

The One in Which I Say Open Source Software Sucks - JacobK
http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/06/30/one-which-i-say-open-source-software-sucks/

======
davidw
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
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
"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.

~~~
gaius
Yes this _is_ the Year of the Linux Desktop.

 _smirk_

------
ori_b
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.

~~~
tedunangst
"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.

~~~
psadauskas
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...](http://www.gentoo-
wiki.info/HOWTO_Integrate_Firefox_with_KDE#Appearance_Method_2:_alternate_gtk_dialog)
)

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.

------
rjurney
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.

~~~
ori_b
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.

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

~~~
bct
For the same reasons that very few non-open projects have the kind of
usability you're talking about.

~~~
rjurney
Great commercial software has good usability because they pay good usability
people. These people aren't as likely to donate their time to a FOSS project
as are hackers who can code raw functionality.

------
stonemetal
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_denied
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.

~~~
SwellJoe
_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.

~~~
ahlatimer
There are most definitely stability problems with Photoshop. You would think
something that cost that much would at least be <i>stable</i>, but I suppose
"serious professionals" look at feature sets and not stability.

My experience with GIMP is none, so I'm not exactly qualified to comment, but
Photoshop has to be one of the biggest usability nightmares on the market
today. There are strange restrictions and ambiguous error messages that don't
make any sense for the novice. Once you get more comfortable with Photoshop,
you realize the power and flexibility of it, but it takes a while to get
there.

As someone that spent a good long while being frustrated by photoshop, I can't
imagine GIMP actually being harder to use.

~~~
blasdel
As frustrating and annoying as Photoshop is, GIMP is _massively worse_
usabilty-wise across the board, and then all the features are missing too.
It's a lose-lose.

I haven't found a single task where GIMP is less obnoxious. Most of the time I
give up -- sometimes I'll try to use ImageMajick or PIL, other times I'll get
a Mac or Windows box with Photoshop or Paint.NET

~~~
SwellJoe
_As frustrating and annoying as Photoshop is, GIMP is massively worse
usabilty-wise across the board_

I can't agree with you on this one. I think you're guilty of believing
intuitive means "what I'm used to". We all are to one degree or another, which
is why I made a point of mentioning my many years of using GIMP vs. being a
beginner with Photoshop. Nonetheless, the learning curve in Photoshop is very
steep; I believe steeper and longer than GIMP. Yes, it's definitely a more
powerful tool, which is why I bought CS4 recently despite being comfortable
with GIMP/Inkscape and able to product _most_ things I've ever needed to
produce with just a few minutes of effort (except ai and psd files). But,
nonetheless, even just doing basic image editing tasks, Photoshop is pretty
hard to use.

I think the only real conclusion we can come to is that complex software is
hard to use for beginners.

~~~
blasdel
I didn't even mention the spectre of 'intuitive', much less subscribe to its
primal fallacy.

I used GIMP and several generations of Microsoft products (my family had a
MSDN subscription) before I figured out Photoshop at all, and the difference
is night and dusk (PS is no usability king either, just not dogshit). There's
tons of opportunities for improvement over PS, but GIMP takes none of them and
instead does a bunch of stupid MDI shit.

Interestingly, I find the opposite holds true for Illustrator/Inkscape -- I am
baffled by Illustrator, and have never met someone (even digital art faculty)
who could really wrap their head around it, much less show me the way. It's
CAD-tool bad! Inkscape is awesome, and not just compared to AI (though for the
first several years it was ridiculously unstable).

------
tptacek
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
If he's making the same point as usability and UI experts, why does it matter
_who he is_?

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

------
naz
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
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?

------
orblivion
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.

~~~
CWuestefeld
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.

~~~
krschultz
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.

~~~
teilo
And you are over-simplifying it. In Windows, install = double-click setup.exe.
In Ubuntu? ... Wait, what was that again? I didn't get it.

For those who have been using unices for many years, it is difficult to
remember the challenges of a switcher. I've been using Linux for 12 years, but
I have constant reminders, because I'm a CTO, and have to support the end
users who are coming into a new OS environment. When you, who have all this
stuff in your head, trivialize the new users legitimate challenges, you are
part of the usability problem, not part of its solution.

------
xinsight
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.

------
frodwith
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.

~~~
veqon
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.

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

<http://adium.im/>

------
yesimahuman
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
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.

------
0xdefec8
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.

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

~~~
Elepsis
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.

~~~
paulgb
Yeah, I'm not suggesting that the Linux installation process is as friendly as
Windows (though, as you said, things are getting better). But how many Windows
users even know what an operating system is? How many of them realize that
Windows isn't built-in to the computer? I think there's a mental obstacle here
that would make installing Windows difficult for many (but not all) Windows
users.

------
nl
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).

------
ThomPete
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.

------
bct
Truly, this is a novel and intriguing opinion.

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

