Folks, let me share some random observations with you, because I can’t wrap my mind around those.
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People have Zoom, Teams, Slack, Discord, Messenger, Telegram, and Viber, all happily installed on their phones at the same time. When you then invite them to Matrix they are like “Is this necessary? Why install yet another one of those?”
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People who use Chrome by default without ad blockers, and you just hint there is a massive intelligence and surveillance operation are quick to respond that “I am getting this services for free, so it is fine to give something back” [1].
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People thinking that OSS is not secure enough for their devices. Surprise surprise, it is the exact same people who fall for obvious scams and their devices are ad-ridden, bloated horrors that have not been updated in a million years, but they think that Libre Office will break their computer and lose their emails.
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People thinking that privacy and anonymity enthusiasts are shady freaks who want to go live in the woods and possibly terrorists. There is a slightly insane take here that we are against technology because we refuse to “just” install an app to make our lives easier[2].
So they do not complain about being exploited and disrespected, while ripped off and offered crap services, as long it is a capitalist corporation shaking them down with vendor lock-in and network effects. They are grateful even. But just the idea of installing a single free/libre OSS app or extension to protect their privacy is a red flag and pushes their buttons big time, even for just suggesting it.
So, what are your own examples of anti-OSS stupidity, and how do you explain its prevalence in society?
So many people I’ve talked to about privacy are 100% believers in “if I have nothing to hide I don’t need to care about my privacy” and they think the only people that use things like tor are drug dealers trying to access the dark web.
Explain to them that Meta employees can and will look at their sexting and nude photos.
If this doesn’t alert them, they are a lost cause.
To be fair, living in the woods doesn’t sound too bad.
There is a grain of truth in this stereotype, innit?
From a business standpoint I’ve noticed these two mindsets prevail:
With paid SaaS, there’s always somebody to blame for missing features or outages. From my POV either way the IT department is getting blamed if a system goes down, and the overconfidence in the vendor to fix all issues timely is not always realistic.
Business leaders have conditioned themselves to being sold something. With open source they still expect a CEO or some figurehead to give a presentation on how the free tool will benefit the company, even though it doesn’t make sense when there’s no incentive to sell.
Great point.
it doesn’t make sense when there’s no incentive to sell
I assume the cost of transition is sth that should be justified. Even learning to use the software is a kind of cost structure in itself. So, they need to understand why it is worth it.
always somebody to blame for missing features or outages
It tracks. But there are possibly responses to that, like open source business models that are based on long term support or an enterprise subscription.
On the flip side, open source expects users to accept bad and outdated UI. The people who need a more simplified UI aren’t the people who can make the changes.
In my experience open source has been getting really intuitive ui, at least for more basic apps like messages, that are just as good or better than proprietary equivalents. It’s not like apps like apps like matrix aren’t being used because they look bad because a lot of the clients look and feel really good.
This reminds me of an older discussion about Matrix vs. Discord. Someone said that Matrix does not even have to look like (or even have comparable features to ) Discord for it is a proprietary for-profit and they have lots of people working on streamlining things and adding features. This includes the “visual appeal” of the GUI of course. Some people might find that important. If you ask me people should learn to use the shell in elementary education, so this discussion about dumbed down users (who expect a big magic button that next to reads their minds) has other angles beyond catering to that specific type of user. Because this user has been conditioned by a huge corporate ecosystem of marketers and front end developers. Interesting point for extending this discussion nonetheless.
I don’t know if it is “conditioning” so much as laziness. The effort of having to learn open source software is a lot higher than programmers believe and a lot of money is spent by closed source companies to optimize ease of use above everything else.
Open source as an economic model doesn’t have an inherent motive to increase use of a product the way that the profit motive exists for closed source products. An open source model is better when pleasing existing users instead of going for new users, especially users that don’t have the technical skill to contribute to a project.
And your response is typical of open source software advocates; it is a skill issue for users to get over.
it is a skill issue for users to get over
I can’t explore the details right now. I believe that usability should be addressed by OSS developers. I believe in educating users as I believe in better funding initiatives to achieve that, as I believe in people also paying to OSS a fraction of what they pay to closed source corpos.
