luciferofastora

Aww, I was hoping for… gestures at your username

I left a long time ago. Don’t think they were as trigger happy back then, so they never got the chance. You think I should open an account and start posting reasonable criticism of disinformation so they can ban me and I get to be one of the cool outcasts rather than a boring old emigrant?

Yeah, I think the extension of “We need to acknowledge that UX is important” is going to be “We need to negotiate a mode of working that enables UX volunteers to help efficiently.” I’ve been out of software development for years, only tangentially worked with UX designers for a university project (and even that was basically just a bunch of UI mockups I was supposed to implement, so I never saw the process). I don’t know how the industry has solved that question (if at all), but the less hierarchical FOSS system may have to find its own way.

I’m glad that you have any interest in the topic at all, and thank you for shedding some light on your side of the issue.

No, I don’t think you’re missing anything. That’s the issue at hand here: creating proper, usable software takes time and effort. FOSS-developers tend to prefer pouring their time and effort into functional code, with the UI primarily shaped by their own needs rather than a thorough analysis of what other users could want. Often, tools are the result of someone building something for themselves and figuring they’d share it with others.

To properly design for a broad audience is an extremely selfless ask, and for all that these devs donate their time to the public, they only have so much to give. I think it’s fair that they’d prefer working on things they benefit from too, but that means sacrificing general usability for personal expediency.

And that’s why so many tools are clunky: they’re “good enough” for the developer, and nobody cares to also make them good enough for the rest of the user group.

seems like every projects wants you to fork ans submit changes

I think that’s just how software devs tend to work: a main “trunk” of code, from which they branch off for a feature or change, then when they’re done writing the new code, merge it back into the trunk. That’s the mode we’re used to, the only tool we know for managing parallel code development.

How else would we do things? Or rather: how would you do things? This isn’t a rhetorical question: I genuinely admit I don’t know how you’d prefer to operate, or what you mean by punching in and out.

If you’re asking for specific tasks, projects may have an issue tracker of some form where you can find stuff other people found, but other than that, FOSS often is a “see something that needs fixing, go and fix it” thing. Particularly if the devs themselves don’t notice a problem, because they know what that confusing icon means or how that tool works, they won’t create a task they don’t even know needs doing. Even if they know something is bad, they might not know how to make it better.

If you’re using or trying to use a program and notice something has been done poorly, is too complex for an entry-level user, whatever it is you think could or should be improved, talk to the people making it, or look for a contribution guide.

Even if you can’t contribute code, it might be helpful to share your skills and knowledge by opening issues, explaining specific problems and offering ways to solve them.

The UX designers I knew had a bit of a circular problem: the poor UX put them off too much to develop that passion for FOSS that drives devs to work on it for free. They’d first have to puzzle out what things are supposed to do and how they’re supposed to go about achieving whatever they’re looking to do, basically reverse-engineering user flows that were never properly engineered.

I don’t have a solution for this and I don’t know if they’re representative, but acknowledging the importance of UX is a start for sure.

Absolute statements are never fully accurate, including this one.

Honestly, computer literacy in general. Even back when I was in university, basic comprehension of how computers work was lacking even among IT students. Not as egregious as the various user horror stories you’ll probably have heard, but bad enough.

I admit that our software dev 1 teacher starting the first lecure by opening a terminal, viming together a basic Java Hello World without explanation, then compiling and running it wasn’t a great start for anyone except the lucky few that knew enough to not be deterred.

But the general idea what files are should be common knowledge, the “hacker” impression of the command line should be demystified a little, and the distinction between monitor, computer and hard drive… actually, maybe we should leave that one out for the sake of entertainment.

The only way to meaningfully compete with freeware is a feature advantage: if your revenue can sponsor developers to focus on polishing and improving your system beyond the free alternatives, there will be a market of people willing to pay for (immediately*) better products.

It’s what keeps Excel a step ahead of Calc: between a rather clunky UX and frankly awful documentation for some features and functions, Libre just doesn’t quite have the same maturity. It’s good enough for the majority of use cases, okay for some more and I’m really only aware of one feature I miss (Power Query or equivalent) or haven’t found. But it’s not as polished, and for some, that alone is reason enough to stick with paid products.

Conversely, it’s why more people are starting to move off of Windows: between user experience improvements, smoother installation, the spreading realisation that most stuff happens in browsers anyways and Proton making a lot of gaming a lot more accessible, Windows is losing that edge in features. If the list of anti-features and drawbacks grows large enough, the familiarity alone just doesn’t hold people any more.

You can compete with free competition, but that requires an eye on the market. And performance-impeding spyware just isn’t must-have for everyone.

*as opposed to supporting open source devs to the point where they could focus on their software, hopefully leading to better products some time later, which is less gratifying and less reliable than paying for a project you get right now

I wish my real name was Lucifer :(

But also, I wanted to look up the history of BBS and had to spell out “bulletin board” to get the right results from DDG, so maybe what you learned thirty+ years ago just isn’t common sense among people that weren’t even on the internet when that market collapsed.

(I myself didn’t see the heyday either; I learned those lessons in games and on forum boards in the aughts and tens.)

Board the ship, then pull up the ladder

I had a promising career option at my workplace. Guess what field it would have put me in… Sigh.

You mean whether a people trapped in poverty, deprived of perspectives, desperate and frustrated by the injustice that continues to be done to them, develops a culture of violence?

Yeah. Probably. That’s what centuries of slavery, segregation and wealth-gating social mobility will do to people: they get stuck in a cycle of poor conditions harming childhood development, leading to ill-adjusted adults struggling to get or hold good jobs, some of which will resort to other ways of making money.

www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/…/violence

www.opencrime.us/analysis/crime-and-poverty

Pretending it’s a racial issue or a culture of violence is only half the truth. The other half is that it’s an economic issue arising from a history of treating them as second-class citizens at best, at worst basing your entire government on the conviction “that slavery subordination to the superior race is [the black man’s] natural and normal condition” and going to war over it.

Nah, these facts are not the issue. Omitting that the statistics themselves are the result of discrimination is kinda negligent though.

The solution wouldn’t be to try to balance out a bias in a fundamentally flawed dataset, but to establish a human system of decisionmaking that’s resilient to prejudice and bias instead of relying on machines that can only imitate their makers’ mistakes.