Why Users Drop Open Source Apps For Proprietary Alternatives 891
maximus1 writes "Hard as it may be to imagine, 'free' is not always the primary selling point to open source software. This article makes some interesting points about subtle ways Open Source projects might lose to the competition. Lack of features is a common answer you'd expect, but the author points out that complicated setup and configuration can be a real turn-off. Moreover, open source companies may not do enough to market major upgrades. If they did, they might lure back folks who tried and dumped the earlier, less polished version. This raises the question: what made you dump an open source app you were using? What could that project have done differently?"
Ease of Use (Score:5, Insightful)
For me it really wasn't about the lack of features. It was more on how easy it was to use as program. You have Feature X,Y, and Z on there, but if I have to navigate Menus A, B, C, and D to find that feature then I will not use that program.
Difficulty In Using (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Why surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it hard to imagine? People will pay money for something if it saves them time, or is simply more pleasant to use. It's software after all - free isn't the best drawcard if the software is crap to begin with, and goodness-knows there's a ton of crap open source software out there.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:3, Insightful)
We have a lot of brilliant coders working in F/OSS. We need to attract some equally-brilliant technical writers to donate time to explain how the stuff works in the real world.
Those brilliant coders might have to explain to the brilliant technical writers how some stuff works. Seeing as the "separate (and usually incomplete) (not to mention incomprehensible at times) documentation" is also somewhat out of date since they've been busy hacking away on the code instead of updating the documentation. I don't mean explaining basic stuff but esoteric things like exactly what effects various switches and options have, if any of them conflict with each other, and so on.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:4, Insightful)
Lack of Ctl-D to "Fill Down" in OO Calc (Score:4, Insightful)
Lack of user-testing (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems the developers have no concern whatsoever to test their new user-interfaces with users who will actually use their software. This causes miscommunication between the developer and the user-base, in turn leading to an alienation of both groups. It is paramount to learn to speak the language of the user, or the boat we want to sail will never land on a coast.
Besides this, I find the lack of clear and uniform documentation a big mishap in modern linux systems.
So, my complaint list:
1. Lack of user-testing
2. Incomplete, incomprehensible, multi-format documentation.
3. Lack of quality control (eg. automated testing)
4. Unannounced drop of support on certain projects.
5. A plethora of linux distributions makes it difficult to choose.
6. Too many configuration formats.
7. The UNIX framework is not mature anymore and because of its design flaws, responds horribly to new demands.
8. Too many different programming languages make it difficult for new talent to drop in or to integrate different approaches.
9. KISS principle is broken too many times.
10. Featuritis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
GUIs only: regressions, stability, low standards (Score:2, Insightful)
If it's open source and *doesn't* have a GUI, it's probably fantastic. My email, programming, backups, version control etc. is all open source and I wouldn't have it any other way.
But as soon as you add a GUI and plug in a monitor, the quality drops away and things start to get iffy. What happened with KDE4, for example, was unacceptable. You can't just dump everything and expect users to accomodate that.
And stability. A lot of open source apps are fantastic but they have rough edges - little bugs and issues. The way media managers like Rhythmbox and Amarok handle an iPod, for example: sometimes I get weird errors about mounting the iPod, or it doesn't behave properly when there's no free space left, and other little issues. They may not be show stoppers, but they're enough to give you a bad impression. The quality just isn't quite there.
And you know what the worst part is? This isn't getting any better. Open source GUIs are about the same quality now as they were a decade ago. Sure they're more capable, but all the rough edges are still there and don't seem to be going away. I've been using desktop Linux since Redhat 5.2 and I can honestly say the standards and general incompleteness, relative to the competition, are about the same today as they were back then.
I still use Linux on my desktop but I'm tempted to buy a Mac next time and use it as a front-end, while keeping all the 'real' stuff on a Linux box. But I don't want to manage two computers if I can help it. Ho hum.
Works both ways (Score:3, Insightful)
I've dumped proprietary applications for the same reasons people dump open source alternatives.
And there's also the price of a lot of proprietary applications, it's often not worth the improvements I gain.
Several reasons ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of the reasons leveled at open source can also be leveled at commercial software. I've seen more than my fair share of commercial applications that lack features, have critical bugs, and are definitely hard to use. While some of these problems may be surmounted by purchasing additional software or employing the services of a consultant, that is rarely an option for non-revenue generating organizations (never mind most individual users).
So why do people drop it? Lack of familiarity is one big reason. If you're a Linux user who does specialized stuff with your system, try figuring out how to do that stuff in Windows. Can't find it in the UI or configuration files? No problem. Just read the documentation. Wow. What language does Microsoft write their documentation in? While it may not be quite as bad as another language, the jargon of the Windows world is definitely different from the jargon of the Linux world. This adds time and frustration to the process of learning a new technology. So if you're familiar with Linux, you'll probably stick to Linux. If you're familiar with Windows, you'll probably stick to Windows. Feel free to substitute Linux with your favorite open source application and Windows with your favorite commercial application. By in large, this barrier will still exist.
If that issues exists for technical people, imagine how hard it is for non-technical people to deal with similar problems. A function that is found in a different place or that works in a slightly different manner will cause a neophyte OpenOffice.org user to throw up their arms in frustration, call the product shit, and head directly back to Word. Many people are completely unwilling to adapt to change in a domain that does not interest them. (I've talked to some of these people, and intellectually they realize that OpenOffice.org is just different and that it would serve all of their needs. But emotionally they view it as a vastly inferior product.)
Sometimes bundling is a reason for adopting commercial products. I'm not talking about the bundling of software that you see with commercial vendors (e.g. the various Adobe suites). Rather I'm talking about the resources that are bundled with that software. When you download the Gimp or Inkscape, you get just the Gimp or just Inkscape. When you buy something like the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, you get fonts and clipart that you can use in your projects. When you buy the Microsoft Office Suite you get clipart and templates. Looking at my Linux setup, I have only one or two graphic fonts and no clipart to speak of. Even though I have the standard DTP and graphics software installed under it. Now I don't mind that. Actually I prefer it that way. Yet I can guarantee you that the run of the mill user will throw up their arms in frustration because they expect that stuff.
