From my experience, most FOSS software is very user friendly user-centric / user-focused, while proprietary stuff is shit. What is the most notable exception to this rule that comes to your mind?
Edit: With user friendliness, I don’t mean UI design, but things like how the software is handling user privacy, whether it sees its users as users or as money-making cattle, how it handles user feedback, compatibility with other software the user uses (vs. vendor lock-in), configurability, and similar issues.
Edit2: I was made aware that user friendliness is a defined term: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Userfriendliness
Obsidian, its pretty pro user but the devs are scared of forks for some reason.
What about forks? Isn’t it closed source?
Also Android support is like 4 years behind the new standards
Yeah its closed source because the devs don’t want people to fork the project for some reason. I thought the app had pretty good user experience when I used it but I am more of a vimwiki type of guy.
FaceTrackNoIR. Head trackers for Flight Sims are unreasonably expensive. So you just give the FaceTrackNoIR guys $4, get a download link in your mail (which you can keep forever), slap some webcam on your monitor from 2004 and boom, head tracking. It’s a fairly decent piece of software that gets the job done.
Additionally you get a bunch of extras like, smartphone compatibility, and a bunch of plugins for common head trackers, if you don’t want to use their own software.
And it doesn’t do any AI garbagio with the face recognition, just good old fashioned algorithmic pixel tracking. All local.
My experience is the opposite - FOSS is often obtuse, with an assumption that you see things the same was as the dev, which is usually a single person or at most a very small group. Add to that, documentation is nominal, or non-existent, and quite often lacking even a high-level description of what an app does, let alone where to find features in an app. FOSS devs often don’t even follow menu layout that’s been pretty well established at this point. For example, I’ve found the Settings menu under File, Help, Tools, View, etc, in different apps.
Proprietary apps are usually developed by a team, one that’s studied the market segment (or another group has), and usually understands how that segment operates. They then develop the app based on design goals established by a team other than the developers, with UAT (user acceptance testing) performed at given stages (this is even more frequent today with Agile project management). It’s not uncommon for a UI to be mocked up and given to end users to validate UI design/layout choices long before anything is even developed.
These devs usually follow a company standard process, with code reviews by other people. Their changes must be approved by management, and those changes are often requested and reviewed by other teams before being submitted to the dev team.
Most FOSS simply doesn’t have the time or staffing to do what most proprietary software dev does.
And I use both proprietary and FOSS all day long.
I am an IT guy, so my needs, preferences and priorities are not the norm.
IMHO software is mostly a shit-show, doesn’t matter if property or FOSS. My most loved target of critique is macOS/Apple, because the user experience is so bad for me. (Forced by my work to use it, so I have several years of experience/suffering with it.)
I think it is more about finding software which works by accident (or your training/prior knowledge), as you expect it should work. The biggest problem with proprietary software is that they usually need to up sell, dump down features (hello, macOS window management, finder and everything else) or want to force you into their walled garden.
One easy example where FOSS kicks ass compared to proprietary is managing/installing and updating software: Linux and the BSDs have all sane centrally managed systems for native packages and Flatpaks/Snaps, compare that to the shit-show on Windows and macOS devices. Don’t let me start on provisioning and other topics, where FOSS is by now decades ahead of the stuff one sees in macOS/windows.
One proprietary system which works awesome is Steam and SteamDeck. No questions there and I’ll happily throw my money at Valve.
I had the pleasure of working with great UX designers, but you are sorry out of luck if you are not the persona they target and their decisions are guided by making money and making their manager happy, so a good user experience is at most their 3rd concern, if you are lucky.
Concerning documentation I fully agree with you, with very few exceptions (Arch WIKI, FreeBSD handbook, RHELs documentation), the FOSS world is a sad place.
In the end, there is the potential for great UX in both proprietary and FOSS systems, but when you want to focus on user centric, FOSS wins IMHO for IT guys because they are the only systems which are literally build by their users.
I think I somewhat disagree on technical terms. I don’t think those two are opposites. That Free Software has been tailored to the demands of the user. It’s just that the user is the developer itself… While software that gets sold, is made to appease the customers. So I think it’s not an opposite, but ultimately the same. The software is made to solve some problem for someone. It’s just that the developer sits in front of their computer with a different target audience in mind.
Other than that, I agree. But another think to note, there are vast differences between projects. Some are really clunky. Some are shiny and polished MacOS clones. We have them all. And sometimes it’s just users complaining when the UI in fact has a concept… It’s just not the currently predominant design by the market leader, and people think it should be a clone of that and offer a similar experience…
I was gonna say I can’t believe anyone would say that FOSS software is user friendly vs proprietary stuff. Maybe if you’re only ever used to obtuse FOSS software anything that’s less confusing?
