I have suspected for a while it is astroturfing. Same as with GIMP and Libre Office where inevitably someone will trash the UI as it’s “soooo bad”. If you say a lie, and repeat it enough, people start to believe it.
Every time I introduce someone to LibreOffice I half expect them to hate it, and that I’ll have to go through the alternative interfaces and try to make them accept it and potentially install OnlyOffice instead if that doesn’t help.
Instead, I’m generally met with an “oh, this is nice”, before they start typing away.
I get that some of the bigger nerds would prefer something different (I would personally love the power of LibreOffice inside a modern minimalist GTK app), but LibreOffice is working great for most users. Those passionate enough to see an issue with it probably prefer markdown or latex anyway.
I honestly prefer LibreOffice to what Microsoft Office has become.
When I went to grad school, I was told MS Office was required, so I purchased it, but turned out we just used basic word processing and a handful of simple presentations, so I ended up using LibreOffice for everything instead.
Same here. I found the Microsoft ribbon they introduced in 2007 to be a major anti pattern. It didn’t make things easier, it made things way harder. Our IT department tried to bust me for not using the official Microsoft software (outlook, excel, word, etc) so I outright uninstalled windows and put fedora on there. Granted, I was trying to do partitions and fucked it up, but whatever. The point is I wanted to get away from their “antivirus” spyware so I could use what worked for me. I got the idea when I saw the Dean of academics was using i3 as her window manager
I’m a huge fan of open source but saying the only people saying Gimps UI is bad are astroturfing is insane.
It’s famously controversial and uses UI paradigms that don’t exist in any modern desktop environments.
I’m not, but it’s not like it’s an occasional thing. Every time it’s brought up, it’s trashed. Free software that does a better job than anything else free, and folk bash it. Either they like and are motivated by Adobe dominance, or they’re useful idiots.
It’s balanced to say “great program, but could do with a UI improvement”. It isn’t to say it’s unusable because of UI. I cannot imagine any free software advocate should be proud of taking that line.
I love GIMP’s UI. It’s clean, it’s to the point, and it’s stayed basically the same for ages!
“Other people who have bad experience ces with something just be asteoturfing.”
Ivw consistently had an issue with Firefox that I described in a thread a few days ago that I can’t seem to identify or fix. Am I just not allowed to mention it?
Maybe their issue tracker is the best bet, or in a separate question thread about the issues. Raising it in every thread it comes up when people recommending it isn’t going to solve the issue or help anything, is it?
No, it won’t. I bring it up in this particular thread for 2 reasons.
-
I don’t like the insinuation that anyone who claims to have problems with Firefox must be bots. I don’t think that’s at all true, since I’ve run into multiple problems with the browser myself that I haven’t been able to solve.
-
I brought it up in the previous thread because I think that if people are considering switching, knowing what problems exist is useful. It isn’t meant to dissuade anyone, in fact I regularly recommend Firefox to my friends and family. But I don’t personally use it because of a pretty major problem, and I don’t think it’s bad to mention it when the topic comes up.
