOS. I did this for a few years before finally pushing back into desktop Linux during COVID lockdowns.
There's a lot of reasons behind why it's so easy to become used to living in the mobile ecosystems but for me it was very much about form factor. It's just so much easier to carry around a slim tablet with amazing battery life and software that "just works" when you live a very on-the-go life.
Projects like PinePhone give me hope that one day we can have general purpose computers in the form factors that made Android and iOS so popular to begin with. Obviously, this is a software and hardware problem, it's just that the world moved on to more and more mobile devices and FOSS stuck to less portable hardware.
This is the big problem. OSS advocates have been pushing software that is both open and completely terrible. It's no surprise that the public doesn't care.
I used to work as a front-end dev. The biggest issue facing good OSS UI is the fact that everyone throws their support behind Qt. Consumer OSS, and especially the Linux Desktop, will not take off until the community make the tough decision to first starve, then excise this God-awful cancer of a framework.
It's one of those technologies that "almost works", like Bluetooth or ring binders. It's not quite broken enough to the point where people can justify breaking compatibility and working on an alternative, but it is a major pain point to anyone who uses it.
Specifically, it introduces and entire class if new build/deploy issues, has a system that you need to actively fight against to get a UI that looks great, state synchronisation that feels like it was designed for UNIX terminals from 1985, and a whole host of corner case bugs and bizarre performance issues.
I actually wish it were more broken so that we could all finally move on to something good.
