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??
@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. :)
@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.