It’s the same as with Linux, GIMP, LibreOffice or OnlyOffice. Some people are so used to their routines that they expect everything to work the same and get easily pissed when not.
And for some reason, mainstream media seems to discourage people from FOSS projects. Just look at the coverage on Lemmy.
“It’s clearly not ready yet.”
Why? We don’t know. It’s just not.
I am a reddit refugee and just down for fun ride on the bleeding edge. I am finding a lot of the same communities here and I am happy that Lemmy is here to fill the void.
Lemmy and jerboa are extremely polished compared to a lot of the free software I’ve used, albeit a lot less complex. FreeCAD is one that comes to mind whose UI and interaction actively fights you just to do simple things
Yeah, but freecad has also improved by leaps and bounds over the years.
I’m sure it has, but trying to use it still frustrating. For example, when creating constraints, if you don’t explicitly select everything or nothing it pops up an error over what you’re doing and plays an annoying sound. They at least improved it a bit since I last tried it and now you can select the tool and then the points and lines, but if you have anything selected at all but not everything (e.g. point onto object and you only have a point or the line) then it still throws the error instead of trying to interpret. Its extremely jarring when you’re trying to do basic things and completely turns me off of using it. If it works with both all relevant objects selected, no objects selected, and can determine when an invalid number or types of objects are selected, then it stands to reason that it should be able to interpret what is missing and just let you select that, but instead it throws a tantrum.
Fusion 360 is so much easier to use but its a huge application, runs slow, and dies on complex parts. I also use it because it has more control schemes, which is what made it impossible for me to get used to Inventor. I find the elitism of expecting people to just memorize what order to click in to not have the application scream at you, or people saying to get a special mouse to use CAD or use the applications particular flavor of control scheme to be stupid.
I’ve been here since the blackout and everything is great, apart from a few times when the site seemed a bit slow. I don’t even miss reddit anymore.
Try using an instance close to your house, with good ping. It makes a huge difference.
Go to https://fediverse.observer/map and select Lemmy instances.
Lemmy is absolutely easy to use. once you created an account. But a lot of people have problems with that.
Said who?
saw many posts on reddit were people registered and could not log in, did not get confirmation mail, had too long names/PW issues… I could not register first, worked at the second or third attempt.
i guess it’s an instinct to want most people to move away from reddit (or windows, ms office etc.). but unfortunately this is not what free software is about. i’m not being cynical here, let me explain.
think of the time when you didn’t know anything about windows; you had to learn your way around, its quirks. now that you have used it for so long that those things have just become second nature.
i used identi.ca, i have been using mastodon for 4 years now, i started using lemmy last year, i have been using irc for i don’t know how long, i started using linux in 2005, i have been using floss professional audio software for more than 15 years, i’m even transitioning my professional arch/eng workflow to floss software.
know that free software is not for everyone, not because these are not capable, but because it’s hard to delearn and relearn a new workflow.
which means… lemmy most probably won’t be the new reddit, but it’s already a nice platform that it never needs to be the new reddit.
Somewhat agree, but don’t get me started on a Gimp. To think that gimp was build to be a tool analogous to Photoshop (PS) is naive. It was born to demonstrate GTK GUI widgets and to check boxes on feature list (of supposedly paint program analogous to PS) from programmers perspective at most. Ok, they did the thing, checked the boxes, used all widgets, demonstrated that it works and from that day on it had and still has totaly inneficient workflow compared to PS and nobody cares about that. Answer to sugestions is almost always half assed, apple soused - you are holding it wrong, we are not PS. :)
My 2 cents, you can learn Gimp, you can adjust yourself to it, but if you have ever worked on PS and were good at it (with all its workflow, shortcuts, up to the level where you work one hand on keyboard, having most toolboxes hiden out of your view, etc…) you’ll still feel gimpy. It’s like comparing of giving commands to the gnome with an axe versus to an elf with a whole bunch of efficient specialised tools, spells and workflows – both trying to create art. I don’t use PS daily for how much, maybe >8 years and use Gimp weekly for about 12years – I say, it is still gimpy as f… And I’m programmer not a designer, designers usualy just hate it. I on another hand understant it (and it’s history) and take it as it is, as an inferior gimpy cousin of PS :)
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I’ve always used gimp and never found it confusing or very irritating. Not necessarily pretty. Whenever I checked out alternatives I went back to gimp.
GIMP has a super confusing interface. Even just resizing an image is more steps than it is in paint 3D. And I use GIMP to modify images all the time.
I prefer a halfling with an Uzi myself, but whatever floats your boat
why does no one ever mention krita
There’s the answer I was looking for!
