The One in Which I Say Open Source Software Sucks

http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/06/30/one-which-i-say-open-source-software-sucks/

by JacobK • 17 years ago

78 102 17 years ago

blog.bitquabit.com

davidw2• 17 years ago

To be fair, people have been saying that for years, and slowly but surely, open source has been marching on. 10 years ago, no way, no how would Linux be even considered for desktop use. Now? A few people on this site have parents using it. Not there yet? Could be. It will be, though.

One of the signs of a 'not good enough' disruptive innovation is that the rate of improvement of the new thing is greater than existing tech. Windows and Mac were both fairly usable 10 years ago, Linux not so much (for 'ordinary folks' - I was happily using Linux as my primary environment at work in 1997). Linux has improved by leaps and bounds, and will continue to do so. Will it ever surpass MacOS? Maybe not, but will it hit a 'good enough' level? Certainly. It already has for many things. At the last company I worked at in Italy, full time, we had everyone on Linux, including the administrative assistants and call center people.

sethg• 17 years ago

I think one reason Linux user interfaces have been catching up with Windows (if not Mac) is that for the past ten years or so, desktop-app usability has remained stagnant (or, in the case of MS Office, regressed).

Twenty years ago, Apple and Microsoft had to convince non-geek consumers that personal computers were worth buying, and so they had an incentive to make their products as usable as possible (given the constraints of cost and technology). Now that consumers see personal computers as things that they have to use whether they like it or not, there's not as much incentive to use the UI. Instead, people shell out their own money (or, if they're lucky, their employers' money) to take "how to use Microsoft Office" classes.

rbanffy• 17 years ago

"Linux user interfaces have been catching up with Windows (if not Mac)" is a common misconception.

I love the tabbed file system views in Gnome. It's much more comfortable than the Finder. Windows Explorer too is simply terrible. I have been using Windows at work and Gnome at home and can't even begin to decribe all the ways Windows is completely broken from a usability standpoint. People tolerate it because they know nothing different and/or are unwilling to learn.

In many aspects, Gnome and KDE have already surpassed Windows and OSX.

ori_b6• 17 years ago

Strangely enough, I'm using Linux precisely because proprietary software is painful to use. For example, searching for software with google to download it, trying to determine if the source is reliable, and clicking through a manual installer is way too tedious - it should be at my fingertips.

Also, at least when compared to Windows (where everyone and his brother seems to feel the need for a custom and flashy toolkit, even within Microsoft), Linux apps have mostly standardized on look and feel. Very few people seem to feel the need to reinvent the GUI toolkit and make something that looks completely out of place on Linux (except for the proprietary vendors, like Google, who seem to be ignoring the established human interface guidelines and completely inventing their own look for Chrome)

Finally, as a developer, being able to delve into the source of libraries when debugging is invaluable.

IsaacSchlueter• 17 years ago

It is this result of "good lazy" app developers that has helped move FOSS in the right direction, IMO. Aptitude and GTK are the best things to happen to Linux since Linus.

bad_user• 17 years ago

Having a central repository that handles version dependencies and upgrades ... is great.

But let's be honest here: whenever a newer version of a software package is released, it can take months before it enters sid on Debian, or in Ubuntu, and these are the better-maintained distros.

And if you want to distribute proprietary software, maintaining multiple packages for multiple distributions and multiple versions, is hell-like.

And regarding interface guide lines, I do not agree that Linux apps have a standard. Quite the contrary.

psadauskas4• 17 years ago

But that's the philosophy of those distros such as Debian, Ubunutu and Fedora: Don't upgrade anything except security patches between releases.

If you want the bleeding edge packages, you need to install it yourself from an add-on repo (once you set it up, its just as easy as `apt-get install newpkg`. Or, pick a rolling-release distro that caters more towards having the latest packages available, such as Gentoo or Arch.

tedunangst• 17 years ago

"Linux" is only uniform if you stick exclusively to gnome or kde apps. Just try running firefox (gtk) on kde (qt). The file selector dialogs don't even look the same.

psadauskas4• 17 years ago

Who cares? The purpose of a file selector is to select a file, not look like every other file selector in existence. Even on Windows, the Office file selector looks nothing like the Photoshop one, or the Firefox one, or the Notepad one.

