Why is opensource software so ugly?
>>51435746
Usually it is about function, I mean the first car was not pretty however it was able to do what it was meant to. Move shit around.
What happens when you work for free?
You tend to give it functions and not worrying about eye candy window fag desires.
When it comes to Linux open source I know that the developers and basically anyone on the Linux side cares about two things and two things only.
1. Functionality
2. Jerking off to loli hentai
>>51435763
Why is it so hard to ask somebody to make a decent design? Specially when you are such popular software like Calibre.
>>51435837
>Jerking off to loli hentai
Mate I am a open source developer and I never watch anime. It's for faggots and shows through the software infecting other faggots.
But number 1 is true.
>>51435838
>Why is it so hard to ask somebody to make a decent design?
OK I'll make an awesome looking design, it'll take me a few weeks to make a good looking product, so I'll need some money to buy food and shit, oh wait.
>>51435746
Go back to iOS, Ashley
>>51435838
There aren't a lot of designers floating around in the FOSS sphere that are a. capable b. willing to work for free c. not cunts
Perhaps there should be more crowd funding dedicated to visual representations, that would solve one part of the issue.
>>51435746
because they use gtk.
>>51435838
Are you going to pay for the programmer to design an eye candy interface?
I mean would you fix someone's car for free if it meant you had to invest $20 a day fixing it?
Applying to software, function is what software is about. Invest the most into the functions of the program then worry about interface.
Eye candy programs do not always offer a better use experience. It also requires a well educated, researched, cost invested, programmer that understands what users will want and user response to the interface.
Time and money is what stops eye candy software being common place since it isn't really a day job to do. In fact it could take months to effectively create art work, implement it and then further improve on it.
>>51435746
Because UX designers don't contribute to open source. They want to get paid for every bit of shit they do, which they call 'consulting' if they freelance.
>>51435746
update your calibre. Now you can change the icon theme and make it look a hell of a lot nicer than that.
>>51435909
lol there's nothing gtk in that picture.
And why are jews so greedy ?
Plenty of non-free software is ugly, the same way plenty of open source software is beautiful (popcorn time). The difference is that if you really want it, you can modify the GUI however you want - you have the source code.
>>51435915
That's one side of the coin, other is that programmers don't design interfaces for simple visual theming.
Most designers don't know shit about programming and thus the bar can be high even if there was enthusiasm.
If FOSS wants better design, it should help the designers by providing tools.
>>51435850
It's never too late to try~~
>>51435906
you dont need designer, just copy paste ui from good software
you mean optimized? look at all those rich features and information panes. its got everything you could want right in one central location so you dont have to load faggy animated guis. if anything open source is the best shit cause not only can you see whats in the program, but you can also (if capable) edit it to your liking. proprietary programs are bogus shillware with a lack of features for a premium price that you dont know what its doing unless you hack the fuck out of it, like windows 10, it could be gathering and collecting data and sending your shit to servers somewhere in india.
OSS forever
>>51435850
The only faggot here is you.
>>51435746
well, to be honest Calibre is a bad example. The developer is a rajeesh and intentionally refuses to make any UI/UX changes, even after being told for years that it's hideous and inconsistent.
>>51436642
>GIMP
>Unity
>GNOME 2/3
>KDE
>7-ZIP
>Pidgin
>Deluge
>Qbittorrent
>Libre/Open Office
Almost all OSS looks like shit
>>51435746
Programmers are passionate and work for free if they believe in a project.
Designers are cunts.
Because good designers don't work for free.
>>51436698
Good developers don't work for free either. Hence why proprietary software is in almost all cases, superior.
>>51435838
Let's put it this way, taking on from the car
metaphor someone else posted:
Your friend car is broken, you know how to fix it and he asks for help. You are a nice guy and help him, because it's something he needs.
Now compare this to:
Your friend has a car and he wants to give it a paint job. Instead of doing it or payng a professional to do it, it asks you, a mechanic, to paint it for free, just because you're a mechanic and that's a car.
