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Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

I think part of it at least is that the engineering tools have, on average, a more technically sophisticated user base and those tools mostly involve working at the command line or through an IDE like VS Code or the like. I think a lot of where free software falls down is on the GUI, which is less of an issue with engineering tools.

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I agree. GUIs are hard!

On the other hand, it seems like Open Source has a lack of designers that are willing to contribute. For example, in Tantacrul's critique of MuseScore [0], there's issues highlighted that seem obvious in retrospect, but in Open Source projects, unless there's someone who drives the user experience, it's easy to miss all these small things that add up to signal (whether rightly or wrongly is besides the point) a lack of polish.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A

That is squarely where the problem lies. There are good open source developers out there as evidenced by the great Github projects. There are also good designers out there such as those that maintain Dribbble.com profiles. What keeps them from collaborating to produce top notch projects?

Thanks for sharing Tantacrul video. He's quite an entertaining bloke!

Designers are hard to collaborate with, from my personal experiences.

In particular, software freedom is more important on average to technical users probably because they see the more of the direct effects of having control over software.

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