5 years ago, a YouTuber, musician, and UX designer who goes by Tantacrul made a comedic but accurately scathing review of the design flaws of popular open-source music notation software MuseScore. (He had previously done similar to closed-source Sibelius, and would later address Dorico.) By the end of the year, MuseScore had hired Tantacrul to head up their design team and he eventually oversaw the design and development of a completely new major revision of MuseScore with a professional team of developers. He also had a big part in Audacity’s more recent development, since Muse Group also owns that.
That’s one open source project that clearly really highly values a good user experience. They’re lucky though. It’s relatively easy for them to fund this because the open source software is a keystone element to their paid subscription web service with a very vibrant community of contributors. Not all open source has that.
This story is inspiring and unique in its own sake.
More broadly, it is important to showcase stories like these, and change the perception of bad UI/UX in OSS.
I realize, in relation to another comment on this, there is some elitism in OSS developers.
I probably have been oblivious to it because I picked up computers post-conviction as a second-chance career, and I always approached the field as an outsider. I thought that made me immune to elitism because I picked the skills up as an adult, and always thought that if I can learn then everyone can learn, but people now treat me as one of the geeks rather than as one of the normies, and it seems I did not catch up with that.
So, yes, I concede, OSS developers should put more effort into appealing and highly usable UIs, but I still believe this would work better at the OSS-“foundation” level rather than the individual developer who first and foremost develops a solution for his own use case, and broader usability is typically an afterthought.
Yeah well said. UX just isn’t developers’ area of expertise, so they’re naturally not going to develop with it at the forefront of their minds. It needs to come down from the organisation caring about and hiring (or engaging on a voluntary basis) people who are actual UX experts that can work with developers to deliver an excellent user experience.
I want to second your choice of Tantacrul’s video on MuseScore’s UI/UX, it is really a great resource. And more relevant to this discussion, at some point he says about the logo “Job Done. It is Open Source anyway, nobody is expecting too much.” How hilarious and true!
who are actual UX experts
To be fair there are some aspects to it that are impossible to get right without targeted user research, so yes, this is a whole cost structure on its own, and should come down from the organization.
Libre Office will break their computer and lose their emails.
Few buttons in a different place and they no longer instantly know how to use it == broken.
People stagnate and tech savvy people don’t realise how tech savvy they are.
The difference I’ve noticed is that average people memorize how to accomplish their tasks with software and savvy people look for something that will accomplish their task.
100%. If they tried OnlyOffice which has better MS Office compatibility and the buttons in the same’ish place, they’d be fine.
It’s always one of two things:
- This UI sucks (because it’s not what I originally learned)
- This isn’t mature (because if I do something wrong I might get in trouble)
Most people are just not technically minded or have the patience to figure stuff out on their own. All most people understand is “buy thing, it works, I go on internet and play games” … then after a year or two their laptop, phone or device starts to run slow because they never maintained it … “thing slow, thing no good, throw away, buy new thing” … then start again.
I have several intelligent, highly educated, professional friends who have bought expensive phones and laptops, never maintain them, complain about them, dump them and buy new ones within a year or two. Literally buying $1,000 phones every year or second year.
Meanwhile I bought a galaxy S20FE a couple of years ago. I got it on special with my phone company and paid $100 for it over two years. I added it to my collection of just about every phone I’ve ever owned over the past 15 years, that are all still working, along with laptops I’ve upgraded to Linux and tablets I’m experimenting with.
What did you think of the 20FE? That was my last phone. I quite liked it in a lot of ways. My one point of major annoyance was the low volume of the ring tones. I know it can get louder because media being played on the speakers gets significantly louder, but I can’t make the ringtone be audible from my pocket on a busy street?
Love it and I still have and working. After having it for three years, the only problem I’ve had with it is my battery is spent. When I first had it I literally only ever thought of charging it once a week. I don’t game or use my phone for much other than taking pictures, video and as a phone to call people. I used a few small apps but mostly to go on Lemmy and they other site that shall not be named.
I have an S22 now and it performs a bit faster but there is a serious battery problem with this line as it quickly drains in a day with moderate use.
I’m considering replacing the battery on the S20FE just to bring it back to full use again.
The other bonus with the s20fe was the card slot. I think it’s the last FE line to have a micro SD card slot.