It's not something he needs, it's something he wants for aesthetic, so you tell him to fuck off even if you're friends.
See what I mean?
>>51435838
Why don't you do it?
>>51435928
Fuck year I do, why should I work for 20hrs on a design I'm not even being paid for?
>>51435838
Developers can make decent money while working on open source software and/or have spare time to do so. Designers can't afford working for free since they're one step away from the poor house.
Is there a more bloated, poorly architected app in existence than Calibre (that is still totally indispensable and based)
>>51436880
...I wonder thought how you'd go about clean-sheeting an application as large as Calibre that you want to be cross-platform (with minimal tweaking/hassle) without resorting to AIDS like QT. Is there such a thing as a cross-platform toolkit in >2015 that doesn't look equally awful on all platforms?
>>51435850
you don't belong on 4chan if you don't watch anime
>>51435746
just avoid anything related to KDE and you'll be fine
>>51436941
Never seen an anime in my life.
I remember reading some research paper that suggested that open source design suffers because design needs a single coherent voice; it doesn't benefit from a bunch of people contributing to it (or even working by committee, that much).
I'm trying to look for the paper, but it's turning out to be really hard to find.
Looks fine to me, OP. I'd only change the icons.
>>51436984
this is the closest I can find.
http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1018/939
Why are you too autistic to get that aesthetics are subjective?
Transmission for OSX is the one major exception I can think of. Really nice looking nicely designed app, that adheres really well to how an app should look and work on OSX.
>>51437042
There's design in the aesthetic sense (which, sure, is subjective I guess (although I don't think anyone would seriously argue that the way GIMP looks is at the epitome of aesthetic polish)), but design in the sense that we usually mean for software is more about usability.
There are lots of quantitative, objective metrics that we can apply to software that OSS projects tend to fail at: time to complete a task is one facet (and note that novice users take longer than expert users, and you should evaluate them differently). Task Load Index is another facet you can use (maybe people take equivalent amounts of time, but if it's less cognitively burdensome or fatiguing by even a small amount, that might make it preferable).
The article I linked to before made a brief argument (or a huge argument, I don't know, I kinda skimmed it) that open source projects don't have good methods or resources to test and "debug" interface usability issues, to say nothing of engaging with end users in the first place.
Design in this context - a more "functional" design context - has to start at the beginning. Hacking away at GIMP to try and make it more usable at this point, now that it has 740,000 lines of code, is all but a lost cause.
>>51435838
i'm sure your design-related patches would be welcomed by the caibre developers
oh, you're unwilling to do it yourself?
then stop complaining, you didn't pay for it, for non-commercial/free software, things get done by the people willing to do them
>>51437132
-- and to clarify, this is in contrast to (most) commercial software, where people are paid to make software accessible to others, even if it's not what they want to be doing
>>51436941
all yours friend :^)
>>51437132
Redesigning a full software application like Calibre would be an enormous undertaking. It's not something you can do piecemeal the way you can with fixing backend/underlying functionality the way you're describing/imagining with pull requests and whatnot.
And this complexity argument says nothing about the huge uphill battle you'd have to fight just to get people to agree to change the user interface in *any* appreciable way, because people have built into the current interface over the course of... how many years?
>>51437189
fuck off. this site was created for anime. fucking redditors like you are pure cancer. if you don't like anime, you don't belong here.
>>51437204
the point is simply that the people who contribute the most to free software are the kinds who care more about functionality than appearances and accessibility, because most of these people make the software primarily for themselves to use
>>51437253
>Mah sekret sklub
Lmao been here since 07, kid. Stay mad weeb.
>>51435746
Its free and someone made it in their free time
>>51437270
>07
you're still a newfag
>>51437275
I assume it's that guys full-time job. No?
>>51437270
its an anime club :^)
>>51437294
You can't make money off making free software
>>51435746
Artists care about muh copyright.
>>51437189
> /t/
> not 90% JAV
Pick one.
