I can't fault FLOSS for bad GUI too much since it's rarely done with the resources that for-profit products have

but the installation process at least shouldn't expect me to separately download an obscure dependency off GitHub

@shel "bad GUI" isn't entirely cause by lacking resources tbh.

you gotta distinguish between "bad looking (unpolished)" and "unintuitive".

the former is definitely a factor of resources but the latter isn't imho.

I think one of the biggest reasons why lots of FLOSS isn't intuitive to your regular user is bc there's just a lack of diversity in those communities. It's tech people making stuff that mostly other tech people use.

@tom @shel this whole thread reminds me why i ditched windows....it wasn't the fault of windows at all, its just it was easier to do what i wanted, on Ubuntu, and that's before I learned about other reasons people might ditch windows...

I changed OS rather than trying to fix the problems....I'm part of the problem.

But I am trying to better document projects I use in a cross-platform friendly way

Thanks Shel for the thread.

@shel oftentimes those projects seem to be in dire need of usability feedback from people who aren't in tech but it's a bit of a chicken egg situation

@tom @shel yeah - i think part of the problem is also that FLOSS developers are largely unpaid volunteers, and interact directly with their customers (which i'm not really surprised is a disaster). i think the structure is naturally prone to failure unless the project has some funds from other sources to better support customers

@tom @shel not arguing that the situation doesn't suck for end users, because it does, but i understand why it sucks. free software is still a field largely populated by hobbyists, and i don't know anyone who wants to try to please demanding strangers for free as a hobby.

@shel yeahhhhh I've been quietly fighting this fight for a long time, too. I sometimes think about doing some volunteer UX work for FLOSS software I use, but just figuring out how to make those changes is even more of a mess! >_<

to be clear my criticism isn't that the software itself is bad UX due to lack of polish or whatever, but that at every step it expects and assumes a very high level of tech competency that even as someone with a minor in computer science and a background in working tech support professionally, I do not feel like I have. If you want someone who doesn't work in tech for a living to use your software you should never make them use command line or compile from Github

LibreOffice is very good FLOSS. It never directs you to github or makes you use command line. I can direct anyone to try LibreOffice

I can't say that about much other FLOSS that I use.

Linux is basically this experience all the time btw.

"this experience" being "in order for things to work i have to put a semantically opaque bash command in my command line that a stranger posted online; and then figure something out from a github"

Also ALSO software devs and techies don't like things like pop-up tutorials that are helpful to new users and hold your hand; and are very hostile to attempts to add them. My onboarding modal for Mastodon received a LOT of resistance from sysadmin types who said it should be something you go look at like documentation; or a button you opt-into

but like ppl who don't go poking in every nook and cranny aren't gonna find a tutorial unless it presents itself to you

@shel Thinking about it, this experience is much more common on Windows than a Linux distro, right? I wonder if this isn't always on purpose. Like they're trying to frustrate Windows users into switching. "Officially" (I'm talking rms & co.) you shouldn't support Windows because it's proprietary and so making something good for Windows users is helping proprietary software, so it's all bad and stuff. (I think this is their perspective.)

@shel Of course this is probably more likely to frustrate most people into using proprietary (and easier to use) software. Oops.

@lanodan @shel I'm saying that he and others would seem to prefer if you COULDN'T run free software on Windows, and see it as a necessary evil at best. They'd probably put a Windows kill switch in if being free software wouldn't make it trivial to remove. And yeah they're not always the most coherent bunch on licensing.

@shel when designing an onboarding for @SealasApp we were gonna do exactly this

"DESPITE" the EXPLICIT goal that it should be usable by people who don't know how to do accounting, or are "non-technical"

@shel there's always someone noting that you need to know what files and commands you're using to make sure they're safe, but there's very little explanation of what commands or files do what things, unless you go digging (and know what to look for)

@shel LibreOffice was originally developed (as OpenOffice) by a multi billion dollar corporation and development is now sponsored by a foundation that pulls in around a million euros a year

They have slightly more resources than the vast majority of open source projects

@vi fair
though installing software w/o running a mysterious command line command from github shouldn't cost billions of dollars

@shel these are artifacts of it happening in the open.
in big software houses, obtusely built software packages get written as well, and the same questions of "how do I get this to run" get asked inside the company, and someone takes the answers and does the labor to put release engineering process in place to capture it all and package it in an easily consumable way.

generally in the floss world, this labor is done by Linux distribution maintainers.

@shel supporting deployment of a software package across a very heterogeneous range of PC platforms is a very different skillset than is required to write the software itself. the people doing the work of making the libraries aren't wrong for putting it on github - but we need more people doing the work of *carrying the ball from there to the goal* to make it accessible to all. it's less exciting work but extremely necessary, as you've discovered

@shel > If you want someone who doesn't work in tech for a living to use your software

I think the problem is that most people hacking on these small projects *aren't* thinking about those people at all, they just want to do a thing for themselves and release it in case others find it useful.

I know people who don't share software because they're wracked with guilt over this; they want to share but they don't have the time to make it more accessible

@shel to be clear, I *totally* agree with this thread, and my concerns about it are why I package software for Debian (end users shouldn't have this much overhead to install and use a thing!), but I wish I had a real, sustainable solution :(

@shel Often, the "go somewhere else and get a dependency" pattern happens because of licensing issues. Software A may not be able to bundle software B (or maybe even offer to download it) because of incompatible licensing, but can make use of software B if software B is installed.

With proprietary software this isn't an issue, because software A will avoid certain licenses like fire and/or pay someone so that they can include it.

@lanodan @shel The difference is that those things were/are usually bundled along with the main installer, which leads to less friction.

In fact, I'd say that less friction with things like DirectX was very much what Microsoft intended, because that's how you get everyone to use DirectX.

Contrast that with GPL, which considers principles to be of higher importance.

@shel you're faulting volunteers for an installation process that only exists because a company worth over 700 billion dollars hasn't included a proper package management system with their OS.

@vi yeah but the FLOSS advocates shouldn't fault the masses for not understanding what they're supposed to do in that case and going with the software that they don't need a degree in computer science to install

which is what my point is

@shel i thought everything can be installed with chocolatey these days?

@meena that's command line

@shel I always recommend what works and works best, not what's ideologically pure. If we want FOSS to become the norm, we have to make it work first, and imo software that isn't useable by it's intended audience is broken.

@puppy I find LibreOffice, Gimp, Mastodon, and Audacity to be pretty usable. Audacity does expect you to download a dependency separately but it's not linking me to github i just gives me an exe and tells me to install it.

@shel libreoffice fits pretty nicely in as a drop in replacement for ms office in that its just, download this one thing, run it, boom. they even got their own ribbon like ui going now too so its even closer

gimp is....nahhh. the icons are a bit misleading/confusing, it takes an age to load up, and it also takes several steps more to do simple shit as opposed to something like paint .net which is much quicker

@shel idk if p .net is floss tho. probs not. either way.

mastodon is ok but only once you actually understand how everything works. before that point its still an absolutely confusing mess and a lot of design decisions that make you go "what, why??"

audacity is only usable for the 5-10 minute jobs you quickly want done. anything else and its garbage

@shel its still bothering me that even though mp3 patents are dead it still requires you to manually go retreive the LAME dll via clicking on several different links before you actually get the download link

and on top that it complains if its not a specific version too