At least in open source, you can hack it however you want. In fact, its fairly simple to make Firefox use the KDE file picker: Enter "about:config" in the address bar, look for the "ui.allow_platform_file_picker" key and change its value to "false". ( http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/HOWTO_Integrate_Firefox_with_KDE... )

Edit: I was incorrect, the method I linked won't make firefox use the KDE picker, just an alternate gtk picker. But there are ways that can be found with a little bit of googling.

ori_b6• 17 years ago

Sure, but at least it's uniform within a desktop environment. If you looked at what I was saying, Windows doesn't even give you that. Mac is better, even though it also has 2 gratuitously different available look-and-feels.

access_denied5• 17 years ago

Updating software packs, determining if source is reliable, studying source code and debugging are not done very often by office workers in fields like biz admin or design, to say the least.

rjurney7• 17 years ago

To get great usability - you need paying users clamoring for it. To implement it, you need central control around a unifying cognitive model.

Open source is bad at usability because FOSS projects are controlled by committees that can't even assign tasks, let alone create and enforce coherent cognitive models and elegant interfaces that express them.

You could have good FOSS usability - if you had a central company driving the development. As in Firefox. It just hasn't happened many times so far, because people are willing to pay for good closed-source interfaces in most problem domains.

bct4• 17 years ago

That's the conventional wisdom, but I'm not sure I believe it. It takes (much) longer for an app's usability to mature without some central arbiter, but "you need" it is far too strong a statement.

rjurney7• 17 years ago

Without a central arbiter, an app's usability never matures.

youngian• 17 years ago

Exactly. Ten years ago a lot of people would have told you that you need central control of code and full-time work from paid developers in a central office with careful managerial oversight to build powerful software. And all those people, many of them "experts," were laughably wrong.

I think the concept of designing for usability has just been slower to enter the FOSS world. Only now are open source projects starting to grapple with how you do interaction design on a open source project. But throwing up our hands and assuming it will never happen just because it doesn't always happen right now is silly. How about we start recruiting non-developers to open source projects to run simple usability tests and report on their findings? It's not that developers will never work on usability, it's just that it's a difficult and foreign field to most of us, so we avoid the issue altogether.

ori_b6• 17 years ago

You can also get great usability from a lead developer with taste, and people that are actually interested in using the software.

Profit is certainly not the only incentive that drives people. Saving time and effort by fixing problems (usability and otherwise) is also a great motivator.

rjurney7• 17 years ago

And yet it never works out that way on very many projects. Why is that?

cschwarm4• 17 years ago

True. But for Open Source projects, having a lead developer with taste is a matter of chance. And people using the software usually don't care about the "no-users" but only their own wants and needs.

In contrast, Closed Source products simply hire a professional interface designer if that's necessary to convince "no-users" to buy.

joeyo• 17 years ago

  > You could have good FOSS usability - if you had a central
  > company driving the development. As in Firefox. It just
  > hasn't happened many times so far, because people are
  > willing to pay for good closed-source interfaces in most
  > problem domains.

Actually, Firefox was originally started by two guys as a reaction against the centralized development that was at the time occurring with the Mozilla browser. The Mozilla foundation officially came on board later, well after Firefox gained momentum and popularity.

rjurney7• 17 years ago

And thus they were the central force driving good usability. They did it just for fun - or was it a company?

blasdel5• 17 years ago

The GIMP's development process has strong central control around a unifying cognitive model.

Unfortunately the people in charge are idiots with terrible taste, and they've been under siege so long that they're deaf.

orblivion2• 17 years ago

Firstly, open source does (or can easily) have one big usability advantage: installing things, assuming it's on a repository, is much easier. Or, at least, it's very close to there; I haven't asked a lay user how useful they find the "Add Application" menu in Gnome. But assuming it's not already done right, once it is, that's a huge advantage.

