this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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Do you have any specific notable examples? In my experience, FOSS tends to take a more no-nonsense approach to things.
How does a product that defaults to its own proprietary for-profit offerings providing a better user experience?
The argument I hear most of is that people are just used to what they've used in the past, and having difficulty moving to an alternative because of that isn't indicative of the alternative offering worse UX, but rather an unwillingness to learn anything by the user.
If you try to get a professional Photoshop or After Effects or Resolve or Solidworks or Quickbooks etc etc. user to use a FOSS equivalent you will be laughed out of the building.
It's not that they won't learn, it's that the alternatives literally can't do so much of what people need it to do. And at the same time they most often look worse, are harder to use, and are sometimes less stable.
A prime example myself, I have tried to use kdenlive for YEARS to do simple subtitling. Every few years I try the latest version. Without fail it ALWAYS crashes within 20 minutes.
Same for Audacity. 5 minutes into clipping some audio... crash. 3 times in a row. And it looks dog ugly enough to turn me off to even wanting to try it in the first place.
Or GIMP, it can't do non-destructive editing, this makes it completely unusable for many professionals.
It's not just one or two things here or there in these apps, it's huge sweeping problems across the entire FOSS landscape, almost none of the options are comparable for professional users.
So I'll counter an anecdote with an anecdote, my dad is a draftsman by trade and was an engineering technologist for decades, he's looked at Freecad back and forth and is now seriously looking at it over solidworks for his personal projects now that he's retired, I also flipped from solidworks which I used professionally for about 5 years before changing roles. Does it have quirks, yeah it does, but so do other cad packages, and lets not pretend that solidworks is a beacon of stability, there's a reason it was drilled into us in uni to save frequently and why it has autosaving. The UI is relatively simple, there's plugins to customise it and it has substantially improved over the last decade when I first gave it a try, way better than my memories of using solid edge (and I personally disliked fusion, just didn't click with me, at least freecad has a near identical workflow to SW). Am I more accepting of jankiness with Foss solutions, straightup yes, it's provided for free without restrictions on its usage vs solidworks where if you have a maker license for example, only other maker licenses can open the sldprt file.
Another example, I'd wager it's why you see a lot more r and python usage in statistical spaces where SPSS and SAS were used because those tools are extremely expensive for licenses (I recall a colleague talking about it costing 10s of thousanda at leaat, maybe more, company was always looking into ways they can get off of it) cost alone makes the Foss solutions more accessible.
I'll be also fair that both of my anecdotal examples we're using for personal projects but the point is that professional users aren't a monolith.
This is one reason I'm still paying my monthly Microsoft dues. I'm an advanced [I guess] Excel user and none of the other spreadsheet programs out there can do everything Excel can do. At least not easily.
Pssssst, Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS(
I fundamental thing that makes FOSS better is not the product that exists, but that, when you see a problem, you have the option to think, "let's see how to fix it".
Now I have used MS Excel for most of my life, up until University end, and only recently started using LibreOffice Calc instead.
And despite me telling all my colleagues how much better the new versions of LibreOffice fresh are, I know very well that there are still some glaring problems in these programs even in general use.
However, I had experienced some problems in MS Office too and back then all I could do was feel powerless for a few seconds and then either find some workarounds or ignore the problem, depending upon what it was.
In case of LibreOffice, I can make a note of the problem and plan to report a bug and maybe even help fix it, which leaves me on a +ive note at the end of the day.
Digression: Problems with LibreOffice:
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A lot of people are also just dumb. FOSS won't fix dumb.
I had to run an alias every time I wanted to change the brightness on my laptop, and it defaulted to max brightness every time it was restarted.
I get that if I was a better person I could just pull myself by my bootstraps and teach myself to sync the brightness buttons on the keyboard to work again but I'm not. On windows it just worked.