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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

> The people who originally wrote a lot of OSS and Linux software were envisioning a world where Adobe tools would be replaced by Gimp/Inkspace and the Ubuntu desktop would make Windows obsolete except for specific MS software/tasks. That never happened.

The reason that never happened has nothing to do with the licenses. It happened because most purely open source programs have abysmal UX. Every time I open Inkscape on my retina macbook I feel like I'm grinding the machine against concrete - it's slow, looks awful, doesn't scale and doesn't use the system's native UI libraries. Somehow all of RMS's charm never seems quite enough to convince designers to fix the glaring, obvious problems.

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So I share your sentiment. I still open Photoshop/Lightroom on my Windows laptop when I need them (although lately I've been trying to use DarkTable and RawTherapee for some projects) but yes, Gimp is far from being a high end tool. Illustrator still kills Inkscape (I worked with a hardcore OSS guy who said it's just a matter of training, what you're use to and what you start with. I could tell he'd never done any real graphical editing work ever).

But who is working on it? Obviously not you. Obviously not me. It's a lot of work. I've looked at code here and there and often said "..huh..that's not has bad as I..oh no wait..yea..yea it is..I wish I had the time to work on this."

If some of the Stallman-ish/revolutionary ideas had happened in the last decade, maybe all of us could spend 20 hours a week trying to fix/improve/rewrite the software we like/need. Today software devs are slaves to the industry. Even if we get paid well, many of us are still working for things that will bubble and die. The only things companies open source is middleware that can make them important.

Money is addictive and it's taken people away from that ideology that simply doesn't pay the rent. There's something deeply wrong with all of this, but we're in another state of hypernormalisation, so it's very difficult to see or address in a meaningful way.

> So I share your sentiment. I still open > > Photoshop/Lightroom on my Windows laptop when I need them (although lately I've been trying to use DarkTable and RawTherapee for some projects) but yes, Gimp is far from being a high end tool. Illustrator still kills Inkscape (I worked with a hardcore OSS guy who said it's just a matter of training, what you're use to and what you start with. I could tell he'd never done any real graphical editing work ever).

Could you expound on what DarkTable, GIMP, and Inkscape needs to be more comparable to the Windows/Mac alternatives? What are the crucial, missing features?

As a hobbyist photographer and video editor, who has used Lightroom and Photoshop extensively, I find that I manage fine with alternatives available on Linux.

> But who is working on it? Obviously not you. Obviously not me. It's a lot of work. I've looked at code here and there and often said "..huh..that's not has bad as I..oh no wait..yea..yea it is..I wish I had the time to work on this."

I am working on it. A lot of us are. But we need to know what to implement. We need bug reports and feature requests. DarkTable alone has almost 20 000 commits and 200 contributors. The Linux kernel has about a 1000 contributors for every release.

Does it look like we're not working on it?

And money? ... Well, yes, most HN commenters seem to be very money-centered. After all, it's a site about starting new crappy companies, pushing shitty, useless products noone needs. They don't give a shit what they partake in, as long as the paycheck is right.

But, nevermind that.

A lot of open source contributors are paid full time to do this. So you can work on open source 24/7 and get a fat paycheck, if that's your thing. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Then there are those who actually code because they like it, you know. Because it's their passion. They might endure a shitty job to make a living, but in a weekend they do 50 commits to open source projects.

Be a slave if you want, I choose not to. I work on whatever I want.

> Does it look like we're not working on it?

Frankly, yes.

I can't speak for the experience on linux, but on mac Inkscape needs to:

- Support high dpi displays

- It needs to scroll and zoom smoothly. (There's no reason for it to lag while scrolling and zooming on a modern computer. Every other app on my system manages it).

- It needs to use the operating system's menubar instead of xquartz.

- Use native controls for everything. That open/save dialog looks like something out of the 90's.

- It needs to support smooth scrolling.

That would be a start.

Ok. You are talking about problems with the software on a proprietary system... Sorry, I don't support closed platforms.

These problems do not exist on the Linux version.

That's a bit of a problem.

Proprietary OS users are going to judge Inkscape (or Gimp, or any other Free Software) from what they see on their platform. If it lags and doesn't support High DPI on their platform, they're going to assume the same is true of the GNU/Linux version.

