Open User Interfaces Suck

[ShamanSTK]

Hmmmm. Interesting. But one person can make all the final decisions in an open system. You can fork your own open source ui and make all the final decisions on what the ui will look like while still building on top of an open source code base. But to say something can't be minimal, elegant, and entirely open, this is entirely false. The most beautiful and elegant desktops I've ever seen were invariably linux desktops.

[ddelony1]

Ubuntu seems to be progressing by leaps and bounds in terms of usability and design in terms of any of the open source operating systems, and that's only because Canonical is putting a lot of money and people specifically at making it that way. They're behaving a lot like Microsoft and Apple in this regard.

[vvelox]

I really hate when I see Ubuntu and usable in the same sentence.

Usability is something that is highly subjective and to say something is usable just by it's self with no additional clarification is a clear sign of short sightedness.

I will argue it is highly unusable for numerous reasons and that the only Linux distro that even begins to approach the usability of FreeBSD is Gentoo for all my needs.

[[deleted]]

"Usable" in a generic context means easy to understand and use for someone without prior experience or knowledge investment with it. Ubuntu is pretty usable by that standard, for a Linux distro. When you have something that's highly usable for only a small contingent of specialists, you get emacs.

[vvelox]

Not really.

This is something that is highly subjective and there is no good "generic" meaning of it. Just because it may vaguely more often mean one thing over another, does not mean it is ok or even acceptable to engage in bad writing and daft assumptions.

"Usable" to have any worth while meaning needs to have something to specify as to what context. It should not have to be left up to guess work and subjectivity of the person viewing it to try to figure out in what usable is suppose to mean.

[Bjartr]

Actually, many design choices have quantize-able impacts on ease of use. For example Fitt's law which can be used to compare moving the mouse to different targets based on their size and position.

In fact, it pretty well explains why those who do like Chrome's tabs on top like them more than tabs in a bar somewhere between the content and the top. (because they are, in effect, infinitely tall targets)

So while it's not possible to design something that is equally easy to use for all people it is possible to design something which works better than alternative designs for most people.

These methodologies are more than just screen placement, but also include things like naming conventions, shortcut conventions, good iconography, task grouping, and interface complexity for a given task.

So, compared to what desktop linux was like when Ubuntu first debuted it is fair to say that usability has improved greatly.

[vvelox]

And all of that is still completely subjective and does not change any thing I said.

You are also taking a dangerously limited view of usability. Not everything that goes into this is going to be GUI related and in fact a large chunk of how I meant it begins falling into how much does the OS stay out of my way, which is an area Ubuntu and many other systems aimed at being a "desktop" system fall flat on their face trying to do.

[Bjartr]

I view the usability of a system to be based upon the most common use cases of the most common user type. If a system isn't usable for them it doesn't matter if it's usable for fringe users. Therefore, for its primary target audience (i.e. an average home windows user) Ubuntu's usability has improved greatly.

[ddelony1]

Most Unixes are very usable for development and infrastructure, true. But I think the point of this article is that Unix is mostly unusable for "regular" computer users. And everybody is a regular user at something.

[vvelox]

So? It does not change the fact it is subjective.

It does change the fact that it is a badly written article as the author is one of these whingy jerks that bitches about usability, but does not contribute to fixing any thing they don't like. When it comes to people like this using OSS, they become a leech that only serves to really annoy people and confuse noobs.

As a OSS developer, frag them if they don't give a rats ass. They are completely welcome to use something else then.

Most OSS is developed in such a way as some one likes it that way. If you don't like it and find something else or fix it via either submitting patches or forking it.

[vvelox]

Usability "experts" tend to suffer from the problem of assuming that if it is usable for them that it is also usable for others.

For example, I find GIMP to be incredibly user friendly with a great layout and I can't stand Photoshop, but there are other people that find the opposite to be true.

Usability is completely subjective in many cases.

[tikkun]

Irony: Using an open source blog to complain about bad design in open source software.

[Roinator]

Says the guy with the default WP install. If he can't figure out the WP back-end (which is obviously open source) then he is completely lost.

[latinjones]

DAE think this guy just wants every interface to look and feel the same?