And the list could go on.
Re:Security (Score:1, Insightful)
Which might be also compromised, except you can't know. So you are really saying that you don't actually care about the security, you just don't want to know...
This is the least convincing argument for dropping an open source tool ever: there is a bug. You can fix it. You don't want to. *So* you go for closed source, which might or might not have the *same* problem, which you *cannot* solve.
Sir, I admire your amazing logic.
Re:Stability (Score:1, Insightful)
The biggest problem I see if the lack of easy to use documentation, and then when a person asks for help they get the "Read the Fucken Manual " reply. Setup and configuration is the one area where Open Source software tends to lag. Everyone is so worried about getting iut to work they forget to let the users know how to get the most out of it. I believe documentation and easy to use instructions are as important as the software itself.
Re:Stability (Score:1, Insightful)
Well I just upgraded from 2.x to Firefox 3.0, and if 3.5 really is unstable then I don't want it. FF3 never crashes, even when I'm running flash. If FF3 can go days without crashing, then FF3.5 should be able to do the same.
.
>>>"complicated setup and configuration can be a real turn-off."
This is why I stopped using Linux on my laptop. I couldn't get the darn thing to connect to Netscape ISP, and after frakking with it for several hours, I finally gave up and reinstalled Windows XP. I had it connected in just 5 minutes. There are advantages to proprietary software that "just works".
Besides is Linus really "free"? My time has value too (about $50/hour) and the hours I spent trying to connect to my ISP could have been spent earning overtime at work, buying Windoze for ~$120, and still having some cash leftover in my pocket. Sometimes it's worth handing-over the credit card to get plug-and-play software, rather than put-up with free software's constant need to "configure" everything.
Re:Lack of user-testing (Score:5, Insightful)
So, my complaint list:
1. Lack of user-testing
2. Incomplete, incomprehensible, multi-format documentation.
3. Lack of quality control (eg. automated testing)
4. Unannounced drop of support on certain projects.
5. A plethora of linux distributions makes it difficult to choose.
6. Too many configuration formats.
7. The UNIX framework is not mature anymore and because of its design flaws, responds horribly to new demands.
8. Too many different programming languages make it difficult for new talent to drop in or to integrate different approaches.
9. KISS principle is broken too many times.
10. Featuritis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep)
Ironically (Other than #5 and #7 needing rewording) that is the exact list of complaints I have against most of the commercial software packages I have to work with!
If you replace the word 'linux distro' with 'windows release' in #5, and replace 'unix' with the list of 20 frameworks used in windows for #7, then it is an exact match.
Re:Security (Score:3, Insightful)
There is one single very simple reason: (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, every software is free to normal users!
Either you download and crack it yourself, or you have a friend who does it for yo.
That is the main point free software hasn't taken off, and everybody knows it.
I mean, when instead of Gimp, you can get this: http://btjunkie.org/search?q=adobe%20master [btjunkie.org]
Then who cares about Gimp?
And instead of OpenOffice, you get this: http://btjunkie.org/search?q=microsoft+office [btjunkie.org]
I mean, it's obvious.
Oh, and under Linux, the culture is quite different. :)
1. Because not everything runs fine under Wine.
2. The abilities to combine Linux tools into scripts and a mesh, glued together with bash.
Which I absolutely love. I could never go back. I'm officially spoiled.
Documentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though the documentation for proprietary software can be crap, it is usually light years ahead of what you get for most Freeware/Open Source/Hippieware/Whatever programs.
I hate it when I install something and I get a window with three greyed out menus. Somehow I am supposed to magically know to go edit ~/.korgodi/pyconfig/menus/anabling.cfg to turn them on. And when I look for documentation about this or even a damn README, I get a link to a forum where everyone is too busy arguing the philosophy of tabs vs. spaces for indentation to tell me anything.
I hate writing up the documentation as much as anyone, but your project is not ready to be released until you can give the user a document telling them how to use the stupid thing.
I'll give you a real-time example. I am going to attempt to find the format for conditional execution in gmake. I don't do development on this machine normally, so some fumbling will be necessary.
Step 1: 'man gmake':
What do you mean there's no gmake? I installed the dev package.
Step 2: search for where gmake is.
Let's check synaptic to see where they put it. No gmake in there.
Oh, they called it just plain 'make' in Ubuntu. Of course.
Step 3: 'man make':
Blah blah blah . . . purpose of make . . . startup options . . . damn there are a lot of them . . . THAT'S ALL?!!! . . . Wait, there was a SEE ALSO back there.
See Also The Gnu Make Manual. Oh, of course, I have one of those with me at all times. WHERE IS IT!
Step 4: Google
Type in 'The Gnu Make Manual'. There it is. Ah yes, a webpage with a format circa 1994. ^F conditional . . . See Conditionals. At least it's a link. Reading . . . I had wondered what the definition of the word 'conditional' was. Show me the stupid syntax.
Blah blah blah, examples that no one will ever use . . . oh wait, for once the examples are relatively useful. Okay, that should get me started.
So, that wasn't too bad as was as documentation searches go. But I still had to resort to Google. WRITE THE DAMN MANUAL AND INCLUDE IT. If I type 'progname -h' give me something useful. Put something in the Help menu. No, I don't care what programs you compiled it with.
Re:Fonts (Score:3, Insightful)
That's probably the OS's fault though though. Apple spend money on getting decent fonts for OSX, because decent fonts do cost money - real Helvetica, Gill Sans et al cost money. Money which OSS/X/Linux developers simply can't afford. Microsoft have the same thing with their new fonts for Vista/7/Office 2007, they spent money on Calibri etc and got great results.
A Short List (Score:3, Insightful)
Being free, in cost or in development model, is of little interest to me when I chooise software. I want the best software I can afford, and I can afford more than no cost.
