Sad but true (very few exceptions). How might we change this?
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RT @geoffreylitt
@RobertHaisfield I don’t think I’ve ever seen a well designed UI product that was meaningfully open source. UI Design doesn’t seem amenable to loose distributed consensus the same way other kinds of programming are
https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1355293177029275648
Counterexamples:
- vim and end (very much not community efforts)
- firefox (but you can't really mess up a browser UI)
- atom
- I heard Eclipse is quite usable
- gimp and inkscape are awesome, but UI is behind Adobe.
- uhm... anything else??
@srs libreoffice, gui-based file managers (thunar, nautilus, etc)
though i guess they also stole from proprietary stuff
@urshanabi @srs was about to write this. The best examples of good-UI FLOSS stuff seems to involve taking cues from industry-developed interfaces, and they do best when they’re contained tools as opposed to multi-purpose platforms. Doesn’t seem impossible, though - Signal’s spaced-repetition PIN system seems innovative in the context of secure messaging, though I might have just missed the precedent.
