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.
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.
Ultimately FOSS is “I made this for me. You can use it if you want.” Anything that helps others understand how to use it is (a much appreciated) bonus.
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…
Obligatory winRAR mention. Technically proprietary paid software, trial never expires.
Win RAR is shit from my experience.
Steam
Steam doesn’t fit OP’s criteria. They definitely prioritise profit over the user’s preference.
When you open the app you’re immediately shown pop-up ads ffs. And the app opens to the store.
You can disable the pop-ups in settings and default to opening your library by default but it’s difficult to locate the relevant settings.
Steam transformed the PC gaming experience for the better but I find people’s reverence of it is misplaced.
Not really a user-friendliness issue, but pet peeve about one thing that I can’t patch because it’s not open source. Steam doesn’t let me cap the number of concurrent TCP connections when downloading updates. Like, TCP degrades reasonably gracefully under contention; each connection gets something like an equal amount of bandwidth. But with Steam downloads – which are bulk, noninteractive, and which I definitely don’t want to take priority for available bandwidth – the package uses a ton of connections. If you have 30 connections, it gets ~97% of the available bandwidth when contending with a more-conventional protocol that uses a single connection. The Steam downloader logic, as I understand from past reading, keeps adding more until it doesn’t see any significant degree of increase in speed, which is exactly what I don’t want to have it doing. And Valve doesn’t provide any way to turn this off.
Steam does provide some other mechanisms to try to limit its bandwidth usage, but none are very satisfactory.
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You can hard-limit the rate of downloads. But I don’t want that – if there’s no contention for bandwidth, I want Steam to use it. I just want it to back off when there is contention.
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You can limit the time of downloads. But I don’t always know when there’s going to be demand for bandwidth.
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You can limit downloads to not run when playing games. That addresses the very specific case of downloads interfering with Steam games that have latency-sensitive demands, like multiplayer FPSes. But that’s far from the only situation where there’s something contending for bandwidth.
I mostly use open-source software, so it’s really frustrating when I run into behavior in proprietary software that I can’t reasonably fix. Plus, usually if it bothers me, it’s bothered someone else in the past, and they’ve gone and fixed it, so I don’t even need to do so.
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As someone else pointed out, the premise of this question is extremely faulty. Being user-friendly is one of the main advantages of proprietary software because they have teams of researchers and designers making sure that things are as frictionless as possible for the user. This isn’t to say they don’t use dark-patterns or engage in anti-consumer practices, but I’m certain that if you did a random sampling of F-Droid and the Play Store, you would find a lot more polished and user-friendly software on the Play Store than the FOSS apps on F-Droid
Disagree strong. Every turn and chance, revenue is given preference over ease of use. Cookies, tracking, free trials where you need to either log in or add your credit card are trends that are very annoying for users. And from there we can get into specifics of what the app does.
It also doesn’t explain why every software made in Microsoft, either from scratch or bought after being successful, is the absolute lesson in UI anti patterns.
So OP edited his post to be about being ‘user-centric’ and not ‘user friendly.’ There’s a huge difference between being easy to use, even for the technologically illiterate, and being good for users so I wouldn’t disagree with a lot of what’s been said in this thread
Obsidian, its pretty pro user but the devs are scared of forks for some reason.
What about forks? Isn’t it closed source?
Also Android support is like 4 years behind the new standards
Yeah its closed source because the devs don’t want people to fork the project for some reason. I thought the app had pretty good user experience when I used it but I am more of a vimwiki type of guy.
What a biased question haha
OP, please download some FOSS software and tell me how friendly it is to use. As an arch (btw) user who primarily uses FOSS, they’re definitely not generally better than proprietary.
well, I am not that tech savvy and have a lot less trouble using FOSS as compared to the proprietary counterparts. if some application is too difficult for me to set up, I just give up & forget about it. But if I HAVE to use a proprietary software (like for school) I will lose my shit and get so angry i can’t be talked to for 2 hours, because in my experience proprietary stuff ALWAYS has so much shit in it and is so tedious to set up, and also complaining about my old hardware.
I also use arch, btw, so yes I’m probably biased in a similar way as you.
Most FOSS software I downloaded is very friendly to me, thanks. Or do you have a particular unfriendly FOSS software in mind?
Btw, out of interest, if the software you use is so unfriendly to you, why do you use it? Money reasons?
Anki on iPhone. Pay one fee and it funds the other users but it’s forever.
Photosync small one time fee but you get an awesome app forever.
Pleco app. Has some add ons but well worth the money and no other fees.
Anki and Pleco… May I assume you are studying Chinese ATM?
Haha, yes. Used them for ten plus years to study it. Now doing more Japanese but sucking at it. Regardless Pleco is the best language app outside of Anki. No Japanese app can do handwriting like Pleco. If I encounter some old or unclean character in Japanese I still use Pleco
I studied some Chinese in the past, Pleco is pretty good, even the base app offers a lot of features. I’m now learning Japanese too, LOL, started in 2016 and left it in 2019 or so, but recently I’ve fallen in love with the language again.
That’s cool! :) I also started Japanese in 2016 and also fell off in 2019 until 2020! Chinese maybe since 2014. What’s made you fall in love with it? How’s your studying been?
Funny story, a guy I used to work with was like “hey, let’s study Japanese” and I was like “OK”, LOL. After that I spent the following 3 years studying Japanese and he quit after a week or so, which didn’t surprised me since he has that kind of personality, good kid tho. The hardest part was finding a way of studying effectively, it was the first time I tried learning a language by myself so I spent most of the time horsing around with methods that don’t work. Nowadays I mostly do Anki plus lots of input.
What to you use for input?
Mostly the news, and JDramas when I feel like chilling but still want to do some listening.
I find Sync For Lemmy to have a great UI. I’ve been using it for years, and have it configured to perfection. I use other clients that are good, I can tell they’re good, but they don’t fit the same way.
I guess if you’re looking at it through the lens of a user who actually knows what the fuck they are doing, and not the average, common denominator that the proprietary shit is designed for. 🤷🏻♂️
Proprietary shit is always easier to work with, if you’re just wanting the most basic thing that software does. It’s unfriendly when you try to do more than that with it. FOSS is the other way around in my experience. If you don’t know shit, it won’t help you. But if you’re familiar with what you’re trying to do, FOSS software actually lets you get into it and do all the nitty-gritty without fussing.
Every piece of free and open source software I use is because I wanted to do something more than what a commercial piece of software would allow me to do.
While I generally agree, I can think of some examples from the professionally-oriented software field where the commercial stuff fares well, like CAD. I am very out-of-date on Photoshop, but I’d guess that it’d probably also qualify – GIMP isn’t bad, but I can think of only a single example off-the-cuff where it led Photoshop on functionality.
To be fair, Photoshop is (or was the last time I ever used it) expandable with user plugins. If you want something it doesn’t have, you can add it. Which is also one of the main draws, at least for me, to FOSS; open source means I can add/remove/change things for my own personal usage and needs. That really only applies because I know enough about programming to do it, though.
Proprietary shit is always easier to work with, if you’re just wanting the most basic thing that software does.
Do you have examples?
My image viewer shows images, my pdf viewer shows pdfs, my file browser shows files, my music player plays music files, and so on. All of them can do a little more, but the basic functionality is just there usually.
Vivaldi
AdGuard on, baking soda and vinegar on iPhone. 15$ for essentially YouTube premium but it’s a one time purchase
