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?"
Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
Support (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest reason is the fact that there weren't expensive support contracts available for purchase. Employee turnover always exists and generally only one or maybe two people knew how to operate any particular system in the places where I have worked. Expensive support contracts allowed for someone else to do deal w/the turnover problem and kept it out of the hands of the on-site departments.
Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Documentation and .... (Score:2, Interesting)
Second, at least with business programs, it's obvious that a programmer designed them them. GNUCash is the worst thing a business can use for their accounting software. They took a home checkbook program, added a couple of other accounts and considered it done. If you're running a business, just shell out the money for Quickbooks, MS Accounting, or Moneyworks.
Lastly, some development tools - yikes! Comparing gtk+ with Qt, Qt has wonderful documentation, the build environment was easy to set up and the integration with eclipse was great (I wish for a Netbeans integration one day but that was easy to set up too). It took me a few hours to get gtk+ build environment set up correctly where Netbeans could actually compile and link something. A make file would just be a nightmare!
User interface (Score:1, Interesting)
The main reason I don't like the GIMP is that on OS X, it has a really horrible user interface.
Security (Score:3, Interesting)
Sales Calls (Score:1, Interesting)
I used to work at a very large worldwide telecom provider. You know the name whether you are in the USA or Russia or India or Japan or 200 other countries.
When we needed a new tool, we would "ask around" with our existing vendors. These vendors would either recommend the top 3 very well known apps or quickly partner with an up-and-coming vendor or lastly, but only if there wasn't a way to make money, suggest some open source tool. OpenNMS could have been used internally, but there was too much money on the line, so we have a mix of commerial apps - Netcool being one of them.
Why? Sales calls. Software costs money even when it is free. Time, effort, maintenance and other FUD concerns. Unless the free version is basically bug free and has proven commercial support, we can't consider it. Further, we'll never consider it unless someone knocks on the right door at the right instance. The "support" costs are simply too difficult to overcome for completely free tools. Generally, we pay someone else to install these applications too, so expert installation and support are required. If there isn't a sale person selling all of this, we won't bother looking at it. We aren't in the software business - even though we invented UNIX. We aren't in the computer business, even though we run 60K+ servers.
We do use free software - lots of it, but only the extremely high profile projects make it into critical systems with internal support alone. Oddly, spending $500 on some small, never-heard-of-it-before tool was easier than using a FLOSS alternative because, if you paid for it, then it was assumed that support would be provided. In reality, that small company would usually be an ex-employee who retired, but left their software running. It was so poorly written that only that person could maintain it. At the first new feature request, the cost became $50K + 15%/yr support. A nice extra retirement income when added to the pension. Not bad for 5 days of work/yr.
I now work at a small company. We avoid commercial software beyond what we **must** have. Our production servers DO NOT RUN on Windows-whatever-the-name-is-today. We do have a few Windows development servers, but only because customers demand it.
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:3, Interesting)
I can completely agree with smpool7. He is telling you about the corporate side of it. Let me tell you about the personall, home situation side of this story.
In the early days when I did not have the money to purchase software I used opensource.
By using it I learned a lot and eventually became a UNIX administrator (with some additional learning and stuff). And when it works it usually does a great job. But now I got older, make more money, have a family, I simply do not have the time to delve into a program or piece of software and make it work. That is why I go back to purchasing a license and simply use it.
The big difference between opensource (and I am talking linux and the software that runs on it, because that is what it means to me!) and purchased software is that I get a clear webshop where I can order the latest product. There is a very short manual with it, which basically tells me to click setup, or drag it to applications (OSX fan anyone?). After that it simply works, no hassle, no problems. When I use open source, I have to click setup and then usually I get into an interface which just ............. (And yes, there are exceptions!)
Main thing is: When I buy/pick a new piece of software:
1. I must be able to just use it. No inch thick manuals
2. When I have a problem, who can I call to solve it for me.
3. I must be able to easily find it the software. (no version 1.3.2.3.4.1.455.5.beta.stable.gz). Just version 1 or 2 or 3 and then I download and use it on a customer oriented website and not a technical one.
4. It needs to be interoperable, meaning, when I create a document, file, whatever, my friends, family must be able to work with it.