I got an Honor magic V3 just a few months ago, looking back I wish I’d looked into honor a bit more, but I’m quite happy with it despite it skimming all my info.
I wouldn’t have upgraded but I gave my old backup phone(S9 Edge) to my best friend last year after his iPhone something or other bricked itself with an update 1 day after end of warranty.
If I hadn’t passed on my old backup I would have just kept on using the 20fe, loved it. Mine was 3.5 years old when I bought the V3, and the battery was definitely starting to go. Still good enough for an “Oh Shit I’ve Smashed My Phone” phone.
Pretty sure the 20fe is the last Samsung flagship with a microSD slot, they’ve completely done away with it except on the budget phone/tablet lines(A and J?)
- People install communication apps because someone they want to communicate asks/tells them to. I don’t want to use Slack, but people who pay my bills use Slack, so I use Slack. I use Matrix too because I believe in it philosophically, but the UX is a little rough and very few conversations I want to have are actually taking place there.
- I don’t really understand this one. Adblockers are relatively easy to install and the modern web sucks without them.
- I haven’t encountered much of this in a long time, but familiar feels safe to people. Something they haven’t heard of might feel sketchy.
- This sounds like someone trying to persuade you to install an app because you using it would be convenient for them.
For a lot of people free equals inferior /bad.
They are OK with free when it is closed source and harvests their data. In fact, some dev said that people would spend 30$ on burgers and beer for an outing, but spending 1$ to support an OSS app is unthinkable. In turn this makes developers to rely[1] on ads and data harvesting which makes things worse for everyone.
I don’t know if I agree, because I will never rely to such monetization methods, but who knows, perhaps there are some people with ethics that have no other way to make ends meet. I believe it is the whole culture that promotes these practices as acceptable, and you can see the opposite in this community or in places like FDroid/Droidify where it is not acceptable to monetize in such ways. People just don’t do it. ↩︎
You’ve explained the mentality - people don’t particularly care to know.
Why would people put in the effort to solve a problem they’re barely aware of, and don’t understand - particularly if putting the effort in to understand and address won’t even solve that problem? If you want to add problems to people’s lives, you need to tone it all the way down.
Don’t get me wrong though - you’re fighting the good fight - and meeting people where they’re at helps, so I guess this is a decent place to start.
yeah i have a friend, they only play the same 3 games, web browse, and talk to a like 2 people on discord. they could easily move over to linux/matrix and never notice the difference, i have offered to help them several times, but they just dont wanna do something different. they know how their computer works already, why change it? i argue that there really isnt much of a change, but its enough to completely dissuade them.
A: “You should switch to Matrix.”
B: “I’m used to this. I don’t want to learn a new thing.”
A: “Well it’s very similar, so there wouldn’t really be much of a change.”
B: “Well if it’s the exact same thing, why should I switch? I might as well just stay on Discord.”
^ THIS shit pisses me off. It’s like MAKE UP YOUR MIND. DO YOU WANT DIFFERENT OR SAME?
The two people they talk to on Discord would have to change over as well. I would love to use matrix for more things.But literally no one I know IRL Or otherwise communicate with regularly would switch with me so what’s the point. And honestly I don’t even really talk to people on here who do you have matrix so I do have an account but I don’t talk to anyone on it.
I couldn’t say why some are so fully propagandized into servile corporate bootlickery. But enough about r/neoliberal[1][2].
That open source makes it any less susceptible to privacy and security concerns.
How so? What do you recommend then?
Xz utils comes to mind. I recommend avoiding bias just because it’s oss
OK if you insist, let’s point out that just because people can look at the code and find vulnerabilities, this does not mean they automatically do. Just because it is open source it does not mean automatically it is secure nor private. I hope everybody reading this understands that. On the other hand, there are analyses on why the XZ thing happened, for example this one looking at bullying in the community and pressure for fixes. Without following the communities regularly and researching there is no point in being a passive consumer of open source products. Having said that, with proprietary software the opportunity to audit the code is not even there to start with, eg you have to take a provider’s like Microsoft’s or Telegram’s word for their encryption. Let’s not forget to address the misconception that viruses can’t be written for Linux. They can. Also persistent actors are willing and able to compromise open source and even air-gapped systems.
