@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.

@urshanabi libreoffice is light years behind MS wrt polishing. Agree on Thunar, IIRC they had this network-based plugin / interaction system that was very open & easy to interface with, far beyond what e.g. Win offered. I'm not sure if it led anywhere, but cool idea.

@urshanabi ugh, might've nautilus. One of the two.

@srs i cant really tell the difference between libreoffice and ms office, but i guess im not a power user

@urshanabi A friend & avid linux / FOSS advocator told me that impress (presentation tool) is essentially at the level of Office 2000 and unusable once you know recent PowerPoint.

I think it's all about the details: for example, do objects snap to each other the way the user expects them to? Do the graphs come with pretty defaults? Etc.

Performance also wasn't stellar, though this might've changed, and ms is also a bit weird in this department. (Formulas in ppt, I'm falling into a rant hole)

@srs oh yeah i havent used ppt for the better part of a decade

@urshanabi lucky you!

(It's not that ppt is good; it's still annoying as hell. It's good for what it is.)

What do you use for presentations?

@srs i havent had to give one in a while

@urshanabi Well that's nice too. :)

@WomanCorn makes sense to me, as long as the design isn't too big a part of your product at least. I suppose they only had the graphic design done?

I feel that this does not work anymore once we consider more holistic "UX design". One can't outsource one's core value proposition because the fair price for that would be the value of the whole company. This should apply to open source projects as well.

This might be unfair, but I feel that some apps are "basically nothing but UX".

@srs If memory serves me right, they had some kind of UX work done, but the community takeaway from that seems to have been <provide less functionality,> so it doesn't seem to have helped a lot.

Also, that was right around the time that distros stopped shipping GNOME and started shipping customized GNOME forks.