3dilettante said:
Making a good stab at something doesn't automatically mean that something can't suck. Having no budget, no organization, and no direction is not what I consider to be a mitigating factor as to whether or not something sucks. It might be a good effort, and great for its means, but I'm not blowing a second more on something if there is a more convenient and streamlined way of doing things.
Agreed, but sometimes the reason people give up on free/open source software is because it works differently (maybe only slightly) from what they are used to.
They seem to completely forget the trouble they had back when they were learning how to use the monopoly programs.
That "power of habit" is one of the major obstacles for alternatives to microsofts programs. They not only have to be slightly better than microsofts offerings, they have to be
much better, both usability wise and in term of capabilities.
Not that that is a bad thing but it does make a tremendous hurdle for developers with small/no budgets to overcome.
Firefox is a great example of this, here we have a web-browser, that is genuinely much better than ie in almost any way. Yet people are hesitating to use it, because it looks a little different from what they are used to. If you could force an ei user to use Firefox for a month I’m 99% sure he/she wouldn’t turn back to ei.
I've used free and open source tools. They don't all suck, I'm sure. It's just that a lot of the ones I have used do, and I don't think either an open source or proprietary solution is any more worthy of my time just because of noble efforts.
I’m not saying you should sacrifice your well-being to free software, but if you can see and understand why, what microsofts is doing is wrong, and then not actively
try to avoid using the their products, then you are by definition of the word immoral.
Let's say that there was this evil regime (I know this an extreme analogy) that terrorised it's population, but that made some product (say oil) that the whole world had come to depend on, would you still feel indifferent about supporting them by buying their product, if there was alternatives?
DemoCoder said:
Open-source UIs suck. In many categories on the desktop, Microsoft has had the best software for years, for example, Visual Studio. No open source IDE comes close, although Eclipse is getting there, KDevelop is along way behind, VS has been around for a long time. Then there's office software. No open source challenger is as good as MS Office, and the best open source Office (OpenOffice, formerly StarOffice) was developed commercially. KDE and Gnome tried to copy OLE/COM features in Office via CORBA/DCOP, but it doesn't work as well.
I’m not sure you could get everyone to agree that VS is so good, I’ve heard more than a few people bitch about it, while praising other IDEs.
Maybe there is no
one office package that matches ms office but there are several single applications that does a particular job at least as good as one of the office apps. And StarOffice/OpenOffice is not that bad at all, they more than fulfil the needs of the average home user.
ms office strength lies in the secret, proprietary file formats. If they didn’t have those other software vendors would have it much easier.
The main complaint I always hear when I suggest alternative programs to people is that “other programs are not fully compatible with word, exel, powerpoint, etc.â€.
When the Linux desktop is able to actually provide something better than XP, maybe you can say they don't deserve their position,
Let me get this straight. They deserve their position until Linux GUIs get better? Why Linux GUIs in particular? And how come they can deserve something they never earned?
but the fact of the matter is, the Linux desktop is a mess. OS X is the only real challenger.
I don’t’ now about “messâ€, “not good enough†would be more fitting I think.
It’s “just†a matter of someone taking on the responsibility of organising the development of
one good GUI, just like Linus Torvalds is (still) responsible for the kernel of Linux.
Something free software developers should also really consider is changing the names and the logos they use. GNU and GNOME aren’t exactly ideal names if you want to break into the mainstream. An ugly gnu, a poorly designed penguin and a small foot are not good logos either.
You talk about a better UI, can you name one? It's not OSX, it's not BeOS, it's not IBM PM, almost all UIs are based off of the original Xerox paradigm. All variations on the same theme Windows uses too. So then what? ZUIs? OpenDoc? 3D UIs? No one has really come up with a simple, but powerful, easy to use UI. And with most people unable to program their VCR clocks, it's no wonder. For the last 10 years, I have heard the same arguments over and over about better UIs, and to date, no one has ever produced anything substantially better than the original Xerox mouse/window/menu/widget paradigm.
There has been made significant discoveries and tweaks to our knowledge on human computer interactions in the last 25 years. Yet very few of those discoveries have actually filtered down to/been adopted by the people who make GUIs. The reason? Lack of competition. It’s too expensive and is deemed futile for anyone to attempt making a new OS and GUI.
There are people working on alternative regardless, like Jef Raskin with his “The Humane Environmentâ€. A ZUI with a kind of “soft†CLI on top for commands.
I think CLIs might get a second chance, now that people have gotten used to having to write stuff to get results in various search engines and address bars.
Maybe a more error tolerant and "intelligent" CLI could be made, with input either through keyboard or microphone. Combining the speed and flexibility of a good CLI with the straight aheadness and accessibility of a GUI, could be powerful stuff.
