Courtesy to Twitter user XdanielArt (date of publication: 8 June 2024)
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Sure, I can agree with that.
The problem with OSS tends to be that engineers are more willing to work on it than UX designers and it's quite rare for them to have the lead on that area. Forget convention, just on quality. There are exceptions (hey Blender!), but not many.
More often than not what you get is some other paid upstart hit some big innovation and then that propagates and sometimes it gets to open source alternatives before it does to fossilized, standardized professional software.
I do think there's some value in having UX that makes it easier to jump back and forth, though. Especially if your positioning is "I'm like this paid thing, but free". The easier you make it for the pros to pick up and play the easier you can carve some of the market and the more opportunities you give to newcomers learning on the free tool to migrate to the paid tool if the market demands it.
I think part of the problem is that "good" UX isn't a single thing but a continuum. It's very dependent on the skill level of the user. Often what makes a good UX for a newbie is a bad UX for a power user and vice versa. OSS tends to attract power users and particularly the ones working on some software in a particular area tend to be domain experts. That in turn can lead to designs optimized for very advanced use cases that end up being frustratingly opaque to an "average" user or even worse a newbie.
Blender is an excellent example of this. It's regarded as one of the best 3D programs out there but it's far from a simple piece of software to pick up. What saves it is that all the commercial alternatives are just as obtuse as it is and so the ground level expectation is that it's going to be complicated.
Likewise many OSS and Linux tools expect or even require CLI usage which while great for power users putting together scripts and pipelines are often opaque and unintuitive to someone who is still learning the domain.
This focus on power users leads to turning newbies away and funneling them towards the commercial offerings where they then get used to their quirks and limitations of those apps so that when they do eventually become power users the quirks and limitations of the OSS alternatives feel strange and off-putting to them.
For sure. Good UX is not "simple" UX. Professional software doesn't need to be flashy and clean, but it does need to be efficient and usable.
Bad UX is bad UX, though.
I bring up Blender because Blender vs Gimp is my favorite example of how FOSS can find a very functional alternative AND compete with the paid side with no compromises... but also of why it often doesn't.
Blender is for power users, but it's well designed enough you can dabble with it or follow a tutorial and have fun doing it. Gimp will make you hate the very act of opening a file and trying to make the most basic crop on it even if you're a Photoshop master.