The Open Source Design Conundrum 322
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by
Soulskill
from the too-many-chiefs dept.
from the too-many-chiefs dept.
Matt Asay writes "Walk the halls of any open-source conference and you'll see a large percentage of attendees with ironically non-open-source Apple laptops and iPhones. One reason for this seeming contradiction can be found in reading Matthew Thomas' classic 'Why free software usability tends to suck.' Open-source advocates like good design as much as anyone, but the open-source development process is often not the best way to achieve it. Open-source projects have tended to be great commoditizers, but not necessarily the best innovators. Hence, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently stated that Red Hat is "focused on commoditizing important layers in the stack." This is fine, but for those that want open source to push the envelope on innovation, it may be unavoidable to introduce a bit more cathedral into the bazaar. Without an IBM, Red Hat, or Mozilla bringing cash and discipline to an open-source project, including paying people to do the 'dirt work' that no one would otherwise do, can open source hope to thrive?"
You can run anything on a Mac (Score:2, Informative)
Macs can run Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (duh). The machines themselves are crafted with attention to detail. Versatility in a neat package. What is not to like?
Bert
Netbooks also on the rise. (Score:3, Informative)
Regardless, in the last couple of years I've seen a lot of X and T series Thinkpads but moreso netbooks at hacker and FLOSS meetings in the EU. I hear from friends that the build quality of their MacBooks is a bit disappointing. Perhaps this is a reason, among others.
Re:Free software sucks because. (Score:4, Informative)
It is very possible to make good and usable FLOSS software - you just need a project leader who knows about usability. I find that reading and understanding Gnome HIG is a great first step.
The 'problem' is that in most cases the main programmers in FLOSS have little knowledge about HIG, while a lot of commercial software is designed by sales people, who know HIG, but have very little knowledge of programming. So the situation is that FLOSS often has great code, but bad interfaces, while commercial software often has good interfaces, but crappy code. In both cases the situation can be improved by having people from the other side join in and contribute. In commercial software that means that the manager hires some good coders, while in FLOSS side it means that users file bugs and sometimes send patches or UI mockups.
It is not an unsolvable problem, it is just an existing problem that takes effort to solve.
Re:KDE is very usable (Score:4, Informative)
At least use the updated version of MPT's article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Window managers (Score:2, Informative)
You don't miss it until you've used it, when i was on (ms) windows i didn't really use windows at all they took too much space for boarders and most used so much space for menubars/toolbars that everything had to be run maximised, now between my moded firefox/kde i regularly have 3 or even 4 windows in use at once.
open source bits (Score:3, Informative)
Apple has also sponsored a few other interesting open source projects such as Darwin Calendar Server [calendarserver.org], WebKit [webkit.org], and of course the Darwin [apple.com] UNIX kernel. Most of these projects are covered by a BSD or similar license.
Apple's implementation of the Cocoa Framework is not an open source framework, but it is based on an open specification, OpenStep specification [gnustep.org], although it has evolved past the specification. There is an alternative, open source implementation, GnuStep [gnustep.org].
There. Fixed it for you.
Re:Apple makes good hardware (Score:5, Informative)
https://edge.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts [launchpad.net]
Re:Doesn't handle, it's Being handled, as a Weapon (Score:3, Informative)
I have to disagree with your premise that non-corporate sponsored FOSS lacks "first rate product". While admittedly I am not a typical consumer/end user, I do find that Gnome is just as professional and useful ("first rate") as OS X's Aqua -- and I do switch between the two regularly.
Gnome is corporately sponsored... Red Hat, Novell and I think even Canonical are contributing resources to GNOME. Read more on the GNOME Foundation pages [gnome.org]
Re:Some good points in there (Score:4, Informative)
Damn, one more thing I forgot:
Know the capabilities of the OS/DE you're running in. I don't use GTK+ apps on Windows, because they don't work with Microsoft's voice recognition or handwriting recognition features. Which is really a shame, because those features work automatically if you use the native widgets. (Heck, they work in Firefox and I'm pretty sure they aren't using native widgets.) It's a huge pain on my tablet.
Open source projects almost never support drag&drop, but drag&drop has been around long enough that it should just be expected to work. (Kudos to the open source projects that get this right, BTW.)
Re:Apple makes good hardware (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apple makes good hardware (Score:3, Informative)
If we're talking about open source developers, that's two reasons:
Firefox is open source, and unless there's been a lot of progress made lately, Firebug is still the best tool of its kind.
Re: GUI design (Score:1, Informative)
"interface design ends up too complicated for most people to use"
The Gnome menus and Applications seem easier to use than Windows versions, I've used both. Openoffice seems more consistent (as far as menus go) than MS Office but first you have to turn off "Hide Menus" in MS Office to compare.