All in all: Opensource has it's advantages, we all know them, and I most definitly support them, but when I get older, have less time, i just want a product that works, and I am willing to pay for it........... and that is a very sad conclusion.
Pro tip (Score:2, Interesting)
Mortgage on my house (Score:5, Interesting)
If you aren't getting the same kind of coin, you aren't negotiating hard enough. Hint: know the selling points of the open source alternatives, and (obviously) arrange for a private after hours meeting with the sales guy, but without your colleagues.
Re:Security (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, you conveniently ignore the fact that I was hacked through this hole. So, that means the breach is known and actively being exploited.
Sure, the new application I chose *may* have a security hole as well, but the one I dropped *did* have a hole (and a big one I might add). Which would you choose given that knowledge? No, my logic is completely sound. It is yours that is suspect, perhaps influenced by ideology.
Re:Ease of Use (Score:3, Interesting)
Users "Graduate" to Proprietary (Score:5, Interesting)
I've lost count of the number of "casual" graphics designers to whom I have introduced to open source tools... they want to "do stuff," either within a web site or with their photos, but the name brand graphics tools are too expensive, so... they'll try anything, even something with a name as ridiculous and off-putting as "The Gimp." Then, once they become proficient, once they start to understand "layers" and "filters" and the like, they understand the required reading a bit better, and wonder what they are missing with the Adobe software. Well, they don't wonder, it's very clear: all the web and design magazines each month provide specialized step-by-step tutorials on how to do neat stuff with the popular tools, and never once mention open source beyond the "Annual Condescension" summary article about the "other" tools. These people take a stroll down the aisles at B&N and see tome after tome designed to help the Adobe user, and maybe -- in a particularly well-stocked store -- a copy of "Beginning GIMP, which just sounds icky. I've seen the same scenario play out with Audacity and Pro Tools: people learn how to edit with free Audacity, and then when they become savvy enough to realize what they are missing with the proprietary stuff -- either in the form of missing features or widespread community and commercial support -- they step up.
The pro creative tools have great "wannabe" appeal: working with Adobe and Pro Tools, the amateur wannabe artists feel like they're "more connected" to that professional world to which they aspire. Using the free open source tools just underscores -- in their mind -- that they are second tier. This is not to say that the open source tools are second-rate technically, just that -- in the eyes of the latte-infused graphics and sound editor pretenders -- they may not be quite as "fashionable."
Elitist culture a problem sometimes (Score:3, Interesting)
Open Source is a lot better from when I first started looking into it 15 years ago but I still occasionally get hit by cultural attitudes of some of the software developers. To be fair, I understand that a lot of the projects are volunteer run and small scale, maybe one or two people hitting way above their weight and competing with large commercial corporations, but the documentation can be sparse. There's still an emphasis on getting software out rather than communicating what it does or how to help people to use it in some cases. More friendly introductions and more explicit guidance would be useful.
I think there are still a lot of elitist attitudes in the open source movement, with people "points scoring" - trying to prove they are more elite, more expert, and more competent than others and basing their sense of worth on proving they are better than others. Some of this filters into support forums where innocent questions from beginners can be savagely put down ("if you don't know how to do this, get lost newbie!").
The open source movement has come on a long way but could go a lot further in taking advantage of the large number of people who philosophically wish to support open source / FOSS/FLOSS whatever you want to call it but are not technical experts. Think of the large number of people who will pay extra to buy free range eggs / fairtrade food: they don't want to become small holding farmers themselves and look after chickens in their own back yard but they'll pay extra for food sources they believe in and fight furiously for it to be promoted as an alternative to be used in schools and government workplaces. Maybe think how the open source movement could learn lessons from this?
Re:Security (Score:3, Interesting)
The answer is price (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Documentation and .... (Score:3, Interesting)
How does this apply to TFA? Any OSS which understands how personal finance is moving from paper based to EFT for all transactions and provides an application which really works in EFT space will succeed. The commercial accounting applications will stay stuck in the mode of supporting paper based accounting for at least another decade. The people and business education have to be upgraded -- and that will take a generation [25 years].
