From my experience, most FOSS software is very user friendly user-centric / user-focused, while proprietary stuff is shit. What is the most notable exception to this rule that comes to your mind?
Edit: With user friendliness, I don’t mean UI design, but things like how the software is handling user privacy, whether it sees its users as users or as money-making cattle, how it handles user feedback, compatibility with other software the user uses (vs. vendor lock-in), configurability, and similar issues.
Edit2: I was made aware that user friendliness is a defined term: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Userfriendliness
My experience is the opposite - FOSS is often obtuse, with an assumption that you see things the same was as the dev, which is usually a single person or at most a very small group. Add to that, documentation is nominal, or non-existent, and quite often lacking even a high-level description of what an app does, let alone where to find features in an app. FOSS devs often don’t even follow menu layout that’s been pretty well established at this point. For example, I’ve found the Settings menu under File, Help, Tools, View, etc, in different apps.
Proprietary apps are usually developed by a team, one that’s studied the market segment (or another group has), and usually understands how that segment operates. They then develop the app based on design goals established by a team other than the developers, with UAT (user acceptance testing) performed at given stages (this is even more frequent today with Agile project management). It’s not uncommon for a UI to be mocked up and given to end users to validate UI design/layout choices long before anything is even developed.
These devs usually follow a company standard process, with code reviews by other people. Their changes must be approved by management, and those changes are often requested and reviewed by other teams before being submitted to the dev team.
Most FOSS simply doesn’t have the time or staffing to do what most proprietary software dev does.
And I use both proprietary and FOSS all day long.
There seems to be some confusion. With user friendliness I wasn’t referring to the UI. See Edit in updated post.
The confusion is because user friendly has a clear definition but you’re using it to mean something else.
You could consider editing to say user-centric, user-first, user-focused. Or re-wording to specifically state prioritising the user over profit
It seems you’re right. I wasn’t aware that it has a definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Userfriendliness As a result, I was so naive to just use it as being friendly to users. I’m kinda surprised that this seems to be a well established term (as can be seen by so many here interpreting it with this definition).
Will re-word post.
Steam
Steam doesn’t fit OP’s criteria. They definitely prioritise profit over the user’s preference.
When you open the app you’re immediately shown pop-up ads ffs. And the app opens to the store.
You can disable the pop-ups in settings and default to opening your library by default but it’s difficult to locate the relevant settings.
Steam transformed the PC gaming experience for the better but I find people’s reverence of it is misplaced.
The key to steam is that they realised that being user centric, while bad for short term profits is very good for long term profits. They are also not publicly traded, so not just anyone can buy in and try and make a quick buck burning them to the ground.
I’ve found their store and setup to be a reasonable balance of advertising to functionality. The fact that you can adjust it yourself is a good example of their mindset. Most people don’t care or find them useful. Those who don’t like them are unlikely to interact with them, so it’s not worth fighting their efforts to turn them off.
Anki on iPhone. Pay one fee and it funds the other users but it’s forever.
Photosync small one time fee but you get an awesome app forever.
Pleco app. Has some add ons but well worth the money and no other fees.
Anki and Pleco… May I assume you are studying Chinese ATM?
Haha, yes. Used them for ten plus years to study it. Now doing more Japanese but sucking at it. Regardless Pleco is the best language app outside of Anki. No Japanese app can do handwriting like Pleco. If I encounter some old or unclean character in Japanese I still use Pleco
FaceTrackNoIR. Head trackers for Flight Sims are unreasonably expensive. So you just give the FaceTrackNoIR guys $4, get a download link in your mail (which you can keep forever), slap some webcam on your monitor from 2004 and boom, head tracking. It’s a fairly decent piece of software that gets the job done.
Additionally you get a bunch of extras like, smartphone compatibility, and a bunch of plugins for common head trackers, if you don’t want to use their own software.
And it doesn’t do any AI garbagio with the face recognition, just good old fashioned algorithmic pixel tracking. All local.
Obsidian, its pretty pro user but the devs are scared of forks for some reason.
What about forks? Isn’t it closed source?
Also Android support is like 4 years behind the new standards
Yeah its closed source because the devs don’t want people to fork the project for some reason. I thought the app had pretty good user experience when I used it but I am more of a vimwiki type of guy.
Obligatory winRAR mention. Technically proprietary paid software, trial never expires.
As someone else pointed out, the premise of this question is extremely faulty. Being user-friendly is one of the main advantages of proprietary software because they have teams of researchers and designers making sure that things are as frictionless as possible for the user. This isn’t to say they don’t use dark-patterns or engage in anti-consumer practices, but I’m certain that if you did a random sampling of F-Droid and the Play Store, you would find a lot more polished and user-friendly software on the Play Store than the FOSS apps on F-Droid
What a biased question haha
OP, please download some FOSS software and tell me how friendly it is to use. As an arch (btw) user who primarily uses FOSS, they’re definitely not generally better than proprietary.
I also use arch, btw, so yes I’m probably biased in a similar way as you.
Most FOSS software I downloaded is very friendly to me, thanks. Or do you have a particular unfriendly FOSS software in mind?
Btw, out of interest, if the software you use is so unfriendly to you, why do you use it? Money reasons?
