The Pnictogen Wing

there's "non-foss shit ux" and "foss shit ux"; the difference is that the latter is slightly more shitty for some reason

honestly most of the times (in my experience, at least) foss software is easier to use than the popular, proprietary ones. like, it took me a while to get used to photoshop but after using krita for a week i was pretty good already. of course this is anecdotal and prior experience affects the results but. ya know

this could be true?? but inkscape and gimp are actually just awful ui/ux-wise idc

i find that that foss software often suffers from “death by a thousand cuts” problems while proprietary does not as much. both seem to suffer from bad holistic design approximately equally often? although typically bad holistic design for a foss app is usually “theres too many things you can configure and none of the defaults are very good”

i am mainly basing this off of experience using LMMS vs garageband. Garageband is a very polished app but has (for me at least) a really awkward workflow that i dont like (why are controls spread across so many tabs? why is there so many separate views?). LMMS on the other hand has a decent overall model (it is basically just fl studio) but suffers immensely from a ton of tiny papercuts (the loop controls snap the playback head which can be annoying, sometimes undo doesn’t work, its too hard to automate a knob). the first thing i noticed immediately when i switched to ableton is how much nicer it is to use from moment to moment (the overall workflow for ableton is different but not worse than lmms tho, imo)

At university I went from being a Windows user who dabbled in Linux to someone who increasingly had to use macOS for my own work and in tutoring undergrads (because the staff were pretty blatantly biased and Windows users got setups that were lower-quality to the point of being unusable, just lovely to be in an open-minded place of learning...). Most of the students were also used to Windows and hated the OS, I had problems with it daily - and then I was there for Apple abruptly going in hard for what I guess is the 'flat' interface style without clearly defined buttons and the like. I opened up Xcode that day and even though I'd been using it the day before with only minor difficulties suddenly I could not see things I was supposed to click even when they were right in front of me.

And then I had to endure the resident crowd of rusted-on Mac users going on about how easy and intuitive Apple was making it for new users when... none of my anecdotal experience pointed to this. It hit me then... they couldn't 'see' it either. As longer-term Apple customers the evolving design philosophy made sense to them; as someone who learned computers on Windows 95 and was very new to this ecosystem I didn't get it.

I stopped using Apple products once I left the university and I do still consider them the worst of the major OS options to use for a number of reasons, but especially with so many convergences of visual style in OSes I don't think that's much more than my personal feeling. If my parents had bought a Mac when I was eleven I would have gone through my learning-to-computer struggles on that machine and become a rusted-on too. 🙀