>>51437326
I figured he made money when people bought books through it.
Never watched anime just doesn't interest me and that isnt going to stop me from going on boards like /g/
>>51437366
then you belong on reddit, fuck off.
>>51437366
>>51437375
You're both retarded for arguing about this.
>>51435915
>Eye candy programs do not always offer a better use experience.
Stallman-tier obscurity
>>51437264
Yeah we're talking about design in different senses again. While all of the stuff I've said is arguably true of design in the aesthetic sense (and in that context you're right that the people designing this are more interested in functionality than appearance), the issue of accessibility isn't just something you can dismiss. If you coded up a program that took 15 clicks and a long series of obnoxious text entries that the program should be able to sensibly do on its own, that's bad design. It's not an aesthetic thing.
To give an example, imagine if whenever you ssh'd into a machine from your local terminal, you had to enter the port you wanted to use. Not just when you wanted to use a non-standard port, but literally every single time - even when it's port 22. Imagine that there's no way to use a config file, and that no affordances in the software would allow you to automatically plug it in; you'd just have to explicitly enter "22" every single time.
That's a (very narrow, small) example of poor design. It's not aesthetic or accessibility - it's just awfully planned for users.
This is what software design is (or at least, is supposed to be). Don Norman and Tog somethingorother wrote about this recently and how Apple has muddled the meaning of design by giving people the impression that design is about polish and shine rather than quantifiable, measurable, *objectively improvable* usability. It's the kind of distinction that differentiates designers who think Craigslist is poorly designed because it's all text and "unshiny" from designers who think Craigslist is excellently designed because it makes its affordances (the things you can interact with, and the things you can do) very transparent.
>>51435746
because design in its core is redoe your work and adjusting to the mainstream
you cant do this having a "a" to "b" workflow.
tl:dr every application looks shit in the beginning only after refining the design multiple times it gets "beautiful" unlike function.
>>51437375
cry more man child
>>51437426
cry more normalfag
>>51437407
alright, alright, i suppose i should have also clarified that i mean only the appearances, op did use only "ugly" (not design), after all
i agree /technical/ design is important, but there's not really a lack of that in free software
>>51435746
I like it when certain software are hard to use.
For example, IDEs and similar.
This ensures that normies are scared away and people with actual interest or technical abilities use them, which in turn ensures that we have a job.
I mean, if your normie boss looks at your screen and thinks that he can outsource your job to an illiterate indian, you're gonna be out of a job soon.
I'm not fond of all these "make it easier to use" shit.
>>51437589
Bah, the word "design" is so overloaded. I just realized when you said "technical design" that one could also mean the design of the codebase itself. You're right that OP meant design in the worst/most superficial sense - this meaningless "looks shiny" sense.
I honestly think that there's a lot of room for OSS to improve in design in the usability sense that I droned on about. There's research on this issue, and it's more easily quantified, measured, and improved. But looking at some of the more modern, albeit smaller projects (like youtube-dl, for example) you see some really good design; there are lots of very sensible defaults, it handles lots of domains expertly, it's reasonably intuitive to change settings on an individual or ongoing basis, etc...
>>51437671
the "usability design" you were talking about is also something i consider more important as well, what good is an unusable program? (at worst, though a harder-than-it-could-be program is non-ideal as well)
youtube-dl is good stuff, i also really like ffmpeg
it can be a bit confusing at first (mainly due to good media encoders being unavoidably complex pieces of software) and the fact that parameter meaning depends on their order/position in the command line, but once you 'get' how it works, it's very easy to get exactly the desired result
it too has sensible defaults and presets all around
>>51435746
Because unlike programmers, designers don't wok for free. Freetards compensate by pretending to hate GUIs.
>>51437649
you're quite the wizard, aren't you?
>>51435746
It's fine as long as it uses gtk/qt so you can just switch the themes to whatever you like.
