IMO FOSS has really great offerings when it comes to libraries or other highly technical code.
But something about either the community or incentive structure results in sub-par UI/UX. Obviously not a rule, but definitely a trend I’ve noticed.
That’s very subjective. I have yet to find a Linux desktop I like as much as MacOS, especially when it comes to WACOM drivers. The stylus response time/curve almost always feels wrong.
Also, I’ve worked with designers who can get something that looks and feels fully professional on a first pass, so it’s not just newness for Lemmy.
Don’t forget the community’s reaction to comments like yours, why down vote him if he’s stating the obvious? FOSS projects often focus so much on technical features because everyone wants to flex their code-fu, but nobody gives enough time to UI/UX. Just look at pretty much every Lemmy web frontend, fugly webpages with early 2000s look-and-feel, usually slow and/or buggy, and with little to no user feedback.
I’ve seen it for years and years now, and I can only conclude that it’s down to the kinds of people who are attracted by these kinds of projects.
They’re tech literate at a professional level by necessity in order to engage with these things at an early time in their development, and this seems to drive a mentality that makes UX design kind of an afterthought, since they already know how to do the things they want the software to do, and they’re not focused on how less tech literate users will handle it.
Then you add in the small minority of gatekeepers that wind up in every community, who feel that a larger, more generalized userbase would be invading their niche community, and you end up with stuff like the Linux forums where asking a simple question would get you a series of remarks that essentially boil down to “go fuck yourself, you should know how to do it already.”
I feel like the people concerned with UI/UX come into these kinds of projects later on after they’ve matured a little, rather than right from start, and this causes resistance to their changes because the userbase is already entrenched in the current UX, especially from the gatekeeper folk in the community who see a higher tech literacy threshold as a good thing.