Re:Difficulty In Using (Score:3, Interesting)
Very much disagree. Are you expecting people to work outside of the working hours?
Not sure at what you're getting at here, maybe you got caught up too much in the word "work". Many coders code outside their working hours, few technical writers write documentation. Apart from some high-profile projects like the Linux kernel, also at work time is spent making stuff work, not making comprehensive technical write-ups about things. The result is that the code-to-documentation ratio is much higher, and unlike closed source they don't have the cash to hire someone to do all those boring parts nobody's volunteering for. Usually the documentation ends up being what someone wrote after messing around with it in order to make it work, but usually that refers only to what he was trying to do and he's not assigned to keep that documentation current.
Re:Support (Score:5, Interesting)
There are several people on campus who use Linux. None of us has ever considered switching back to either Windows or Macs. Sure, there's a learning curve. As someone who had to learn DOS in the Good Old Days, it's no worse than that. Easier actually, because these days there are forums. I can't remember when I heard a useful answer from tech support for a commercial product.
The other massive advantage is software repositories. When something comes up and I need some new program to solve that problem, I google to find out what can do the job, download, install, and some five minutes to half hour later, I'm ready to go. No credit cards, no registration codes. When I have to use Windows to help out a colleague, I can never understand why anyone puts up with the inconvenience of it now that Linux has distros like Ubuntu.
So, anyway, this is a longwinded way of saying that, yes, support is the big issue in getting people back to proprietary software. But that's not support as a non-IT person understands it. That's "support" in the sense that there's someone else to blame when things go wrong.
Re:Stability (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides is Linus really "free"?
Yes, Hans is the one in jail.
My time has value too
Ah, I see, you are once again confusing the meaning of free. Free software is free as in there are four freedoms that it is guaranteed to provide. This often translates to lower cost - especially in the long term as it makes vendor lock-in effectively impossible, but it doesn't have to mean no up-front cost or even no support cost.
Re:Stability (Score:2, Interesting)
But in general I liked Ubuntu enough that I installed it on a laptop in addition to my desktop. Even though a bunch of features were supposedly working out-of-the-box, I had to spend a lot of time getting them to configure properly. Then Hardy comes along. I upgrade my desktop and even more things break than broke with Gutsy. While some promised features finally worked out-of-the-box on my laptop, others broke. Enough already. Given power management problems, I decided to reinstall XP on my laptop. (This was also after a random bug broke even more things on my laptop after a routine update.)
Switched to Debian Etch on desktop, which at that point was very outdated, but at least I felt I could depend on it. It was stable, but lacked some things, so I upgraded to Lenny. Never turned back. Almost everything worked right away, and it continues to do so today. I've only had to do some very minor tweaks, even when I stuck with Lenny as it became stable and only recently upgraded. Only one minor issue, which was easily fixed.
Someday I might try Ubuntu again, but I've found something that doesn't break randomly with updates and upgrades. For all those complaints about Windows, I've never had to spend as much time simply maintaining my machine. Whether it's bugs in the OS or minor issues with functionality in an application, what breaks the deal for me is also stability issues.
Re:Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
Stability isn't the only issue. GIMP and Cinelerra under Linux are heaps more stable than Photoshop and Premiere under Windows, but that doesn't draw me away towards the open source side. In that case, as mentioned in the summary, feature set is high on the priority list there.
I have done my best however to stick to FOSS as much as possible. I do prefer MS Office over OpenOffice, but I've stuck with the latter nonetheless, more because I *want* to like OO more than MSO. However, in the office, I've *had* to stick with MSO because while OO can read MSO originated files, doing a save/send in OO and then again in MSO and back again results in badly broken formatting. This isn't even MS's fault.
Try creating a file in AbiWord. Save it. Open it in OO. Edit and save it. Open again in AbiWord. Broken formatting. ODF is not the panacea of perfect cross compatibility that it could and *should* be, and you can blame the elitism in the ODF committee for sticking to a misconceived notion that they should only set the semantics of the file and leave the syntax up to the implementers. The result? ODF implementations that, while semantically compatible, break each others' formatting syntax.