Maybe OP is a FOSS maintainer
Possible. For me, the things I see from windows (disclaimer: I haven’t used any dos since years, but I’ve occasionally seen video material (including, for example, menus with ads, and horribly confusing settings)) are obtuse, and FOSS stuff is normal. But I may be biased in the a different direction than you.
Guess we have very different experiences.
I work with a commercial software development group and they suck
Not one of the developers had a shred of experience aligned with their target market segment. There is a design team, but they also don’t know the segment, but the division between design, architecture and development leads to a clunky mess.
Professionals in the target market are frequently higher paid than the developers, so management refuses to fund hiring actual experts in the field, and instead just nominates seemingly arbitrary people in the organization to stand in for the “customer” in all those processes that should actually include customers.
So when they are disappointed with losing to a number of open source solutions in the field, they just accuse customers of being cheap rather than facing the reality they have ivory towered themselves into a corner.
Maybe for some markets it is different, but now those markets face the reality that the vendor is trying to game then for subscription revenue and add ons and is making deliberately customer hostile change for the sake of gaming the revenue in the short term.
Now there are certainly markets with no FOSS option, as just no one is interested in developing. I suppose in markets with OSS software there’s may sometimes be a divide between what the developer inclined half of the market would want for themselves versus those not minded toward development, and that could be a weakness.
Ultimately I’ll always remember one review for an open source project. They stated that at first they were underwhelmed because it felt like software they’d write for themselves, and not as flashy as commercial alternatives. Then they realized they would write that software because the commercial software was not for for purpose despite how nice it was, and the project was just they easy they wanted it.
There seems to be some confusion. With user friendliness I wasn’t referring to the UI. See Edit in updated post.
The confusion is because user friendly has a clear definition but you’re using it to mean something else.
You could consider editing to say user-centric, user-first, user-focused. Or re-wording to specifically state prioritising the user over profit
It seems you’re right. I wasn’t aware that it has a definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Userfriendliness As a result, I was so naive to just use it as being friendly to users. I’m kinda surprised that this seems to be a well established term (as can be seen by so many here interpreting it with this definition).
Will re-word post.
Obligatory winRAR mention. Technically proprietary paid software, trial never expires.
Win RAR is shit from my experience.
Steam
Steam doesn’t fit OP’s criteria. They definitely prioritise profit over the user’s preference.
When you open the app you’re immediately shown pop-up ads ffs. And the app opens to the store.
You can disable the pop-ups in settings and default to opening your library by default but it’s difficult to locate the relevant settings.
Steam transformed the PC gaming experience for the better but I find people’s reverence of it is misplaced.
The key to steam is that they realised that being user centric, while bad for short term profits is very good for long term profits. They are also not publicly traded, so not just anyone can buy in and try and make a quick buck burning them to the ground.
I’ve found their store and setup to be a reasonable balance of advertising to functionality. The fact that you can adjust it yourself is a good example of their mindset. Most people don’t care or find them useful. Those who don’t like them are unlikely to interact with them, so it’s not worth fighting their efforts to turn them off.
Not really a user-friendliness issue, but pet peeve about one thing that I can’t patch because it’s not open source. Steam doesn’t let me cap the number of concurrent TCP connections when downloading updates. Like, TCP degrades reasonably gracefully under contention; each connection gets something like an equal amount of bandwidth. But with Steam downloads – which are bulk, noninteractive, and which I definitely don’t want to take priority for available bandwidth – the package uses a ton of connections. If you have 30 connections, it gets ~97% of the available bandwidth when contending with a more-conventional protocol that uses a single connection. The Steam downloader logic, as I understand from past reading, keeps adding more until it doesn’t see any significant degree of increase in speed, which is exactly what I don’t want to have it doing. And Valve doesn’t provide any way to turn this off.
Steam does provide some other mechanisms to try to limit its bandwidth usage, but none are very satisfactory.
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You can hard-limit the rate of downloads. But I don’t want that – if there’s no contention for bandwidth, I want Steam to use it. I just want it to back off when there is contention.
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You can limit the time of downloads. But I don’t always know when there’s going to be demand for bandwidth.
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You can limit downloads to not run when playing games. That addresses the very specific case of downloads interfering with Steam games that have latency-sensitive demands, like multiplayer FPSes. But that’s far from the only situation where there’s something contending for bandwidth.