Here's a short list:
1. Lack of attention to interface and usability design. This is not "eye candy". Consider: People think Photoshop is easier to use than Gimp. What does that tell you? (Responses that trash Photoshop users illustrate the problem.)
2. I get the impression that, apart from the corporate funded biggies, many open source projects are staffed by one or two people. That's not confidence-insipiring when I'm looking for software to use for years in the future.
3. Rushed updates often made to conform to an established schedule. If an update needs more time, don't release it.
4. Lack of innovation. Software innovation is really, really hard and no one does it well. However, open source software, more or less by intent, produces many slightly varied iterations of the same code. I.e., forks.
5. Hostile attitude to customers: One of the touted benefits of open source software is access online to developers and other cognoscenti for tech support. Although I suspect it happens with less frequency these days, too many open source users are met with hostile "code it yourself" or "I'm not interested in that..." responses when they ask for help with a problem. Online support forums should not run bugtracking software.That's a developer-only tool.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:5, Insightful)
When a network application doesn't work .. the first thing I would do is to use tcpdump (or ethereal/wireshark) to see whether the packets arrive properly. If they do, 'lsof' or 'netstat' to check whether something listens on the port the packet is destined for.. and finally 'strace' to see if the receiving application actually receives anything.
And there you go, the problem in a nutshell. Expecting end users to do stuff like this is bullshit.
Re:Stability (Score:2, Insightful)
Something tells me a guy who has to spend hours dicking around in Linux to get his Internet connection working, fails, and just goes back to Windows doesn't care that the operating system is "libre" ... he's not going to be patching the kernel anytime soon.
Re:Mortgage on my house (Score:3, Insightful)
You do know that this type of behaviour can get you fired? It's typically called "corruption".
Continuity: the package manager trap (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with open source is the dependency chain becomes brutal. So you turn to a package manager like Yum or Fink to handle all the self consistency and installs, not to mention the updates.
Then sometime later you want to update python from 2.4 to 2.5. you do the update and it updates all these dependencies as well. And suddenly you find that Gimp or gnuplot or something else you need is busted because say they all depend on some Latex for symbolic fonts and there's an incompatibility.
These package manager while saving you a lot of time on the initial install also couple all your apps together in unneccessary ways, so that updating one can break another. Or worse maybe it won't let you update at all.
One would prefer in many cases decoupling of applications or even standalone applications. When you update an app the worst that happens then is that just that app breaks. Plus it's trivial to roll back to the old self contained app.
UI polish, documentations (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, the documentation is typically better on commercial software than FOSS (there are some expections, mostly badly documented commercial software rather than well documented FOSS). Again, writers, proofreaders and editors want to get paid for their work.
I the long run there are probably only a score or so of free software applilications that are substainable. With the exception of these star applications (apache, linux, etc.) the real reason for using FOSS is that it's free. For example, if both MS Office and OO were both free, which would people choose? If they were both $99 (the home/student price of Office) which would they choose. Mostly free software is exploiting programs to give their work away for free--designers, editors and proofreaders don't fall for it.
OSS a red herring? (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is, in any product, people jump ship to 'something else'. They may jump from OSS to commercial, from commercial to commercial, from commercial to OSS, or OSS to OSS. The OSS aspect of it is a feature for some, but its the total featureset that gets compared. Sometimes, something is just better than something else. An anecdote about some hobbyists 30 minute hack behaving more poorly than a commercial product with man-years of polish behind it is about as useful as comparing some untalented developers get-rich-quick startup software hammered out in a rush for venture capital against a venerable project like Apache.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why F/OSS is generally struggling despite delivering what some would consider equal or superior products. It seems people enjoy the hobby of building things, but once it is all built... its done. Seems a lot like building the frame for a car and putting the engine in starting it up and rolling it off the line. No manual, no body, no paint. Technically it works but it is still missing something.
I think it is more than just technical writers not donating time, I think it is people not donating time to areas that are tedious and boring or provide little 'reward'. It makes sense and I don't blame people but at the same time it does point to a major flaw of the F/OSS movement. Proprietary software has goals and people are going to get paid to meet them regardless of how shitty or seemingly meaningless the job is.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, you should listen to yourself.
If I told somebody who was having trouble with their computer to do that horseshit I would fully expect them to punch me in the face.
Re:Expectations (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is expecting your wireless nic to work "magic"? Why is not expecting an update for Windows or OS X to break a functioning nic "magic"?
That's all he was expecting - that it works. For him it "just work" on Windows. With Ubuntu he had to do a little bit of work, which he was okay with. Then it broke because of an update. So he fixed it again - he was okay with that. Then it broke because of another update.
Why is that him expecting "magic" from the OS? What kind of odd world do you live in, where you expect to get your socks ruined just because you change the laces in your shoes?
Re:Stability (Score:5, Insightful)
What!? Cinelerra is the least stable program I've ever used, it dies every couple of minutes.
It crashes so much that the tutorial starts off [robfisher.net]: "Cinelerra is not perfect. Before long you will be familiar with the tendency it has to crash. This usually takes the form of all the windows suddenly disappearing. Thankfully this is not often a big problem because Cinelerra can recover from a crash very well. Simply restart it and select Load Backup from the File menu."
It crashes so much that the OpenSuse [opensuse.org] page on it has a section devoted to crashing, and running it within gdb as a matter of routine so it won't crash every time you close the "tip of the day" window.
It crashes on Ubuntu [ubuntuforums.org]. It crashes on gentoo [gentoo.org].
Its support for codecs (that actually work) is so sparse that simply finding a single path from source material to product is like crossing a minefield.
Cinelerra is the perfect example of a program that never really converged to a useful state, it just slogs on like a zombie year after year, half dead, because there is no workable free alternative. Can I blame any of this on the fact that it's free and open? Not exactly, but if it were proprietary, it would have disappeared completely years and years ago.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd guess that what you say about ODF and the two word processing apps is true, but the up-tick is that these problems can be fixed. Not so much with MSO.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Lack of a way to use binary drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
You what to know what would remove almost *all* of the driver problems literally overnight? Make it trivial to visit "nvidia.com", download a blob, type "./setup.pl" and have it install a binary driver. You know, kind of like how Windows or (I assume) OSX does it.