Point? Oh yea, I have one. The reason that I moved my workplace away from open source software was because my illusion that ODF was the perfect answer to cross compatible documents was shattered when I accidentally opened an ODF file in AbiWord on another Ubuntu box, edited it, saved the changes, and found that it had made a mess when re-opened in OO. For me, the biggest draw away from MSO was destroyed, and my incentive to push upstream for ODF use was stymmied.
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. It represents for me the largest endemic problem within the open source community, and it really needs to be addressed if we are to present the open source model as a serious alternative to the proprietary/patent/copyright system.
Re:Lack of user-testing (Score:3, Interesting)
1,2,3: This sounds like a laundry list of complaints for any software.
4: how is this an issue of open source? The fact that anyone can pick up and run with a project is a bonus; try doing that with proprietary. If nobody has picked up something, then perhaps it wasn't worth saving in the first place?
5. Agreed, but some people like choice, and you can't go wrong with any of the major distros either.
6. You're kidding, right? So on Windows, you've got opaque, "blackbox" wizards,
7. I stopped reading after this, assuming you're just flaming or have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
Re:Ease of Use (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why I still use Paint Shop Pro instead of photoshop - PSP does everything with half/tenth the number of clicks.
eg. I do a lot of paste screenshot from the clipboard - it's one click in PSP but in Photoshop I have to do "File->new, select 'size from clipboard' in the dropdown, click 'ok', then I get to paste the image".
Same with JPG images - in PSP I load one up, do something to it, click save, done. In photoshop there's a whole extra layer of dialogs to "set jpg options" when I go to save it.
It all gets old real fast.
Re:Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
Free software is free as in there are four freedoms that it is guaranteed to provide.
Which are completely useless to the vast majority of people.
This often translates to lower cost - especially in the long term as it makes vendor lock-in effectively impossible, but it doesn't have to mean no up-front cost or even no support cost.
I'm not sure I buy this argument... lock-in only requires that nothing else can open your files. You can never be locked in to a particular plaintext editor, no matter how closed it is.
Re:Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
Stability isn't the only issue.
Indeed not. Cross-compatibility is a pain, for sure; I don't know if OO and Abi talk to each other, but they shouldn't be making life hardes for the users by pursuing different models.
For me, it's two things:
I hardly use any proprietary or commercial software these days, largely because the FOSS offerings do almost everything I want -- at the cost of some effort and the occasional cuss. But I would hesitate to recommend it to the averagely naive user simply because it's not as self-evident as it ought to be. That's not to say the commercial stuff is much better, but they have the money to polish the turds -- we don't.
Re:Let's change the definition! (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you missed his point, vendor lock-in is possible when the application is so difficult to develop and maintain that a fork would go nowhere.
Imagine a fork of Open Office, it isn't very likely even if there are a lot of things some people don't like about it. It's such a huge application that if it were developed on a volunteer basis, it would require a team of 100 coders to keep pace with its current developement, if not more. Organizing that many coders for a single project is difficult, and frankly it probably wouldn't take too long before the fork was terrible compaired to the main branch.
So if you want the most modern free office application, you are "locked-in" to Open Office.
Again, it is possible that someone could make a new office application, and people would certainly try (there are already alternatives out there, but by and large they suck), but as long as Open Office is the only serious free competition to MS Office, you're stuck with it if you want (or need) all the features.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Interesting)
>> Free software is free as in there are four freedoms that it is guaranteed to provide.
>
> Which are completely useless to the vast majority of people.
Bullshit.
I remember back when you bought a WinDOS machine you got proper install disks
and those install disks would work on any machine you had and would not bother
you with any mandatory license management nonsense.
THAT was a very handy thing. These days, such copies of Windows are few and
far between and are likely to be PIRATED if they are that useful.
The ability to completely reinstall something from scratch if you need to is
very useful. Anymore you can't even get a proper MS Office install package
either.
Yes there is a very practical end user benefit to "free software".
Re:UI polish, documentations (Score:5, Interesting)
For many FOSS applications the UI isn't nearly as polished as the commercial alternatives. This might be partially because UI designers want to get paid for the work (perhaps not a dedicated to the free community as sofware developers).