Some users won't switch because of this faulty assumption.

Native UI… while there is little point it catering to users who won't switch anyway, it will still reflect badly on the application. Widgets that look like "something out of the 90's" will say to the user "I am an old unmaintained app" whether that's true or not. Users are highly influenced by an application's look.

To me, cross-platform is not the holy grail--Linux is fragmented enough as it is. And certainly not to a platform like Apple's. Porting free software to a walled garden is grotesque.

I think focus and efforts should be directed at making good software for Linux. And I do not think that porting OSS and free software to closed systems is a good strategy for converting users.

Users switch from macOS and Windows to Linux for all kinds of reasons, but there is no point in trying to "lure" them in any way. It will be of own volition.

It's not just a matter of luring people in. Some people who want to switch to GNU/Linux won't because "Inkscape sucks" or something. I bet Gimp and Libre Office have similar issues. MacOS users are especially problematic because they're so vocal.

That said, I think this is but a small part of the problem. The bigger enemies are the bundling of Windows with new computer (no separate purchase of the OS), and windows-only games. They're the main reasons behind the proprietary hegemony on the desktop.

When so few desktop computer run Linux, half-heartedly supporting Windows and MacOS comes of as a bit haughty. But if Free platforms are the norm, supporting the proprietary ones at all will actually sound generous.

FWIW, HiDPI support does not work on Linux either. All icons, color palette, custom cursors are about half the size they should be on my 4k monitor.

Scrolling is pretty choppy and it doesn't support smooth/inertial scrolling.

So 3/5 of his listed issues exist on the Linux version.

Is this wayland/X what desktop environment? What gpu? What driver?

Same experience in both Wayland and X11. Intel built-in graphics, i915 driver.

So is your gpu just too slow for 4k?

You asked what needed to happen. They told you.

Even if you, yourself don't want to do it, the attitude you've taken here is exactly the attitude which drives people away from OSS.

I don't see people driven away from OSS. Rather I see even big corporations embrace it. Even Microsoft. And look at the explosion of public projects with Github.

You're both right.

The problem is, his side is "winning". Linux is quite hostile to proprietary software, so not that many people will use Linux since apps > OS. So if OSS doesn't push for better apps even on proprietary systems, it won't even get out of this catch 22.

Linux is big and unspecific. But if we talk about a user count of Linux on the desktop vs OS X/macOS on the desktop, then Linux is not far behind, according to various statistics. Linux numbers are actually a lot higher than the recorded stats, as those are just based on web browser information. Many Linux users do not even use a browser that is counted in these statistics.

People often seem to forget just how small Apple's desktop marketshare is.

I'm a Windows user primarily. Which also falls into the proprietary category. And its desktop market share is far from small :)

erikbye never indicated that he cares whether OSS gets out of the catch 22. I develop a Linux distribution and I know that I do not care. I care about my experience and other users' experiences, but not people who use MacOS. I value software freedom of the things I work on much more than a Mac user.

I don't even see the catch 22. There are more than enough Linux users for a thriving ecosystem, has been for many years, and it's only growing.

Like I said in a comment above, Apple's desktop share is incredibly small percentage wise, but more than big enough for them to sell desktop hardware.

Now hardware vendors also offer Linux (Dell, System76).

Linux/Unix absolutely crushes it when it comes to server/infrastructure, academia, and research. Who cares if official numbers call desktop marketshare of 2% or 5%.

> I develop a Linux distribution and I know that I do not care.

Well, you should care. You should care when your clients or friends send you a file in a format that you can't open or transform properly on Linux. When you want to print something and your printer doesn't have drivers for it. When you want to play an AAA game and it's not available for Linux. Etc., etc.

My friends send me e-mails and messages, which I read with open source software, with links to news articles that I read with open source software. I message with open-source apps using open standards.

I manage (and share with my peers!) the books for an organization with GNUCash.

I collaborate on and write papers with LaTeX, write my code in languages with open standards, use primarily open source compilers, and run my code on Linux cluster which use open-standard parallel communication APIs and open-source implementations.