I watched a 3-hour Krita beginner’s tutorial (can’t remember the exact video but the narrator had a strong French accent) and he explained so many tricks and tips - hold down Ctrl to do this, hold down Shift to do another thing - that might not be intuitive from just poking around. But Krita really is the “built by artists, for artists” program once you have a keyboard & tablet config that fits one’s personal workflow.
I would have if you hadn’t already.
Though TBH if you’re a mouse user gimp might actually be better… but practically noone doing serious graphics work is using a mouse. And it’s not like in Blender where you might switch back and forth: Krita is tablet zen, make sure to read at least a bit of the manual.
There’s a plugin called PhotoGIMP to make it look like PS.
And there’s also Photopea, I used it to make my community icon.
Thanks for trying to help or give hints. I’m good as it is with what tools I use for work. Having in mind nessesity, licence or ownership costs for bussines, hardships with new team mates expectations of using or not using particular tool, learning, etc… Acceptance, it is just a last stage :)
As for PhotoGIMP – I thank for the effort the team (I cheer for them), but the pig with a lipstick is still a pig, or in this case a gimp is a gimp :) I’ve personaly been on this path for the first 2-4 years of using gimp, during the denial-anger-bargaining stages. Then decided, or just naturaly learned and arrived to accepting Gimp for as it is, as an inferiour workflow tool, partialy usefull and replaceable as soon as there is a beter tool at hand for the task. E.g. I use ImageMagic directly from bash command line (generating icons, resizing, converting formats, filling backgrounds, etc…) using my own oneliners or scripts from notes.
As for Photopea – it gives a surprisingly good online photoshoplike editor feeling. Have used it several times this year. Looks like it was made thinking about usability and workflows sanity.
To think that gimp was build to be a tool analogous to Photoshop (PS) is naive. It was born to demonstrate GTK GUI widgets and to check boxes on feature list
GTK literally means “gimp tool-kit” GTK exists because of gimp and not the other way around. Also. Take a look at what Photoshop looked like in 1996 (around Gimp initial release), and tell me that’s nothing like the gimp. They used to be pretty similar, but their evolutions diverged. Gimp just choosed to stick with the familiar interface, even in the light of PS’ changes. Also PS had tens of millions invested in developing it. Had gimp got a tenth of those resources things would be pretty different for both projects.
You are reasoning with your own conclusion that in the context of the question about workflow efectivenes, acceptance by users, tool usefullness it does somehow matter much or in any way – was it the library created as an afterthought or a tool created as a try to use library, or both where born at the same time. :) Who cares. It demoes everything GTK has/had, it was/is clone of photohop idea and they lost it long long ago, as it is now much less efective in it’s workflows. If it was otherwise, the industry standard would be Gimp, but it is just a gimmics of it.
P.S. I’m 100% linux user, my servers linux, my desktop linux, my phone android (ok, that is halfassed linux :) ), my tools and software used, if and then possible, all are opensource and/or free. And still, after many years beeing totaly in FOSS enviroment, I just can’t deny the worfly earned pedestal to Photoshop in its area of expertise. That is not to say that Gimp is somehow bad, by me it’s just a remote next, and it doesn’t even try to run to the same direction :) and it is his choise.
I second this. Not all tools are equal. Some are even better open source. Others are worse. OP overgeneralize.
My go-to PShop replacement is Paint.Net, much less clunky than GIMP.
Paint.NET is lovely, I used to use it a lot for simple image editing tasks, but it’s windows-only and by no means a replacement for Photoshop.
really annoying that they used that name but don’t have the domain, lol
I feel also that gimp as a default for linux sucks. As someone that does not edit photos and just wants to edit some screenshot or make a shitty meme I want a default paint alternative. I’m amazed that it was only when I used mint that the void left by paint was filled with “drawing”
It’s not only the break in routine but also the direction of the site. All your examples are productivity products while the fediverse is, in essence, social media. The thing with social media is that branding REALLY matters. There have been attempts to copy Instagram or Snapchat or Reddit but they have all failed to gain massive communities due to not being part of a known brand.
“I posted my pics on the gram”
“What’s your snap?” etc…
Kbin, Lemmy, these are just instances of something called the Fediverse, try getting a layperson to understand that.
Social media generally has a rule known as the 90:9:1 rule. 90% of people are lurkers just doomscrolling or passing time, 9% are interacting with content and leaving comments and/or posting, and the final 1% is making the engaging content that sites like Reddit and YouTube are known for.
Right now, FOSS software is often populated by only 10% of that ratio, the power-users and people that interact every so often. Those lurkers, the 90%, migrating them will be hard if not impossible. Remember, they lurk, they will stay where the most engaging content is, and that is still currently Reddit.
My biggest takeaway with open source projects is this:
Theres there’s a HUGE jump from being power user friendly to being user friendly in general. Significantly bigger than the jump from dev/contributor users to power users.