KDE guys speak up.
Re:Apple makes good hardware (Score:3, Informative)
"...so the interface design ends up too complicated for most people to use."
Written by someone who's never used Gnome, I see.
innovation (Score:3, Informative)
FOSS can innovate much more than proprietary software because there is no incentive other than to provide a functionality the dev desires.
That's the key, functionality devs want, not end users. Commercial businesses have to provide software end users are willing to pay for but FOSS projects only deliver what the devs want. An excellent example of this is Photoshop vs the GIMP. PS offers 32 bits per colour channel, and print artists need at least 16, whereas GIMP only has 8 bits. They have been promising 16 bits for about 10 years but still have not delivered it. And not because they couldn't, one developers offered them 16 bits but they turned it down. So he forked it and started FilmGIMP, now called CinePaint [cinepaint.org] which offers 32 bits per channel and is used in the movie industry.
Falcon
Sorry, Linux/Gnome/KDE more usable (+ innovative) (Score:2, Informative)
Sorry, but based on my experience, I disagree with the point of this article.
I find both Gnome and KDE far more usable than the commercial offerings that are available. Specifically, I find the following features really useful:
These are features that I have yet to see on a widely used commercial offering out of the box and features that I find really boost my productivity. Yes, there are commercial add-ons (such as StarDock), but they're buggy as all get out and generally suck compared to what I can get on a standard Linux install. One feature that generally makes me tend towards KDE over Gnome is the ability to place the taskbar on the side of the screen instead of the bottom and still have something that is very usable. When you write lots of code, you want more height, not width. Wide screens are great for multimedia but are generally poor for code development. For coders, placing the taskbar on the bottom makes less efficient use of the screen.
Relating to innovation, the FOSS movement has certainly been the source for lots of innovation. This "lack of innovation" seems to be a recent mantra being thrown out against the FOSS movement. Consider:
Sorry to burst the article's bubble, but FOSS has been the source for a huge amount of innovation. What I see coming from the commercial offerings has been, to a large extent, an apeing or imitation of ideas started by the FOSS movement with some incremental improvement on the original idea.
I've had the opposite experience (Score:3, Informative)
I don't even think that it's "gotten better", I think you just have terrible luck. I've never had an issue with plugging extra monitors in with Linux (from adding new ones to my main PC back in 2003 when I first started using Linux, out to when I bought myself a new projector and on-the-fly set up a dual-monitor display with FreeDOOM from my Acer Aspire One to test it out....pixels as big as my hand!). Windows is another story, mainly having to do with crashes and absurdly irritating bugs; dual-monitor support and how it gets handled is one of the main reasons I switched over to Linux full time back while I was living in University Residence.
;) Maybe that's just me, though; I've always got a kick out of the visceral feel of hitting that key combination and watching everything blink out of existence and then back in.
As for Macs, my success rate with plugging them into secondary displays is hit and miss, about 25% complete success, 25% failure, and 50% took a bit of effort and fiddling. That's not counting the times I tried to help people hook their Macbooks up to classroom projectors or such and then realized that they didn't realize they needed a proprietary adapter cable to do so, at which point I laughed at their $1200 new 15" Macbooks and smugly offered them the usage of my $200 13" shitty laptop that I installed Kubuntu on. Yeah, I'm the kind of person who can't stop from helping people but also can't stop from being a bit of a dick about it.
Also, what's the fear of Ctrl+Alt+Backspace?
I'm not saying I entirely disagree with you, to be clear. Luck of the draw has a lot to do with user experience, for one (nvidia-settings has rarely let me down, but I'm not going to pretend you're lying about having issues with nvidia and on-the-fly adding displays), and secondly I've recommended Macs to people before, convinced them to go over to that platform in fact. It's just that in my experience Macs seem to suffer when they go out of their comfort zone; they may often Just Work when Linux doesn't, but there's also times Linux Just Works when Macs don't, it's just that those scenarios tend to skew more towards power user stuff.
P.S. I notice that you said "Powerbook", so I'm guessing when you say "nvidia stuff" you were running Linux on a PowerPC computer. That's probably where our experiences diverge so harshly; Nvidia has never had an official, fully-supported Linux driver for PowerPC, right? AFAIK to a large degree it's a port of, or at least shares development with their Windows driver (on one occasion I ran into a big issue on my Linux install which was identical to the problem a friend had in Windows...unfortunately for him the trivially simple Linux fix had no Windows analogue), so it was fated to never come out for PowerPC. I actually have a friend who owns and loves a small old Powerbook that he dual-boots, and he mainly uses OSX because with Linux+NVIDIA on PowerPC you're stuck with the feature-incomplete drivers. Alas!