Secondly, so we've admitted that non-company-backed open source projects can have good code, making for a good backend. So the economic model does work. What we need now is for more non-developers (UI designers, artists, etc) to join this movement. I think that it's slowly happening. Tech savvy ones would be more likely to join, and as it becomes more and more inviting I think the less savvy will join as well. I can't think of any specific reason this economic model applies to developers more than others, so I think that over time, UI will become good for the same reason the code is good.

tjr• 17 years ago

What economic model are you referring to?

orblivion2• 17 years ago

The electronic gift economy. People collaborating and working for free to produce electronic goods.

The point of the article is that, so far, open source only works when there's a company behind it, and companies are structured the way they are, I would argue, because of their profit motive.

CWuestefeld• 17 years ago

I'm primarily a Windows user, having just recently installed Ubuntu onto a netbook. Obviously I'm carrying old habits and baggage, but from my point of view, finding and installing stuff in the repository is a nightmare.

On one hand, I can see how putting it there makes a unified update system possible.

But the system does nothing for me in helping me discover what I need. To learn of the existence of a tool, I still need to stumble across it from a user recommendation or web search. From there, in Windows I just download and install.

But on the Linux platform, I get lost in all the various repositories available, each of which has multiple levels (I forget them specifically, but I remember something about "universal"?). And god forbid that the necessary repository isn't one of the standards (as I had to deal with when installing XBMC); finding and setting up the public keys is like root canal.

The flip side of this, uninstalling software, I haven't figured out at all. It seems that doing so doesn't actually delete the deadwood, but I happened somewhere on a command line way to tell it to clean up. I remain confused about how to specify precisely which packages to uninstall. The way they're built into dependency blocks, with optional recommended pieces, on the installation side is great. But I don't see at all how to determine the root package of something I don't want anymore, so that all the children are removed as well. And I really don't get if or how it determines which shared, possibly optional packages, will stay or go.

So I think that this is precisely what the OP is referring to. As a developer I can appreciate the benefits of the Linux repository system. But as a user of it, It's hideously unfriendly.

krschultz4• 17 years ago

You are over complicating the matter.

I agree that finding the right tool is sometimes hard because there are so many options. My general rule is open up the package manager (System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager) and search for what I need. Then I google the 3 or 4 options and see what people recommend, and just install that one.

I just let Uninstall do its thing, if it misses a few pieces it doesn't really matter. If it really bothers you just use Purge instead of Uninstall.

As for repositories, again you are overcomplicating matters. You really just need to know if it is in the repositories you have connected or not, you might have 40 repositories by default but it doesn't matter which it is in to you. I generally add 1, max 2 repositories to my machine but thats it.

You also don't need the public keys, you can just hit YES when it asks if you want to use it, though I am sure that is not recommended. Generally the instructions just include a command to copy and paste into the command line i.e. Medibuntu's instructions.

michaelneale• 17 years ago

I guess this is reflected in the popularity of the "app store" for iphone - and now others trying to replicate that (not just for phones either). Its the proprietary equivalent of the open source repository approach.

stonemetal2• 17 years ago

Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising? If you are a graphic artist and don't give a rat's behonkus about computers do you really dig until you find the GIMP(and the continual slog for documentation and understanding) or do you read graphic artist monthly with big color Photo Shop ads, Photo Shop books on B&N's book shelves, and training courses. The choice is just about made for you, in their world Photo Shop exists the GIMP doesn't.

access_denied5• 17 years ago

GIMP and Inkscape are not ready for prime-time. (And as always at this point: They lack proper support for CMYK, Fonts, Color-Management, Workflow in big publishing and printing shops.) Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS.

indiejade• 17 years ago

Nah. It is possible to make professional-quality, shiny, colorful graphics with GIMP if you know what you're doing. Sure, installing the non-default fonts (that is, not having a one-button install method) and configuring everything is what prevents most people from adopting it.

There are graphic designers who are graphic designers, and then there are web developers who are also graphic designers.

Have a look at what some "designers" are getting paid on sites like crowdSPRING.com and 99designs.com and it's pretty obvious that graphic designers who don't know code are fairly easy to find.