I am a UI designer, and the couple of occasions when I've tried to offer UI design improvements for FOSS projects have been pretty depressing. Both times I tried, it seemed that one of the coders on the project doubled as a UI designer and resented anyone who would challenge their ideas. Their contribution of code to the project meant that others then close ranks around them, so that any real discussion of UI improvements is killed off and anyone not a coder was frozen out. You could see why Alan Cooper wrote The Lunatics.
Other projects may of course be different. This was just my somewhat bitter experience with two fairly well known web apps.
Mostly free software is exploiting programs to give their work away for free--designers, editors and proofreaders don't fall for it.
I strongly disagree with that. If I could point to a FOSS application and say "I did the UI for that", I would probably double the amount of commercial work I could get (assuming my work was any good!). I would also think that being the only UI designer on a FOSS project would be wonderful - think of the freedom!
Re:Stability (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Not really. Most end users can't fix OO.o or AbiWord. Hell, most programmers can't fix OO.o or AbiWord. It's easy to fix a small bug (like word count can't handle more than 65535 words, or paragraph indentation is inconsistent, etc.), but something fundamental like fixing an issue with the interpretation of a file format like is being discussed here isn't generally going to be fixed by a patch from some casual user, even a highly technically proficient one who is a skilled developer.
This is pretty much the same situation MS Office is in. It's not like MS themselves can't fix bugs in Office.
Re:Stability (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Even with plug and play software you have sometimes to stay hour to fix a problem because they aren't doing what they were told to do, so in that case you have spent $$ to buy the program and you have to spent time trying to fix problem or either contact customer support to find a way to solve the problem. This is not about Foss or proprietary sw, it's about wether a program is good or not and if their "default config" is enough satisfying for the 99% of the users who are just beginning with it. So maybe today you will find your linux distro more enjoyable since many default configuration works for lots of people and you haven't to spend time making custom configs.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Sorry but I beg to differ, I've *never* had a Windows machine where *everything* worked in the last 5 or 8 years while I've regularly managed to get all my peripherals of the moment to work in Linux, often without having to add anything from outside the distribution (the main issue being webcams which remain a major pain in the butt).
The only exception was laptops where, as excepted, the integrated stuff worked with the provided Windows version (as it did with the Linux system I replaced it with).
Regarding Mac OS, my only recent experience has been with Tiger on a, iBook G4 and it was roughly on par with Linux in early 2000. A lot of peripherals worked but a lot didn't and that was that (never managed to get any webcam to work with it for example).
Re:Stability (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, until there's a decent solution for updates and backups I couldn't describe windows as working properly. Remember we're talking average users here, not system administrators. I am well aware there are solutions to these things for corporate networks with administrators looking after them, but how accessible are those things to the average user.
;)
If I'm wrong and these things are easy then I'd love to know. Otherwise I will continue to view MS Windows as not merely more difficult than linux, but broken. Solve 1,2 and 3 for me and I'll be really glad, very happy to be wrong. I won't hold my breath waiting though.
Windows works for two groups of people: those who have professional level skills to solve the problems and those who don't know enough to realise there's a problem. The second situation is a fairly limited definition of "works" and is the cause of botnets etc. I suppose the botnets are run by people in the first group and are a great example of how well Windows works
Re:Expectations (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stability (Score:3, Interesting)
>>Some game programmer dropped the ball so now Linux sucks?
No the bug was in Ubuntu because the Screen Properties dialogue does not fit inside a 640x480 screen, therefore you can't access the "okay" button to go back to a normal size screen. (rolls eyes). Jeez. Some of you act as if I just insulted your girlfriend. It's just an operating system. Just an appliance.
You can hire a progammer without being one (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
This is one of the common refrains of the anti-FOSS FUD patrol -- that 'all of us non-programmers have no control'. That couldn't be furter from the truth. It's actually a close relative of Microsoft's 'are you going to trust your business to code written by amateurs' FUD.
Truth of the matter is that the bulk of the code that goes into the major FLOSS projects is put there by people who are paid to do the work. It's not a bunch of lone wolves doing it for their own gratification. This means that they take their orders from the people who pay them to do that work. In other words, you don't have to be a programmer to get a wanted fix into your (not so) favorite FLOSS project, you just have to convince a programmer (by hook, crook or paycheque) to do it.