I *dont* blame the vendors for the lack of drivers on linux. I fully blame the kernel developers for their dogmatic refusal to stabalize the driver framework so it allows binary drivers. By "stabalize" I mean create a driver architecture that works across an entire swath of kernel versions. Most vendor supplied drivers seem have this need to be compiled first and thus require the kernel source before they work. That is bullshit. They should just sit around as a blob and work.
But alas, *that* dream will never happen because of some on the fringes of the open source movement close their ears and scream "not pure! not our fault! not pure!". Which is a shame because that single feature would instantly increase linux driver support hundreds of times over.
It *is not* the fault of hardware vendors. It *is* the fault of the kernel--more lightly, it *is the philosophy and culture of linux* that is what holds it back.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Insightful)
Which are completely useless to the vast majority of people.
Not directly, but there are some tangible indirect benefits to the software being free. Consider the Noscript/Adblock debacle. The Noscript author decided to make Noscript interfere with ad blocking for the author's ads. The community really did not like this and the Noscript author apologized and removed this feature. Now imagine what would have happened if he didn't. Someone would have forked Noscript and started up his own addon without this feature. Some people would have switched over to this other addon and the Noscript author would see his ad revenue rapidly declining and would finally give in (or die). This is only possible because Noscript is free software. If Noscript was proprietary, people would have been stuck with the author's shady practices until some guy comes up with a (bad) free software replacement.
The four freedoms don't just give you the right to edit the source, they give everyone the right to do so, benefitting you either directly (more options) or indirectly (deterrence from including evil features).
Re:UI polish, documentations (Score:5, Insightful)
MS spent as much effort on the UI as they did on the actual product. This is very different than FOSS.
I can't think of anything more revealing - and more damning - than this.
The UI is essential part of your product - to treat it as an afterthought defines you as an amateur.
Re:Expectations (Score:3, Insightful)
This is what you expected: Not-supported hardware, for which there is an experimental driver at best, to magically work.
No, wrong. You didn't read his post carefully (or perhaps beyond the first sentence). He took the time to deal with his non-supported hardware, and then did an update. A normal thing to do. Updating software should --- SHOULD --- first, like people in the medical profession, do no harm. If a user has a particular configuration file tweaked, THE CONFIGURATION SHOULD NOT BE RESET TO DEFAULT. That's just stupid at best, and abusive at worst. He didn't expect magic, he expected reasonable behavior. I experienced the same thing on one of my laptops. I stopped updating after having to fix the configurations for my hardware the third time.
Look at it this way, if you perform a system update, do you expect your personal files to get wiped out and be given a clean home directory just because the filesystem driver got updated? Who would tolerate that?
Re:Mortgage on my house (Score:2, Insightful)
The Failure of General Categorization (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stability (Score:3, Insightful)
Now imagine what would have happened if he didn't. Someone would have forked Noscript and started up his own addon without this feature. Some people would have switched over to this other addon and the Noscript author would see his ad revenue rapidly declining and would finally give in (or die). This is only possible because Noscript is free software.
On the proprietary side, some enterprising fellow or company would note that NoScript's users were less than happy, and that there was a market for a new player. This fellow or company would write their own script/ad blocker and steal some of NoScript's userbase, forcing him to change NoScript to keep his users. Writing it from scratch (and with the SDKs and IDEs "scratch" means most of the work is still already done for you) they may even make it better, or add features, and you'd have a better product.
It's a little harder than a fork, but it's not like we're locked in to the whims of proprietary software developers.
Re:Stability (Score:5, Insightful)
Precisely.
I've used all kinds of OSes over the years, including Commodore BASIC/DOS and GEOS and AmigaOS (1,2,3) and MacOS (6,7,8,9,and 10) and Windoze (3,4,95,98,XP,wista) and Linux Ubuntu. When I was young and had tons of time to spare, I enjoyed hacking into my Commodore or Amiga to see what I could make them do, but now that I'm middle-aged I don't have many years left. I want my OS to "just work" like my car just works, so I can use my remaining time for other fun projects.
I gave Linux a fair shake, found it as frustrating as driving a Volkswagen Old Beetle that keeps breaking-down, and decided to go back to XP and MacOS. They cost money, but not that much, and that cost is offset by all the other free/libre programs like Firefox, Utorrent, Opera (not liberated but it is free), and so on.
BTW:
One other annoyance with Linux Ubuntu is when I switched my screen size to 640x480 to play some Atari and NES gaming. I found it impossible to switch it back to 1280x1024. Why? Because the dialogue box did not fit, and the "okay" button was off the screen! I ended-up stuck. That was pretty much the final straw that made me reach for my XP restore disc. What Linux needs is a user-friendliness consultant who is tasked to find all the problems that make the OS difficult for average people to navigate. Linux should be as easy to use as the Mac, or at least XP, and right now it's not even a quarter of the way there.
Re:Stability (Score:2, Insightful)
Something tells me a guy who has to spend hours dicking around in Linux to get his Internet connection working, fails, and just goes back to Windows doesn't care that the operating system is "libre" ... he's not going to be patching the kernel anytime soon.
There also are people that spend hours poking at Windows trying to get it to work. Yet in most cases, just like Linux, it just works.
It's unfortunate that both fail in some instances but it cannot really be helped.
Re:Open Source Browsers RIP? (Score:2, Insightful)
Chrome is controlled by Google though. They are significantly more evil than Mozilla and possibly more evil than Microsoft. Therefore it is possible that Chrome will not suffer from bitrot.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Insightful)
GCC (Score:3, Insightful)
Open Source nearly sank my career.
I've been a staunch advocate of OS for quite some time now. I'm the guy who asks the awkward questions at the meeting, like, "Why are we paying 40 grand for a vendor toolchain when GCC is free?"