UX is something huge companies spend a lot of time and money on to ensure the layman can use the software well, something open source developers do not have the luxury of caring about from the get go.
Power users do not recognize the inbuilt muscle memory they have acquired over time to get around some of the more nagging aspects of the software and get frustrated with new users for not doing the same, while these new users get frustrated at things not being straightforward, or similar to some other software they’re used to.
IMO this push and pull is what is truly preventing a Linux desktop experience that is truly layman friendly. But when it works, and an open source project can slowly start putting more of their time into UX when the project is more mature, then it truly starts kicking ass.
Look at how far Blender has come since the 3.0 update. A lot of studios are straight up switching to it for a lot of work that was traditionally Max or Maya based. Obviously you still have some of the “old guard” who felt a little alienated with the sweeping changes from 2.7 to 3, but I feel blender is objectively better for most people since then.
TL;DR: OSS always deals with different competing needs for power users vs regular users, but given enough time things get smoothened out
I think even the jump between 2.7 and 2.8 is huge in terms of user-friendliness and aesthetics, but yeah over time Blender has gotten way more features and support. Hell, it supported ARM Macs way before Maya did, and the latter only got ARM support earlier this year. I expected Apple to fully complete their transition before Autodesk managed to pull it off.
Yes and no, most of the free/open software has the problem of being very not-user-friendly (even if it’s only for the first time set-up) and the documentation (even the youtube tutorials) are written in a “you should know all this already” way, which is cool if you do, but if this is the first time you are doing this or if it’s the only time you are gonna use that knowledge then it’s absurd to expected someone to learn it only for one time.
It is normal for someone to complain that the thing that steals all their data or needs a subscription is better because it’s easier to use (install, pay/register and use, done), compared with how different and difficult usually it’s to install and get to work a FOSS option (download this, install these, run command lines, configure all these, now get all these plugins, etc).
If we want bigger numbers, then it should be at least as easy as the thing we want them to stop using, otherwise we are barking at the wrong tree.
You are missing a point. Closed sourced solutions pay developers a lot… And they focus on the ux. Think about the most famous example, all apple OSes are just like a customized collection of open source stuff, similar to a linux distro, with a user friendly, closed sourced GUI.
Open source solutions that are not user friendly, is just because no one is paid, or there is not enough budget to pay for a high level UX design and implementation
I’m not missing anything, OP complained about people not easily ditching closed/centralized software and I gave an answer.
I know devs are doing it as a hobby or with donations, that’s on them and they know who their target will be and how much effort is it worth to do it user-friendly or not or how big of a scope they aim for.We’re talking about the normal user and why they decide to stick to centralized or move to FOSS and why it’s so hard for them to do it.
UX in open source software is mostly fine for those who built it for them selves or people in the same environment.
As soon as stuff gets built for others with other requirements empathy declines, and I don’t mean this disrespectful. Good professional UX sources are needed, indeed to fill this gap. But will they be able to convince the open source devs who often were Initiator of the projects?
That’s not contrary to what he said at all, it’s just another layer of why things are the way they are.
If you want the average joes, you need good ux. If you don’t have it, you won’t get/keep them.
Maybe there are good reasons why you don’t have decent ux. Maybe other people only do because they spend money. Maybe you can find a way around that, maybe you can’t.
Doesn’t matter. Good user experience means you keep users, bad user experience means you don’t.
The main reason is that ux design is difficult, complex but not always rewarding. Few people do it “as hobby”. Companies make money out of UX design. As in the example of Apple, they could find a lot of open source good quality software, but they needed the ui to seel it in macs, iPhones and ipads.
Another example is steam deck. Its OS is just arch linux, with an incredible UI (built by valve), and it is currently more popular than windows handhelds.
Many open source solutions are of greater quality than corresponding proprietary stuff (anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment also knows why, corporates are elephants trying to create a swiss watch). What open source solutions are missing are companies paying to create user experience.
I think you’re vastly overgeneralizing the world of software here. Before I make my point here’s two facts:
- There’s vastly more FOSS software than there is commercial software.
- Nearly all commercial software is made for a specific use case or customer.
Just about everyone reading this comment is using FOSS software to do so (Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, or even Edge which is really just customized Chromium). Lemmy itself is FOSS and the majority of websites you visit every day are using FOSS on the back end. Do you feel all this software is “not-user-friendly”?
Let me take a step back from that though and assume you’re not really talking about software in general but are actually referring to software with a GUI that runs on a desktop computer. Someone elsewhere in this thread compared to GIMP to Photoshop so let’s look at that…
Photoshop is not an easy, just-use-it application. To get started most people recommend watching a YouTube tutorial and, having watched a few they definitely start from a place where, “you should know all this already”. For example, if you don’t understand the difference between a JPEG and a PNG file you’re going to have a bad time.