This is quite a bit different than with proprietary software, where it has to be in the business interests of the program seller to fix what for you is a show-stopper bug. For example, when MS-Word for OSX first came out, it's multilingual support (especially for RTL languages like Hebrew) was abysmal. The Israeli government offered Microsoft 7million of dollars (plus a guaranteed bulk contract to fix it, but MS was more interested in using the bugs as a leverage point to force people to move from the MAC to Windows. Microsoft didn't budge on the issue until Israel's Department of defence paid a group of programmers $1/2 Million to port Open Office to the Mac, and ordered a halt to further Microsoft contracts.
So the moral of the story is: If you have a show-stopper bug in a FLOSS project, then hire someone to fix it, then sit back and laugh at the people who spend 10 times as much money working around similar problems in proprietary programs. If you then feed your fix to the greater community, then not only don't you have to support your fix, as the base code is updated, you also get to bathe in the good karma of having contributed to the greater commumity. That's what FLOSS is all about.
Re:My experience with Ubuntu (Score:3, Interesting)
I can confirm this experience with Ubuntu by schnikies79 (788746), a similar sequence of problems with Ubuntu updates breaking stable and working wireless connections on an HP laptop. I had to discover and make a similarly frustrating and time consuming sequence of fixes.
This problem was discussed extensively in the Sep 5th article on slashdot: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/09/05/195219/Microsoft-Attacks-Linux-With-Retail-Training-Talking-Points [slashdot.org]
To avoid repeating myself, I posted: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1359331&cid=29327329 [slashdot.org]
It seems we are running into some unintended consequences, side effects imposed by a combination of the FOSS philosophy and the limitations of UI development, where the first users are the developers themselves.
Linux, does not permit reliable installations of devices, because of a lack of a stable binary interface. We all want Jo Internet to walk into a store, look for a fat penguin (Tux) on the box and know the gadget will just work.
Similarly the packaging and update schemes' assume control and overwrite (break) locally updated configuration files by default (I have no idea why anyone would permit that in the packaging architecture but apparently it does).
FOSS user interfaces are naturally enough initiall designed by the developers, for the developers. Most FOSS is built by a small group for their own use, so that's perfectly natural and ok.
It's not ok, if we then assume it can be packaged up and dropped onto the public, sorry... but I think that's massively naive.
Jo Internet, the public end users, expect that UI's have been designed for them, by the developers. They also expect it to be tested. They expect it to be intuitive and to do the right thing. No one reads documentation, a small amount of context sensitive hints are borderline tolerable.
There are many shades of grey with Doc: some technical areas (graphics, audio, Video editing, etc) may tolerate some documentation just to connect common domain knowledge (Terms of Art) to sophisticated software features.
That's a big difference in expectations.
I have worked with software development folks for more than25 years, I still do. Developers may be brilliant, but creating usable UI's for end users is not generally one of their talents, neither is writing comprehensible documentation.
I have seen entire and valauble product lines killed because of this inherent inability. What makes it worse is that most developers think they are good at it UI's, ego's get in the way, a lot, I have no clear idea why.
These three challenges: fat penguin labelling for retail devices and machines, stable user system configurations, and usable end user oriented UI's are what is holding linux distributions and FOSS back from expanding it's market share.
Until the community can recognize the root causes of the problem, very little will change.
I am a supporter of FOSS and linux, philosophically, professionally, personally, but I am also a realist about building software for end users
I am sure the FOSS apologists will (once again) leap on my post to tell me why I am an idiot, so let me save you some time; I do know that I don't know how to tweak every obscure config option, no one does, that's really the major point.
With any software, either FOSS, or closed source, if you have to apologize for instability, inoperative devices, or explain how to use an App, the software is broken.
IMHO Linux/Gnu/FOSS will remain a niche OS for Geeks; sadly, Jo Internet loses out in the long run, because of these apparently immutable and inherent limitations of the FOSS culture.
I would be delighted to have this opinion proven wrong; constructive ideas welcome.