I think this has been why there's been such a backlash against the freelance sites by the brick-mortar "design only" firms.

SwellJoe2• 17 years ago

Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS.

In the interest of fairness...I just bought Adobe CS4 Web Premium (with Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). I've been working with the GIMP and Inkscape for a good long while, off and on, and I'm still finding Photoshop and Illustrator to be incredibly hard to use and obtuse. I've been watching video tutorials, reading the docs, searching the web, and tinkering, for a couple of weeks now, and I'm still nowhere near as productive as I am in GIMP or Inkscape. Partly this is just that the Adobe products do more. This is an acceptable cost, to me, but I still find myself feeling grouchy a lot of the time because things do not work as I would expect (not just "as the GIMP or Inkscape would do it", but also in terms of discoverability...for example, sometimes I accidentally break my workspace, or whatever it is called, and can't figure out what I did or how to fix it; you can't undo workspace changes, as far as I know).

Take it all with a grain of salt, as I'm a barely functioning idiot with quite a few products that are supposed to be easy to use. iTunes, for example, is a nightmare for me; I always end up deleting my whole collection either on the device or on the computer or having something else go totally amok and I have to reboot into Linux just to recover all of my data. So, maybe Adobe software is "easy to use" like Apple software is "easy to use", and I'm just an idiot.

Stability of the Adobe stuff also leaves a lot to be desired. It's kinda like Inkscape a couple of years ago, or GIMP ten or twelve years ago (or during the 2.0 beta years). Sometimes weird things happen and it just freezes up. This may be the newer Adobe stuff; I'm usually watching a tutorial video when it happens, so maybe Air or Flex or whatever is to blame, rather than Photoshop or Illustrator. But it happens a lot when I'm watching those videos.

nailer• 17 years ago

I agree GIMPs UI is a clusterfuck, but I do believe it has CMYK and OpenType support these days. Are they lacking somehow?

marcusbooster• 17 years ago

Maybe it's the average programmer that doesn't give a "rat's behonkus" about the graphic designer?

I think most designers I've met know what OSS kinda is and are always looking for tools to improve workflow - they just want tools that work. Last time I checked out Gimp it still didn't support adjustment layers for non-destructible editing, which is pretty much a show-stopper.

Packages get used when they lead the way in a given field, most of the OSS design apps I've seen are just playing catch-up.

stonemetal2• 17 years ago

>> Gimp it still didn't support adjustment layers for non-destructible editing, which is pretty much a show-stopper. Packages get used when they lead the way in a given field, most of the OSS design apps I've seen are just playing catch-up.

So which is it? Gimp isn't good enough because it doesn't provide feature for feature compatibility with PS or because it doesn't do something different? You just claimed both. It has a different workflow than PS so yeah as long as you try to keep using it like ps it is going to compare poorly.

omouse2• 17 years ago

Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising?

You can't advertise without doing some marketing work. Free Software projects have to figure out who their target markets are and cater to them. GIMP is the best example because it could be split into a few different versions; one that's suitable for Photo Shop users, and another that's useful for people who haven't been "tainted" by Photo Shop.

There could be tutorials and books that make it easier for Photo Shop users to use GIMP.

If there was some cash, you could do the sleazy thing and pay people to use the GIMP when teaching graphic design classes or whatever. Heck, you may not have to pay them at all if you can convince them that the price of $0 makes the GIMP better than Photo Shop.

_phred• 17 years ago

The trick, it would seem, is convincing them that a $0 tool with its faults and crashes is better than a stable $400 industry-standard tool 15 years in the development and that, when billing design time at $80-120/hour, the latter tool won't quickly prove its worth.

Time and time again, Gimp has proven to me that it's not the tool for doing anything but the most basic editing. I want to love it, because it's free, but I don't have the time to waste when it eats my drawings.

