Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
That GUIs of FOSS applications are less easily usable than GUIs of proprietary software.
I some cases it's true that FOSS are less easily usable.
Always found libreoffice menus confusing almost never able to straightforward find how to get what I want. Also same with gimp.
In my experience they either look horrendous or are less usable, maybe even both. It's not an universal truth tho and it has gotten better in de past couple of years.
For me most proprietary software both looks horribly ugly and less usable, form what I've seen at least.
I guess it kind of depends which kind of proprietary software we're talking about. I've had the displeasure of having had to use both salesforce and Microsoft AD and with those you'd be absolutely correct. Been a while seen I used either tho
I agree, but for these cases specifically I disagree. I agree that the toolbar LibreOffice defaults to is god-awful but View→User Interface... gives you options to select much better menus. Personally Contextual Groups has the most potential but Groupedbar is currently the best. I found GIMP 3.0 as straightforward as Photoshop, especially after I found the search actions tool.
I think the Libreoffice UI isn't great, but neither are its competitors. Probably partly the nature of conventional word processors that try to do everything through a GUI.
After about a year of dabbling with selfhosting I have to disagree. Some do have decent UIs but UX for FOSS is often really bad, you can tell the person coding the apps is a really good programmer but has no concept of UX, I wish I could help them somehow but any suggestion is often met with "uh? Why explain that in the UI? It's already in the documentation!" or similar
Windows 11 royally ruined their context menus even when I was still using it, since I was a Windows user since I can remember.
“Less usable” often means “not used to it” since every application has a learning curve. There are some design standards, sure, but the only way to get used to anything is practice.
Also, a lot of FOSS lets you customize a good chunk of the GUI and shortcuts!