Well, I found out.
I've spent the last few weeks trying to build a cross compiler on Cygwin. Here's what I went through:
Re:Stability (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an example where a community effort concentrates on solving the *technical* problem and forgets that there's a real, on the ground problem that needs to be solved as well, that may or may not be totally technical in nature.
Yeah, for a long time I've thought that part of the problem is (and sorry about this, I know it will rub some people the wrong way) that FOSS is being developed almost solely by developers. I'm sure that sounds silly, but there are a lot of problems that I think stem from this.
First, there's the expectation that if something breaks or something isn't working for you, you can just "fix it". Now this might mean anything from editing a configuration file to rewriting the code, which is far above a lot of people's heads. Plus, as you mention, sometimes it seems like developers focus on some technical aspect of the problem while ignoring the end-user aspect. It's great that ODF is an open format, but it doesn't really work as a universal file format if every program has a different implementation.
But I think there's also a subtler problem, one which, sorry, I'm probably going to do a bad job explaining but I hope you'll bear with me. The problem is that if you're a great brilliant technical developer, you're not going to even think about how to make your program simple. It's sort of a "not seeing the forrest for the trees" problem. You're going to be so smart about understanding all the complicated things your program does, and so well-versed at everything that can be done with your program, that you're not going to be able to understand what a new user will be thinking when he first approaches your program. You're just too close to the problem.
Now that probably still isn't clear, but have you ever tried to write out a complicated explanation, reread the explanation 50 times and had it make perfect sense to you? And what happens when you hand it off to someone else to proofread? They find a bunch of obvious typos and they come up with a bunch of questions (at least that's what happens to me). And then you suddenly realize that your mind was jumping over all the missing steps in your argument and all your typos because you had read it so many times and you knew what it was supposed to say. You weren't really even reading the explanation you wrote anymore, you were just replaying in your mind what you intended to write.
I think lots of technical things can be like this, and I feel like FOSS developers kind of get into this state where they're only seeing the program they meant to put out, and they're seeing how they're using their own software, but they have trouble coming at it fresh.
I mean, I'm not new to computers or system administration, but sometimes I open up a configuration file or read a new program's man page and think, "now what the hell is going on here?" Even in the same distribution, syntax and conventions flip around now and then. Accomplishing one simple and common thing might require changing multiple settings in multiple places, maybe even in different configuration files. The assumption is, I think, that you're not going to want to run a Linux server unless you're a genius who spends his whole day doing sysadmin work. And sysadmin stuff is one of the more well-travelled and refined areas of FOSS. What chance does something like GIMP have, where the developers might be such a different demographic than the potential users?
Honestly, I use various kinds of FOSS all the time, because it's often still easier for me than dealing with proprietary stuff, but I still see the problem. At work, on my Windows box, I'll often use Word instead of OpenOffice. Why? Just because OpenOffice takes a long-ass time to load up. Sure, there are also some formatting problems and I think OpenOffice is a bit uglier than word, but mostly it comes down to how long it takes to load the program and open a document.
So this is mostly just my opinion, but I think the solution (assuming you want to solve it) is for developers to find ways to solicit feedback from common users, and then address those issues the users find most frustrating. No, I don't think developers should just "do whatever users say," because users often don't even really know what they want. But yes, if you commonly get the complaint for everyday users that your program is ugly, then you might want to pretty it up somehow. Just because it's "only cosmetic" doesn't mean that it won't turn users off from using your program.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is, with Linux the majority of users spend hours trying to get things to work, everybody has one or two things on their system that didn't quite work right and needed some config file edited or had to be initialized in such and such a way instead of the normal way, etc.
In Windows (and Mac), these problems are rare. In number they are greater, because you have almost 100 times as many users, but the majority of Windows/Mac users never have a problem with their system. Now, because of the number of Windows machines especially, there is more than enough work from the people who do have problems to create a healthy industry out of fixing them, whereas Linux users tend to fix the problems themselves.
So yeah, most things "just work" in Linux, but in my experience every Linux setup has one or more issues that need ironing out. If you're honest and you do anything more than web browsing, you'll agree. The very large community support base for Linux, especially the relative size compared to Windows (I'd say they are close to equal, even though the Windows user base is 90 times larger), is evidence of that. The difference is for Windows/Mac most users find that -everything- "just works", and the community support is for the relative few technically minded people who help those who have issues.
Re:Stability (Score:5, Insightful)
"Lots of users" does not equal "a large percentage".
The number of people who use Windows but loath it could be twice the number of total number Linux users combined, and it would still be less than 5% of number of people who use Windows. There are not that many people who hate Windows, the vast majority of windows users love it, especially XP and even Vista now that they've got most of the bugs ironed out.
There will never be an open source replacement for Windows, if anything replaces it it will be a closed-source OS like OSX, because programming the bits that make Windows easy to use and acceptable to a large user base are the very bits that nobody likes to write. They are, in fact, a pain in the ass to write and there is no real sense of accomplishment. That is why GUIs in Linux are horrible. Not just bad, but horrible. The rare GUI that is easy to use is a pleasant surprise.
With Windows, as well as with most proprietary software, some schmuck got paid to make sure all the bits that nobody likes to program work the way they are supposed to, and what you get is a GUI that is so easy to use nobody even thinks about it. This is one thing that open source developement is terrible at. Not bad, but terrible, and it is an area closed-source developement excels at. Usually the poor schmuck doing the GUI work is an intern or new guy making his way up the ranks, being told what to do by the high-paid GUI designer. Neither of those two exist in an open source project. If they do, it's very rare.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:3, Insightful)
And there you go, the problem in a nutshell. Expecting end users to do stuff like this is bullshit.
You expect end users to solve networking problems? on ANY OS??? Good luck with that.
The WONTFIX tag applies well to GIMP. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't use Adobe products, period. But I can see why some people would get incensed at the GIMP and abandon it. A big part of it is the pace of development on the GIMP project, and another big part of it is the team.