GIMP is also not an easy, just-use-it application. To get started most people recommend watching a YouTube tutorial and, having watched a few they definitely start from a similar, “you should know all this already” place. Except there’s one great big difference: You don’t have to pay anything to obtain or use the GIMP. That’s the biggest difference!
They’re both image editing tools but they were designed with different use cases in mind. Photoshop was made for professional photographers and digital artists working for business. This is why Adobe put great efforts into making sure that certain “workflows” go very smoothly… Because they’re the most common in business.
If you try to use Photoshop with a different workflow than what it was designed for you’re going to have a bad time! For example, let’s say you wanted to perform a series of manipulations and add some text to tens of thousands of photos; a great big directory of .jpeg files. You might search up how to do this in Photoshop (using macros) and you’ll quickly come to realize that it was definitely not made for this task!
However, if you searched for how to do the same thing in GIMP well, it actually was made to support that! It’s another one of those things where you’ll have to learn a new skill but it’s doable. It’s a use case the GIMP developers had in mind when they made it.
From the perspective of batch editing Photoshop is basically useless. Anyone who tries would find it, “very not-user-friendly” because it was made for a specific purpose and that’s not it.
The GIMP was made as a much more general-purpose graphics editing tool. So much so that it can be completely re-skinned to make it look like Photoshop or even operated entirely from the command line. You can even automate very sophisticated workflows with GIMP using Python!
This same sort of argument can be made for nearly every open source tool that is commonly bitched about, LOL! They generalize that FOSS isn’t user friendly, completely forgetting or ignoring 7zip, Firefox, VLC, LibreOffice, Notepad++, OBS, Keepass, Greenshot, Ditto, Audacity, etc or any of the many thousands of very popular/common FOSS packages that get used on people’s desktops every day.
It’s not just that: it is made worse by the fact that, being “free”, resources are limited. For example, Lemmy.world has been experiencing several hiccups and it’s bloody slow at the moment. I get it, it runs on small servers. But the QoS is bad nevertheless; how can you expect the average Joe coming from Reddit to stay here?
Thing is, and this might be pretty rude to say, but I don’t think I want the average Joe with an attention span of a fruit fly that can’t handle pressing the log in button three times without having a little meltdown on to be the driving force behind content and discourse here.
The average Joe coming from Reddit is what made Reddit the circle jerky, “HOLD MY HAT I’M GOING IN/YOU MUST BE FUN AT PARTIES/AMERICA BAD” dip shit fest that it has been for a long time.
I’m OK with these things being not perfect or super fast or not exact copies of Reddit if it blows away some of the chaff.
- I spit out my coffee.
- I blew coffee out my nose.
- I spit coffee on my self.
- Thanks you owe me a new shirt cos I just spit coffee on it.
Every single fucking one thinks they’re the funniest, most original comedian alive when posting one of these variants.
Yeah, its human nature. Things get better and people come around eventually. Kde plasma is way more continuous from windows 10 then windows 11 is anyway.
That’s because Microsoft stole so much from KDE ^^
Oh really? I was unaware lol.
Yes, the KDE twitter account even mocked Microsoft’s for some of their latest ‘innovations’.
Well, ultimately, I’m glad that something open source is wagging the dogs tail, I assumed it was the other way around.
Yes and no, it’s mean that the creativity and innovation of people at KDE is taken without credit. But on the other hand it shows that their features are really great…
BTW they not only copied ideas but also KDE Plasma’s slogan “Simple by default, powerful when needed.”
Yeah, I was reading about that. It’s a shame about the credit, but hey, what do we expect.
Well thats true for all software - being free/libre or not. It just takes time to get used to it.
For example, when I get a new phone - I spend the next months complaining over how much better the previous one was, until I dont.
I think that for Lemmy and Linux the problem is actually in the people using it. Without people using it, they won’t be many posts/good software support. Without the posts/support there won’t be many users. It’s not some UI being different, or anything else. It’s the main issue. When you see lemmy.world frontpage (All, not Local), there are 15 threads about Reddit and Lemmy, 2 about Twitter limits and the rest is about tech. Meanwhile, on r/popular you have variety of communities, still mostly memes and videos but there are also other posts.
It’s more about reddit that reddit is. You can’t make it long-term with this type of content. On other instances it’s more bearable, but it’s still not enough to keep people here.
Clearly you have never used Arch Linux then - Arch Wiki is truly marvelous.
Likely the problem is more with people not willing to learn anything new, unless forced to do so, because that will break their routines and many are aversive of that.
People like good software that behaves intuitively, news at 11.
Right after our astronomer predictions if the sol star will rise tomorrow.
Bad design that is so common you think it’s intuitive is still bad design