What could really help would be a gallery of stunning art created with only open-source tools; the trick there is teaching the artists to use the tools and making it worth their time to do so...

jcromartie• 17 years ago

The main problem with FOSS graphics packages is that they aren't focused on being usable and producing beautiful-looking graphics. They're focused on being FOSS packages first, and software that does graphics second. The combination of usability (or maybe just familiarity... but still, it's the measure of the ability of a package to be used) and just really nice looking results are what put Photoshop and Illustrator ahead of GIMP and Photoshop in nearly every area. I just don't see anybody saying "look at this beautiful art I made with GIMP." I see people making lame fan art and bad gradients.

xinsight• 17 years ago

As mentioned, OSS projects often lack the "unifying cognitive model". I've also found that with iphone apps, users expect a high level of polish on an app. (A little drop-shadow here, a little shine there, move that button 1-pixel to the right, etc.) It's tedious and fiddly work, and I only bother because I don't want to lose a sale. People often say about 80% of the app is interface - with the iphone, i'd say it's closer to 95%.

If OSS projects were able to motivate developers to work on the boring stuff like graphics and layout, the apps would look a lot better and adoption on the desktop would certainly shoot up.

epe• 17 years ago

I know that one example does not a complete refutation make, but:

http://adium.im/

bct4• 17 years ago

Truly, this is a novel and intriguing opinion.

tptacek2• 17 years ago

There's nothing in this blog post that's blatantly wrong. There's also nothing in it that's news. It's not written better than other sources that have made the same point, which sources include several famous blog posts from usability and UI experts. The author isn't a usability or UI expert. In fact, I'm not sure who he is.

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

If he's making the same point as usability and UI experts, why does it matter who he is?

tptacek2• 17 years ago

It wouldn't, if he had something novel to say, or an interesting or effective way of phrasing it.

gecko• 17 years ago

Because I am secretly an axe murderer, and who in the end wants to hear an argument from an axe murderer, however valid they might be?

blasdel5• 17 years ago

Because he's not making any new points. The only way his post could be useful is if he was notable, making his agreement notable.

fatdog7893• 17 years ago

At the very least, he's notable for taking all the competing arguments and putting them together into a single post that people have noticed, thereby becoming a potential reference point for future people who will make the exact same arguments.

frodwith• 17 years ago

At least for me, usability isn't the point of free software. I want my free software to be usable, yes, and usability should be a goal for the development teams, but the overriding benefit of free software is that it is free. It puts the power back in my hands as an end user. Even if I don't have the technical skills to make use of that freedom, the freedom is important. This is something that "closed-source" applications don't have. If Microsoft made Office free tomorrow and it were easier to use than OpenOffice (it is, though that isn't saying much), I'd use it. But Microsoft Office has vendor lock-in problems and platform compatibility issues, and I'm not free to make it better. If people value usability over freedom, that is their choice. I don't begrudge them the headaches of a different sort that they are incurring.

ThomPete2• 17 years ago

I disagree. That software is free might be an excuse for why not waste time on the usability, but it sure ain't a good reason if you want more than developers to use it.

veqon• 17 years ago

The motherboard on my XP machine died and I dug out my old w2k machine and (amongst other things) I installed OpenOffice. I only use OO for word documents and spreadsheets but it has served my needs without problems. So why can't I convince anyone else to try it? My guess is that they know Microsoft Office, and they feel safer being in the same boat as everyone else. Any problem won't be their fault. The old FUD.

0xdefec84• 17 years ago

As a dude who just tried Ubuntu for the first time in 5 years to see how far they've come, but couldn't because the fucking liveCD didn't have a driver for my cdrom, this rings true.

But for what it's worth, after a few grueling days getting the p.o.s. up and running, I was shocked to have all the UI fluff my macbook has, plus the infinite list of other great stuff that's inherent to Linux.

The moral? Just shrinkwrap all OSS with a CS degree holding nerd who has a couple days of free time.

sophacles3• 17 years ago

Wait, you're actually saying that:

1. Someone still makes non-standard cd-roms? 2. Someone else still buys them?

After learning you are person #2, why would anyone ever trust any other judgement you make?