The GIMP developers have, for the past dozen years at least, dismissed all suggestions that they are the de facto competitor to Adobe Photoshop. They are scratching their own itch, not scratching the itch that tens of thousands of graphic artists have, and if you want something in the GIMP, you better write it yourself. (No hint they'll accept your patch, either.) It's taken several years just to find competent developers who can get along with the GIMP project management and still work on CMYK or 16bpc or other important features. Those features are creeping along way beyond schedule, and just getting them onto the schedule took far too long.
I just got a bug-system notification the other day that said they're finally going to support write-protecting layers. Oh, wait, it just says they're laying the groundwork for a padlock icon on the layers menu, they'll get around to doing the actual write-denying behaviors "soon." I submitted that so many years ago that I've lost track.
Not counting nuances, the GIMP is still essentially feature-matched to Adobe Photoshop 5.5, a product that came out in the mid 90s. No wonder they don't want to accept the mantle of competitor.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Insightful)
Lastly, with programs written for users, consistancy is key. That means Microsoft and Apple both have strong incentives to provide a very consistant framework around which app developers write their programs.
There is no such thing in the Linux world, and Linux developers would be outraged if someone tried it.
Just like Apple and Microsoft, Gnome has Human Interface Guidelines (HIGs), and I'm pretty sure that KDE has them too. Unlike you, I think that Gnome and Apple applications follow their own HIGs pretty well, while Microsoft does not. For third-party applications, Gnome and GTK applications may be less consistent than applications developed within the Gnome project, while third-party Mac applications are surprisingly good at consistency. Third-party applications in Windows are even less consistent than Microsoft's own applications, and even those are hardly consistent with Microsoft's own HIGs.
Re:Stability (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, where are my mod points when I need them.. your post is spot on. It reminds me of trying to find an open source replacement for Visio, so I could throw together some really simple circuit diagrams.
I found a good half dozen programs that had the basic functionality I needed, except that they all sucked, really, really, really hard. A lot of them had amazing feature sets and could do some incredible stuff, but when it came to the basic nitty gritty of .. clicking on an object ... rotating it ... scaling it... moving it from here to there... they all failed *miserably*. Half of them didn't let you scale objects, half didn't let you rotate them at all, the others only did 90 degree increments, etc. The most basic, raw surface of the interface of all these programs were simply unusable.
It doesn't matter if all the open-source apps were loaded to the brim with extremely powerful features, which indeed many of them were, if it's like pulling teeth to drop some objects on the screen and move them and point them where I want them to.
I eventually found a circuit drawing program a friend of mine was writing for fun, that actually did what I wanted pretty much, but then I realized I could get Visio for free from school through the academic alliance, so I switched to that, and the joy of having a gigantic company's worth of resources to make sure every little tiny piece of the interface works great became apparent. (except autoconnect. that feature sucks.) It makes it so much easier to just Do Work, and not Work at doing work.
Re:Stability (Score:4, Insightful)
To put your point as a car analogy; the FOSS world often feels like a car with an amazingly refined engine and one wheel; adding the other three would be boring and technically uninteresting busy work, so nobody does it. You end up with an engine that never breaks down and does 1E6mpg and not going anywhere.
Re:UI polish, documentations (Score:3, Insightful)
The question is how you're making it for. I've made things for myself that have UIs that are incredibly cryptic but work for doing what I want to do. If I just throw it out there because it's better than sitting on my hard drive, well... You really only start caring about the UI when you code for others.
Re:Stability (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, there you really do go (Score:2, Insightful)
>And there you go, the problem in a nutshell. Expecting end users to do stuff like this is bullshit.
Uh, did you read the posting? That wasn't a user issue, that was a SYSADMIN issue. The guy was talking about diagnosing a network service issue which is something a sys admin would worry about, not an end user, who has more important things to worry about like using a browser, or an e-mail tool.
Jeezus, don't hate Linux because it works, hate it because the other OS isn't as expert friendly, dude!
Re:Stability (Score:2, Insightful)
> and what you get is a GUI that is so easy to use nobody even thinks about it
Yes, sure, this is why my company has to offer (grunt) courses on how to use things like Outlook, Word, etc. Especially after every major version update (i.e., GUI "improvement").
Personally, I've never found a GUI which is automatically "easy" to use. On every platform, the designer(s) almost always assume something about my usage model which is simply wrong.
Re:Stability (Score:4, Insightful)
What exactly are you talking about?
If you want to talk about appearance, Desktop environments/window managers like GNOME and KDE are comparable to what you can find on Windows or Mac, unless you're talking about really old stuff like twm. Compiz Fusion gives Linux compositing that is just as good as (if not better than) Aero. Furthermore, Windows still doesn't have multiple virtual desktops like Linux has had for decades. I've come to rely on that feature for day-to-day use, and using Windows is downright painful for me these days. Sure, there is software that can add that functionality to some extent in Windows (and Mac OSX, I presume) but that isn't the same as having it available out of the box and having a compositing engine that can integrate well with it.
I've used OS X quite a bit and I still don't see what everyone in in awe about. It does what its supposed to, but there isn't really anything that special or unique about its interface these days.
Re:UI polish, documentations (Score:5, Insightful)
You really only start caring about the UI when you code for others.
That is the KEY difference between FOSS and proprietary software, and it explains all the issues people have with FOSS right there. FOSS programmers are usually writing the program for themselves, and don't think about what other people might want or need with their program. Proprietary software programmers are -always- thinking about what other people might want or need, because they are NOT coding it for themselves. Half the time they could care less and wouldn't use the product they are writing anyway, but they end up making the better programs.
FOSS is great for developing the underlying technologies behind programs, but when it comes to actually putting something out there for the masses to use, they suck. A proprietary UI with a FOSS core can do extremely well, just look at OSX.
Re:Stability (Score:2, Insightful)
You're using the old definition of Stable. Stable v1.1beta is so much better. Please upgrade; we're no longer accepting bug reports against Stable 1.0, which was a developer-only release. You should have known this from the .0 -- we told you ages ago that 1.0 means broken, I mean, developer.