I mostly use open-source software, so it’s really frustrating when I run into behavior in proprietary software that I can’t reasonably fix. Plus, usually if it bothers me, it’s bothered someone else in the past, and they’ve gone and fixed it, so I don’t even need to do so.
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As someone else pointed out, the premise of this question is extremely faulty. Being user-friendly is one of the main advantages of proprietary software because they have teams of researchers and designers making sure that things are as frictionless as possible for the user. This isn’t to say they don’t use dark-patterns or engage in anti-consumer practices, but I’m certain that if you did a random sampling of F-Droid and the Play Store, you would find a lot more polished and user-friendly software on the Play Store than the FOSS apps on F-Droid
Disagree strong. Every turn and chance, revenue is given preference over ease of use. Cookies, tracking, free trials where you need to either log in or add your credit card are trends that are very annoying for users. And from there we can get into specifics of what the app does.
It also doesn’t explain why every software made in Microsoft, either from scratch or bought after being successful, is the absolute lesson in UI anti patterns.
So OP edited his post to be about being ‘user-centric’ and not ‘user friendly.’ There’s a huge difference between being easy to use, even for the technologically illiterate, and being good for users so I wouldn’t disagree with a lot of what’s been said in this thread
You’ve clearly not used B2B software. It’s shit.
It depends - if you got the money,it can be good. I actually worked with really really good software systems. Especially for the time.
But…they are rare, they were all custom made/fit and the whole company using them had the right “humans first” culture behind it. And they spend huge amount of money on them.
But as they were not shareholder value run,it didn’t matter.
B2G software? That is hell. Pure hell. Never saw a single good one. They even managed to fuck up Linux here.
How the heck can they fuck to Linux? Are they making you use Hanna Montana Linux??
They started their own distribution. Which…ended badly. Especially as the company they contracted to do so was staffed mainly with former oracle and SAP staff.
What a biased question haha
OP, please download some FOSS software and tell me how friendly it is to use. As an arch (btw) user who primarily uses FOSS, they’re definitely not generally better than proprietary.
well, I am not that tech savvy and have a lot less trouble using FOSS as compared to the proprietary counterparts. if some application is too difficult for me to set up, I just give up & forget about it. But if I HAVE to use a proprietary software (like for school) I will lose my shit and get so angry i can’t be talked to for 2 hours, because in my experience proprietary stuff ALWAYS has so much shit in it and is so tedious to set up, and also complaining about my old hardware.
I also use arch, btw, so yes I’m probably biased in a similar way as you.
Most FOSS software I downloaded is very friendly to me, thanks. Or do you have a particular unfriendly FOSS software in mind?
Btw, out of interest, if the software you use is so unfriendly to you, why do you use it? Money reasons?
Have you tried Calibre?
Anki on iPhone. Pay one fee and it funds the other users but it’s forever.
Photosync small one time fee but you get an awesome app forever.
Pleco app. Has some add ons but well worth the money and no other fees.
Anki and Pleco… May I assume you are studying Chinese ATM?
Haha, yes. Used them for ten plus years to study it. Now doing more Japanese but sucking at it. Regardless Pleco is the best language app outside of Anki. No Japanese app can do handwriting like Pleco. If I encounter some old or unclean character in Japanese I still use Pleco
I studied some Chinese in the past, Pleco is pretty good, even the base app offers a lot of features. I’m now learning Japanese too, LOL, started in 2016 and left it in 2019 or so, but recently I’ve fallen in love with the language again.
That’s cool! :) I also started Japanese in 2016 and also fell off in 2019 until 2020! Chinese maybe since 2014. What’s made you fall in love with it? How’s your studying been?
Vivaldi
I find Sync For Lemmy to have a great UI. I’ve been using it for years, and have it configured to perfection. I use other clients that are good, I can tell they’re good, but they don’t fit the same way.
AdGuard on, baking soda and vinegar on iPhone. 15$ for essentially YouTube premium but it’s a one time purchase
The reason for this is simple enough. The proprietary software has an agenda to squeeze as much from the user as possible, and the Internet has enabled this to horrible degrees.
Windows is about making the least effort to be the de facto OS while slamming you with ads and insistence that you must subscribe to various Microsoft services.
Applications that make zero sense to be browser hosted are browser hosted, because it means to have to be approved by the vendor every time you run the software, it must be subscription.
Transactional software purchases are garbage for the business side of software, there’s a mandate for recurring subscription based revenue.
It used to be these opportunities were impractical and the commercial company budget would sometimes lead them to an easier product than open source, but that ship sailed.
Now for technical users, open source almost always has won and will continue to win, because they are dealing with like minded developers writing for themselves, and so they internalize the use case in a way a commercial approach never can.
