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Comment by shRaj9fEc8Vith | Hacker News Reader

Don't OSS project has professional designer? I mean like Apple-quality designers?

Have you ever tried contributing to a popular FOSS product? I have. Expect to be downvoted, yelled at, etc for suggesting change, especially change that's an emotional issue for geeks (implementing a ribbon-like interface, you know the one started by the 'evil' microsoft). Linus's childish attitude is pretty much the poster boy for this attitude. Namecalling is the norm.

There are so many cultural and management issues with big FOSS projects, you could write 100 phd disserations about it. Its not generally a welcoming and innovating environment. Generally, from what I've seen, its the products with the very small teams (or sometimes one person) who seems to make the breakthroughs and everyone eventually just copies those guys.

Can you imagine someone with great credentials and a great portfolio trying to engage the LO team on a novel interface? Can you imagine the Linus-like comments aimed at her way? That's a major demotivator for innovation, change, and success. Oh god, heaven forbid you're a woman in FOSS telling men to make a change. That's an even worse nightmare right there.

This is why, I think, so much FOSS stuff looks like shit and has poor documentation. The artsy crowd, visual thinkers, UI nerds, and the writers are systemically kicked around to the point where they don't contribute much, so a lot of UI decisions are made by coders, who typically are creatures of habit and have a "if it aint broke why fix it" mentality in regards to interfaces and other features.

This is also why OSX is such a wonderful product. Apple took all the strong BSD code and dismissed the linux and BSD WM's and put a WM on there that didn't suck. Apple had the management structure to implement effective change without a "coder's veto" so many FOSS products suffer from. Or how Apple took KDE's khtml/webkit and wove both Safari and mobile Safari around it.

You know, even though I think there are pretty decent Linux DEs today (I'll gladly take Gnome 3 over the OSX or Windows GUIs), you are completely right about the community having an awful attitude towards their designers. See all the hate thrown at Gnome 3, Unity and Pantheon... Those projects are the only ones keeping Linux from looking like it's 10-20 years behind its competitors in UI design.

Not hating them but a few of those people always seem to have brilliant ideas that they try to force (spatial nautilus for the oldtimers, breaking alt-tab in unity etc).

Where it gets really annoying is when they remove the options - our way or the highway, again something borroed straight from Apple.

(yeah, a little tongue in cheek is implied here, I am bo designer and I haven't done much research in UX)

I think a lot of it comes down to what a visual designer can contribute. FOSS projects are typically the sum of individual contributions from a lot of people, all scratching their itches. There is limited scope for someone to tell other people what they need to do.

A designer who can't code is dependent on other people donating their time so that the design can be realized. This puts the designer at an immediate disadvantage.

Exactly. In some sense, you have to dictate to people who you have no power over, and do not respect you (obviously, I'm exaggerating a bit).

>There is limited scope for someone to tell other people what they need to do.

A well run project would be soliciting UI changes, mock-ups, demos, etc. They would be planning it out, have an implementation schedule, etc. Frankly, the idea that designers waltz in and yell at humble nerds is more than a little overly generous to the broken Linus-style FOSS management style.

If you don't value design you're incompetent as a developer. Why would you even contribute to a project if you don't want what's best for the project?

Maybe they do value design. Maybe they just value different designs than you.

I think your comment is a bit unfair. All the problems you mentioned also exist outside of the FOSS world. People feel the same frustration, but they typically won't say it because of some kind of hierarchy. Is that a good thing? I'm not sure.

The other thing is that FOSS projects typically involve contributors from all around the world and cultural differences are always very sneaky, it looks like everybody is a hacker, but in fact most share completely different cultural codes. For example I've noticed that people from the US are used to cheer a lot, that definitely not the case everywhere. So for US contributors, I'm guessing working with people with a different mindset with respect to criticism can be quite a shock.

So the beauty of FOSS is that it kinda works despite the extreme work conditions (distributed / remote / every body is allowed to say whatever / people work when and if they want / etc.)

Hmmm. Then again, look to gnome and unity to see what happens when designers and ux experts can do what they want: they copy Apple, features and bugs ;-)

For us who use Linux not because of the price but because of the usability it offers this is of course not what we want however cool it looks.

There is a LibreOffice design team. I think one of the issues do far was we have had to do a lot of re plumbing which users don't really see - heck even the build system was overhauled to allow easier builds!

There's a lot more to go, but we're making progress and I think you'll start to see better UI improvements this year. I recall the first versions of Mozilla - I couldn't even type into edit boxes when I first started, but look at it now :-)

These things take time, but we have commitment and an enthusiastic community - and actually our developers are pretty responsive. well... most of us :-)

> ... so much FOSS stuff looks like shit and has poor documentation.

Compared to what? By volume? Go read the documentation for openbsd, freebsd or vim. I've never seen more thoughtfully structured documentation.

> Oh god, heaven forbid you're a woman in FOSS telling men to make a change.

I wonder how long it is going to take before it becomes obvious that this sort of whining is counterproductive and induces fatigue in even those who are sympathetic. Consider what is actually happening in open source software development. Consider the personality types of those drawn to a field with such great opportunity for self determination, and risk for failure and public humiliation. Whining isn't going to help you in that environment.

> ... the writers are systemically kicked around to the point where they don't contribute much ...

I've never seen this happen, most of the projects I've been part of bend over backwards to encourage writers. Where did you see this?

Come hack on LibreOffice we're a fairly friendly bunch :)

There are thousands and thousands of FOSS projects. I'm sorry to hear your particular experience sucked, but painting them all with the same brush is to say the least over generalizing. Do your complaints apply to LibreOffice? Are they Linus-esque in their arrogance when being suggested improvements?

Which project was it you were treated this way on? I've had some great experiences with FOSS.

The problem is that under most open source models of governance, it's far easier to create good software than to design good interfaces due to the processes involved.

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