"It's your fault, user" for thinking Stable 1.0 might mean it actually works, and not that it's a "broken, developer-only release", but that Stable 1.1 *beta* is actually the stable version. Well, obviously...
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:3, Insightful)
After struggling with this for hours...finally getting it to work...and then enjoying the slow-as-molasses solution that VNC is, I started to think that paying $100 or $200 for Windows and just clicking a few checkboxes to enable Remote Desktop was looking pretty damn good. (And Remote Desktop performance is way better, too.)
If only it were as simple as paying some $$$ and getting it to work. Unfortunately, it isn't. For me and many other FOSS users, not using Windows is not a question of money or even principle, it's simply that Windows is even worse at getting our work done than Linux.
Maybe Remote Desktop would have solved your problem, or maybe it would have failed miserably for some other reason. There are plenty of problems with Windows installations that simply do not have a solution at all. Or you can waste hours and days on buying one commercial app after another, and in the end figure out that none of them actually solve the problem you were trying to solve.
The sad truth is that Windows is just as bad, frustrating, and hard to use as Linux; the main differences are that Windows also empties your pockets in the process of trying to get your work done, and that on Linux, someone who knows what they are doing has a better chance of getting things working than on Windows.
Now I look forward to someone telling me what a complete dummy I am for having such difficulty setting up remote access on Linux.
I have had not problems with vino at all, on many different Ubuntu machines. Nor have I ever even noticed IPv6 on my Ubuntu machines--it doesn't seem to be causing any problems. You might want to see whether you have done something odd with your setup or configuration.
For the best VNC performance, use xtightvncviewer.
Note that X11, VNC, and RDP make different tradeoffs; RDP is better for remote access but not as good for LAN usage. The RDP equivalent for Linux is NX; expect it to be packaged better in future Ubuntu distributions.
Re:Stability (Score:4, Insightful)
Just look at Office 2007. Word looks and behaves nothing like Outlook or OneNote. In Windows, the big players tend to have fairly good interfaces, but as soon as you move away from the over-$100 realm of Windows software, you're in amateur land and the interfaces quickly devolve into a case study in worst practices. I find that I much prefer using ported Gnome software in Windows than many native solutions. Yes, Photoshop is a fantastic program, but I'd take GIMP over ArcSoft abominations any day of the week. At least I don't have to pay for GIMP.
This article should really be titled "Why Users Drop Cheaper Programs for More Expensive Ones". At least the open source solutions generally resist the urge to insert ads into their software and use a bunch of proprietary widgets.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Insightful)
Try creating a file in AbiWord. Save it. Open it in OO. Edit and save it. Open again in AbiWord. Broken formatting.
What you just illustrated is that with open source you have a choice -- you could use Abiword, or Open Office, or Koffice, or a bunch of others, to do the same job. They might not all interact perfectly but the choice is there.
If this is such an issue for your workplace, pick one of those and standardise on it. But instead your solution is to.. standardise on MS Office? Where the only reason it doesn't break formatting is because it only ever needs to deal with itself? Why not just standardise on Open Office and get the same result?
And, as an aside, I doubt you can tell me with a straight face that you haven't seen MS Office break its own files. Office's problems with different versions of itself are legendary, but I have seen documents break using the exact same install of Office on the same computer.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stability (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, for a long time I've thought that part of the problem is (and sorry about this, I know it will rub some people the wrong way) that FOSS is being developed almost solely by developers. I'm sure that sounds silly
That's exactly the reason for the differences between FOSS and proprietary software - there's a non-trivial set of "other stuff" that's required to take a piece of software from a sort-of-useful but maybe buggy implementation to a polished application that provides a solid end-to-end user experience.
Things like market research into what your potential users actually want, high-level UI design, usability studies, deliberate architecting, and a significant test infrastructure are practically *required* in commercial software design, but I don't know if they get the same emphasis in FOSS.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:3, Insightful)
And there you go, the problem in a nutshell. Expecting end users to do stuff like this is bullshit.
Of course. But try doing the same in Windows to see whether it's a firewall, your router, client using wrong address, server not listening or whatever that is causing the problem. It's not easy there either.
The problem here is that the end user is running into it in the first place, not that network debugging is arcane magic. I honestly don't think most users either on Linux or Windows would be able to debug it.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:3, Insightful)
And there you go, the problem in a nutshell. Expecting end users to do stuff like this is bullshit.
Nobody "expects" users to do this, it's just that when there is a problem, you have the option of fixing it.
Windows and OS X also have plenty of problems, but you have far fewer options for fixing them even if you know what you're doing.
Too much free software sucks... (Score:3, Insightful)
... because making software is time consuming and hardwork and doesn't pay the bills.
The reason commercial software is preferred to free software is that commercial software is still better then free.
That and linux can't run windows apps perfectly, I would move to linux if it
1) had the same shell as say windows xp
2) was faster in performance then windows (i.e. games had higher framerates under linux and there was no bullshit compatability, things "just worked".
The best free software has a lot of great ideas but the problem is that software takes too much work and time from these guys lives without any compensation, they can't compete because
1) They usually over-estimate their coding skills
2) They code for themselves NOT for users
When making any program you're coding for that "motherfucker" the public, therefore you can't make a program for coders, you have to make a program for users, ease of use.
In the early days of video editing software, almost all video editing software was complicated for what joe user needed it for, finally for profit companies came to the rescue, companies like ULEAD for instance.
Take a lot of the pain of video editing out of video editing for the average user who just wants to mash up videos, cut paste, etc.
http://www.ulead.com/ [ulead.com]
Open source guys obviously don't use or are unaware of how to do things better, when any company or person hits on the "magic user interface formla" you have to copy it and make it even better for the user if there is room for improvement.
The thing is good software design is hard and time consuming for the output you get over time spent, it literally takes years to figure out how to build good software, since developing good software is extremely labour intensive.