>>51437778
Yeah definitely. I think these are great examples of finding good usability in a space that's not normally perceived as highly intuitive (command line interfaces suffer enormously from poor feature visibility and discoverability), but that (I think) just highlights how valuable good design can be. A novice can start using ffmpeg without really being that competent with shell commands (I mean they can't be complete novices, but they don't have to be experts by any stretch). But more importantly, experts benefit from becoming experts with ffmpeg. Preferred settings can be reached more easily through shorthand command flags, settings can be set in config files, all that good shit.
>>51437778
i will say that i'm not fond of the direction some modern programs are taking in terms of interface/functionality
some are trying to be "too simple", in that they become useful for an extremely narrow set of jobs, such as media encoders will nothing but a few presets to pick from, or a web browser that goes so far as /hiding the URL bar/
my problem with these is that they offer no room to advance, and they often obfuscate what is actually happening, which leads to problems being unsolvable, and many nice things deemed too complicated for beginners being ommitted entirely (how can someone get away from being a beginner is that's all that's available?)
>>51437835
i smile everytime i see someone ask for an ffmpeg gui
i've asked the question myself years ago, sure, but when you learn what it can do you'll quickly realize a gui that coveres everything ffmpeg can do will most certainly be a clusterfuck of tabs/checkboxes/radio buttons/drop down boxes/text inputs/etc that will most likely be as confusing if not more so to newcomers
Functions above aesthetics
Either this, or you're just another apple faggot
>>51437950
>web browser that goes so far as /hiding the URL bar/
i actually ran into this yesterday
i used teamviewer to help a friends' friend do a port forwarding
he was on windows 10, and i saw the "edge" browser in his taskbar, so i figured i'd have a look
the url bar was nowhere to be found, so i just switch to his chrome window to get to his router
why on earth would they remove the url bar? i mean, i realize some people can't read them, but how does removing it help? now even people who did read it won't be able to
there's probably an option to unhide it or whatever, but that's beside the point, the url bar what i consider a crutial component of any web browser, and i can't imagine any good reason to hide it by default
>>51437950
>>51438112
Not saying that edge is good, but there is the url bar.
In the new tab there is a supposedly intuitive mutlifunction bar right below the text "Where to next?"
When you actually navigate to anything different than the new tab, you have the url bar.
>>51438340
it appeared to have been unused until the point when i opened it, there was a search box in the center of the screen, and not much else (and you are no doubt aware, a search box was not what i needed)
>>51435746
As if it's a problem limited to open source. 90% of commercial Windows software is just as ugly and even on OSX there are some damn ugly things.
Most companies couldn't design a good looking UI if their life depended on it.
>>51438474
I guess you can't read.
I'm sorry.
>>51438091
>he thinks aesthetic doesn't improve productivity
The xbox hueg graphics at the top are buttons
proggy's called gnunet
>>51435746
In my country there's a saying that essentially means you shouldn't be looking for flaws on things that you got for free. The developer of Calibre is giving you something useful, but instead of thanking him you complain about the UI.
>Solution 1
Don't use it.
>Solution 2
Change the look, you have access to all the source code.
I don't like it either, but I only use it for 5 minutes a week to convert from epub to mobi. The dev can do whatever he wants, it's open source but it's still his software.
>>51438646
that's pretty much all there is to it
whats the saying?
>>51438554
and there's nothing wrong with it.
>>51439112
Yeah, no. If you have to go though messy, cluttered UI you lose time and concentration. The impact is probably bigger than the performance of the device itself.
Because freetards are blind.
>>51435746
Because most people in those circles care more about functionality than design.
People usually develop it just for the things they need and almost no macfag designer will develop a stylish GUI for it because he is just not a part of that culture.
There are no super-trendy opensource media editors so designers don't use opensource software to make design for opensource software etc.
>>51437293
it ends in 2010
I came here in 2014 so what am I?
"new hope" generation?
I haven't even heard of that program. It's made in Qt, though, so you're just asking for it.
>>51436941
When will this meme end?
>>51439944
it's an ebook reader/management/library program
>>51439905
>>51438562
best image in this thread
