From my experience, most FOSS software is very user friendly user-centric / user-focused, while proprietary stuff is shit. What is the most notable exception to this rule that comes to your mind?
Edit: With user friendliness, I don’t mean UI design, but things like how the software is handling user privacy, whether it sees its users as users or as money-making cattle, how it handles user feedback, compatibility with other software the user uses (vs. vendor lock-in), configurability, and similar issues.
Edit2: I was made aware that user friendliness is a defined term: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Userfriendliness
My experience is the opposite - FOSS is often obtuse, with an assumption that you see things the same was as the dev, which is usually a single person or at most a very small group. Add to that, documentation is nominal, or non-existent, and quite often lacking even a high-level description of what an app does, let alone where to find features in an app. FOSS devs often don’t even follow menu layout that’s been pretty well established at this point. For example, I’ve found the Settings menu under File, Help, Tools, View, etc, in different apps.
Proprietary apps are usually developed by a team, one that’s studied the market segment (or another group has), and usually understands how that segment operates. They then develop the app based on design goals established by a team other than the developers, with UAT (user acceptance testing) performed at given stages (this is even more frequent today with Agile project management). It’s not uncommon for a UI to be mocked up and given to end users to validate UI design/layout choices long before anything is even developed.
These devs usually follow a company standard process, with code reviews by other people. Their changes must be approved by management, and those changes are often requested and reviewed by other teams before being submitted to the dev team.
Most FOSS simply doesn’t have the time or staffing to do what most proprietary software dev does.
And I use both proprietary and FOSS all day long.
I am an IT guy, so my needs, preferences and priorities are not the norm.
IMHO software is mostly a shit-show, doesn’t matter if property or FOSS. My most loved target of critique is macOS/Apple, because the user experience is so bad for me. (Forced by my work to use it, so I have several years of experience/suffering with it.)
I think it is more about finding software which works by accident (or your training/prior knowledge), as you expect it should work. The biggest problem with proprietary software is that they usually need to up sell, dump down features (hello, macOS window management, finder and everything else) or want to force you into their walled garden.
One easy example where FOSS kicks ass compared to proprietary is managing/installing and updating software: Linux and the BSDs have all sane centrally managed systems for native packages and Flatpaks/Snaps, compare that to the shit-show on Windows and macOS devices. Don’t let me start on provisioning and other topics, where FOSS is by now decades ahead of the stuff one sees in macOS/windows.
One proprietary system which works awesome is Steam and SteamDeck. No questions there and I’ll happily throw my money at Valve.
I had the pleasure of working with great UX designers, but you are sorry out of luck if you are not the persona they target and their decisions are guided by making money and making their manager happy, so a good user experience is at most their 3rd concern, if you are lucky.
Concerning documentation I fully agree with you, with very few exceptions (Arch WIKI, FreeBSD handbook, RHELs documentation), the FOSS world is a sad place.
In the end, there is the potential for great UX in both proprietary and FOSS systems, but when you want to focus on user centric, FOSS wins IMHO for IT guys because they are the only systems which are literally build by their users.
I think I somewhat disagree on technical terms. I don’t think those two are opposites. That Free Software has been tailored to the demands of the user. It’s just that the user is the developer itself… While software that gets sold, is made to appease the customers. So I think it’s not an opposite, but ultimately the same. The software is made to solve some problem for someone. It’s just that the developer sits in front of their computer with a different target audience in mind.
Other than that, I agree. But another think to note, there are vast differences between projects. Some are really clunky. Some are shiny and polished MacOS clones. We have them all. And sometimes it’s just users complaining when the UI in fact has a concept… It’s just not the currently predominant design by the market leader, and people think it should be a clone of that and offer a similar experience…
I was gonna say I can’t believe anyone would say that FOSS software is user friendly vs proprietary stuff. Maybe if you’re only ever used to obtuse FOSS software anything that’s less confusing?
Maybe OP is a FOSS maintainer
Possible. For me, the things I see from windows (disclaimer: I haven’t used any dos since years, but I’ve occasionally seen video material (including, for example, menus with ads, and horribly confusing settings)) are obtuse, and FOSS stuff is normal. But I may be biased in the a different direction than you.
Guess we have very different experiences.
I work with a commercial software development group and they suck
Not one of the developers had a shred of experience aligned with their target market segment. There is a design team, but they also don’t know the segment, but the division between design, architecture and development leads to a clunky mess.
Professionals in the target market are frequently higher paid than the developers, so management refuses to fund hiring actual experts in the field, and instead just nominates seemingly arbitrary people in the organization to stand in for the “customer” in all those processes that should actually include customers.
So when they are disappointed with losing to a number of open source solutions in the field, they just accuse customers of being cheap rather than facing the reality they have ivory towered themselves into a corner.
Maybe for some markets it is different, but now those markets face the reality that the vendor is trying to game then for subscription revenue and add ons and is making deliberately customer hostile change for the sake of gaming the revenue in the short term.
Now there are certainly markets with no FOSS option, as just no one is interested in developing. I suppose in markets with OSS software there’s may sometimes be a divide between what the developer inclined half of the market would want for themselves versus those not minded toward development, and that could be a weakness.
Ultimately I’ll always remember one review for an open source project. They stated that at first they were underwhelmed because it felt like software they’d write for themselves, and not as flashy as commercial alternatives. Then they realized they would write that software because the commercial software was not for for purpose despite how nice it was, and the project was just they easy they wanted it.
There seems to be some confusion. With user friendliness I wasn’t referring to the UI. See Edit in updated post.
The confusion is because user friendly has a clear definition but you’re using it to mean something else.
You could consider editing to say user-centric, user-first, user-focused. Or re-wording to specifically state prioritising the user over profit
It seems you’re right. I wasn’t aware that it has a definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Userfriendliness As a result, I was so naive to just use it as being friendly to users. I’m kinda surprised that this seems to be a well established term (as can be seen by so many here interpreting it with this definition).
Will re-word post.