Re:Expectations (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should anyone expect different from linux? Just because it very often "Just works" on linux doesn't mean it always has to.
Have you ever installed vanilla XP on a machine and had to hunt down drivers for 10 different devices that are difficult to identify? Windows Update Driver search helps, but not if both the wireless and wired network cards aren't working.
I care about technology, not ideology (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a vocal minority of computer professionals and users who operate off of an ideological model rather than a pragmatic one. They see moral issues where most of us only see an engineering problem. Furthermore they define themselves based upon their attachment to their ideology.
For the rest of us this is silly at best and downright exasperating at worst. Try working with someone who demands that a sub-par solution be used on political grounds and who casts your reluctance to do so as a moral failing, if not evidence of participation in an evil conspiracy of some sort. I really do think that people like that are mentally ill.
I make technological choices on technological grounds. I choose the solution that works best. I don't cloud my judgement with emotionally driven ideologies.
I use (and contribute to) open source products because they usually offer the best value proposition. When they don't, I look elsewhere. It is not wrong to support a proprietary solution. It is not wrong to reward those whose efforts have made your life easier.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:3, Insightful)
I do agree that the original guy was nuts for jumping right to the network analysis as soon as a problem occured, but his approach was not a terrible one either. He had the tools, he knew how to use them. Your Mom might not be able to do this but that wasn't what the guy was talking about.
So despite what you claim, those tools only "exist" in Windows after you go fetch and install them. What if the problem is network related such that I can't go download and install this crap? I should have anticipated that and had those tools on my handy USB key? I guess that's what you think:
"I have a flash drive full of network diagnostic tools and utilities that enable me to troubleshoot or establish network connections simply and painlessly."
But I shouldn't have to carry tools around with me at all times. God forbid they're already included with Windows, because it isn't packing much else into those eight gigs of space it's using.
And that's just for networking. When an application is misbehaving in Windows, what are you going to do? When the OS itself screws up what are you going to do? Microsoft MCSE training is among the first to tell you "reinstall" in most situations, because reinstalling is about all you can do to "solve" most problems with Windows and most applications. Oh, or perhaps "use a restore point", which is about as likely to work as I am to stop drinking.
In Linux if something is screwing up, I can usually launch it from the terminal, wait for the crash or bug or whatever, and it'll spit out something I can use as a starting point to determine the problem. How do you do that in Windows?
Does Windows have strace that can be attached to running processes? I see a few that have been put together by random third parties, but the first one doesn't do Vista or Windows 7, and the second says "development stopped a long time ago", and that comment was made in 2007. Besides, frankly, I'm tired of having to go find these third-party bolt-ons to get useful tools in Windows, when the majortiy of them come with most modern Linux distros.
Ever look at Windows system log files? To the extent they log anything meaningful at all, they're nearly unusable and difficult to search. Applications rarely keep logs at all in Windows and there's no way to make most of them do it, either.
Indeed, there is a reason that "uninstall and reinstall" is the most common "fix" for Windows-related problems.
Re:Stability (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, there are, they just don't realize it's Windows they hate. They think they hate computers in general, because they've never seen a computer with any other OS and don't understand that a computer can be any other way. But they do hate their experience with computers, oh, boy, do they. They have PLENTY of complaints, if you pay attention. If you actually *listen* to the users, you'll find that the ire runs very deep. Frustration, pain, sorrow, anguish, despair, fear, loathing, and remorse *dominate* the feelings most users have toward computers.
Re:stop astroturfing (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, with the screen down to 640x480 and with a modal dialog up it may be just a little bit hard to back out and search the internet for the mythical command key shortcut you need.
Well, so what? If you don't know about the shortcut, you're no worse off than you're on Windows or Macintosh in the same situation.
Furthermore, on Linux, these kinds of dialogs tend not be modal; modal dialogs locking up the UI are a common misfeature of Windows and Macintosh applications.
Windows, Macintosh, and Linux all have these kinds of problems. The difference is that Linux has a lot more ways in which you can get out of them if you know what you're doing. And if you don't know what you're doing, you're no worse off than on the other platforms.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Insightful)
One other annoyance with Linux Ubuntu is when I switched my screen size to 640x480 to play some Atari and NES gaming. I found it impossible to switch it back to 1280x1024. Why? Because the dialogue box did not fit, and the "okay" button was off the screen! I ended-up stuck. That was pretty much the final straw that made me reach for my XP restore disc.
Funny; I frequently use Windows (XP, Vista) "for work", and I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro with a 1920x1200 screen. I've seen similar behavior on many occasions with both of these, where a window is partly off screen and I can't figure out how to get the thing I need to get at to appear on the screen. This seems to be a design problem with all GUIs, regardless of OS. If a programmer wants to put a window partly off screen, all of the common GUIs allow it.
But of course, when an app does this in linux; it's proof that linux "isn't ready for the desktop". When it happens on Windows, it's accepted as the way computers are, and you just have to live with it. When it happens in OS X, it's evidence that the user just doesn't appreciate the beauty of the design, which Just Works; you must have screwed it up yourself and are too dumb to figure out what you did wrong.
I think the real difference is the size of the ad budgets. Microsoft and Apple have bigger ad budgets than all the linux vendors combined, so of course their systems are "better" to most people. This probably won't change soon.
Most of my stuff that I consider important, I keep on one of my linux boxes. That way, I know that when (not if) some app screws things up, I can easily get into the data and unscrew it. Most of the time, I can get into the source code and fix the problem. Sometimes I've even got thanks from the app's owners for my fixes. With Microsoft and Apple systems, the critical code is usually not available to a nobody like me, so I just have to learn to live with the problems, or hack together some kludgery to get around it despite not really understanding what's going on inside the black-box software that's biting me.
But to each his own. I'm just glad that so far, the industrial heavyweights haven't found a way to squash things like linux and the rest of the open-source stuff. So far, people like me can get ourselves out of trouble when we're using such software, and maybe even get the software fixed within our lifetimes.