0xdefec84• 17 years ago

and therein lies the predictable attitude that will keep linux a distant 3rd on the desktop.

fatdog7893• 17 years ago

1) China. Enough said. 2) The box never says whether the cd-rom uses a "standard driver model."

After reviewing the facts as they exist in this world, why would anyone have trust your reasoning or logical skills ever again? Moreover, given how important logical reasoning is to the computer programming, why would anyone ever trust your computer programming skills ever again? Finally, given how important computer programming skills are to being a computer geek, why would anyone ever trust your geek cred ever again?

See what I did there?

paulgb3• 17 years ago

To be fair, what percent of Windows users could actually install the OS if they needed to?

0xdefec84• 17 years ago

Not sure I understand the question, you mean could they install Windows on the same machine? It was running XPsp2 prior to Ubuntu 9.04.

Elepsis• 17 years ago

If you buy Windows and have trouble installing it (which, by the way, is far less likely in my experience than with most Linux installs -- although things are getting better on that front, too), there's a phone number I/my grandma can call for help. You'd be surprised by how big a difference that makes.

sp332• 17 years ago

Out of curiosity, what kind of CD-ROM drive requires a special driver?

blasdel5• 17 years ago

It's not usually the CDROM, but the chipset it's attached to. A lot of recent motherboards have multiple disk controllers -- usually a standard one that's a part of the motherboard chipset, and a second super-shitty one (often from JMicron) so that they can advertise extra ports (also because Intel chipsets didn't support SATA hotplug for the longest time).

It's fairly common for the CDROM in an 'enthusiast' desktop to be attached to the single PATA port on a secondary controller.

naz• 17 years ago

I think the main problem with Open Source application software is the lack of experience in the field the application deals with. Open source programming libraries and languages, webservers and browsers are all great because they are mainly programming problems, and open source developers are programmers. Things like the GIMP and Virtualdub try to deal with problems outside the field of programming, and don't have the knowledge, research or resources to develop something that people in those fields want. Usability is one of those fields but it isn't the heart of the problem.

rottencupcakes• 17 years ago

This is exactly the problem. What percent of graphic designers would use an app, find a bug, and report it, let alone wade through the code and fix it?

On the other hand, an open source webserver or programming language, in which the user is a programmer by default, is much more likely to get fixed.

And honestly, what is your average open source developer more interested in: GIMP or Apache?

yesimahuman• 17 years ago

I think a perfect example of Open Source thriving is IBM. They package open source software (Eclipse for RAD, Apache for IBM Apache), and sell support.

It's not a clusterfuck, you just have business people who need to have support 24/7 from people with full time intimate knowledge of the product.

tdonia• 17 years ago

If you accept the premise from the post that minimizing support costs acts as an incentive to enhance usability, then i think there's an important factor you're touching on here. Since many open source organizations provide FOSS software and charge for support, they've got less of an incentive to provide easy to use software. Rather, their model is tuned to providing easy to support software.

ThomPete2• 17 years ago

OOS doesn't suck it just needs more designers involved.

I am a pretty experienced designer focusing on interface design and have tried a couple of times to get involved in these kinds of projects.

But what often happens is that they coders don't really want to have designers involved before at the very end where needless to say the software suddenly dictates the experience.

It's a perfectly solvable problem and have nothing to do with OSS as such but the same thing that hit many big corporate projects.

You decide the platform before you decide on the product.

nl• 17 years ago

That's bullshit.

The key problem isn't if an application is open source, or even it's usability - it's the incumbency problem.

Name one general consumer application for windows which wasn't being used ~5 years ago - even if it is non open source. I can only think of Firefox, games, and maybe some IM client software.

Even usability disasters (eg Vista) win huge numbers of users when they are the default choice.

When new niches open up (eg, web applications), open source apps have proven to be just as usable as commercial apps. Eg Wikipedia and Wordpress.com are both in the top 10 sites world wide, and both are open source (ie, the apps themselves are open source, not just the infrastructure software).

jdm• 17 years ago

a more accurate headline might be "software sucks". it's not like most closed-source software is all that great either, e.g CS

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The One in Which I Say Open Source Software Sucks

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