I do not play video games.

My office printer is plug and play with Linux/CUPS.

All done on my trusty custom linux distro (Exherbo) for years. Oh, and I haven't reinstalled since 2010 but I am running the most recent open-source GNU/Linux software.

Maybe my life and my needs don't match others', but then again maybe erikbye's don't either. Anyway, that is why I do not care about more people using Linux. If anything, more Linux users have made the internet a less useful resource for helpful Linux knowledge.

Why should I care?

P.S. my phone is another story, but I expect different things in that space.

Then consider yourself lucky.

And you probably shouldn't care, except for altruistic reasons :)

Why is the lack of certain AAA games held more against Linux than macOS?

Linux has 1950+ games on GOG and 6500+ on Steam. Some of them AAA.

When it comes to file formats, I'm sure there are certain formats that poses a problem, but at least not the most commonly file formats exchanged. Like Microsoft Office formats; LibreOffice opens pptx, ppt, xls, xlsx, docx, doc, docm, etc.

Inkscape as mentioned above, opens Adobe illustrator files.

Both GIMP and Krita opens Photoshop files. Krita perhaps being the most appealing alternative to Photoshop users (UI-wise).

And normally, if you have clients, they don't arbitrarily send you arbitrary files in random formats. You have agreed on a workflow and file type.

This type of reaction is one of the reasons why everyone that cares about good UI/UX is on either OS X or Windows.

> Well, yes, most HN commenters seem to be very money-centered. After all, it's a site about starting new crappy companies, pushing shitty, useless products noone needs.

Whoa.

> If some of the Stallman-ish/revolutionary ideas had happened in the last decade, maybe all of us could spend 20 hours a week trying to fix/improve/rewrite the software we like/need. Today software devs are slaves to the industry.

Would any of Stallman's ideas change that? If you could wave a magic wand and make all the BSD/MIT sourcecode out there GPL, how do you imagine that resulting in the gimp being funded, or staffed by good UX designers?

I suspect it might put a lot of engineers out of business, because of how much the modern development industry depends on opensource. But then programmers would just have less money. I don't know how that would help bring about stallman's utopia.

In what ways does Illustrator kill Inkscape?

Asking as a person who's never done "real" editing work, but has dabbled here and there and finds Inkscape to be one of the more pleasant OSS projects. I wholeheartedly agree that Photoshop kills GIMP, and I understand the reasons why. So I'm curious what the reasons are for Inkscape v. Illustrator since I haven't run across them?

>>> it's very difficult to see or address in a meaningful way.

That's not a reason to stop believing and helping with small things. I don't say you don't contribute, I just say that "difficult" doesn't mean "impossible" in any way :-)

TBH

Most open source stuff actually is poorly engineered, if engineered at all, because a lot of it is developed by beginner-level coders. Now, I do of course know that many, many commercial products are full of crap, too ... but engineering excellence still mostly goes into commercial products. Obviously. It goes where the money is, and in most product categories that can't/won't be open source.

Almost every open source project is completely focused on implementation, all the while implementation is only one facet of a software project. All other facets are usually neglected.

Yes, there are quite some projects one might call "industrial-strength XY" -- but the vast majority aren't and never will be. This is also not just a numbers game; a large number of crap-quality open source stuff is incorporated into widely deployed stacks. Just take libraries for file formats, just a couple days ago we got a dozen or so CVEs in libtiff ranging anywhere from denial of service to arbitrary code execution. That thing will be on most web servers.

The only reason I use GIMP is that Adobe software isn't available on Ubuntu. Sure, some artists have used it to create great works but that speaks more to their capabilities as artists than GIMP's as software.

Ubuntu is pretty solid but I would be a liar if I wouldn't admit it has serious flaws (e.g. making the user execute superuser shell commands to test and enable hibernation is pretty shitty UX). I'm tech-savvy enough to be willing to accept these trade-offs but I can easily see the appeal of macOS (even if the naysayers are right and Apple have lost their way).

I started off the year by giving a couple of alternative browsers a chance to wean me off my reliance on Google Chrome and even Brave was a more workable solution than Firefox: in order to make Firefox work properly I had to learn about its multiprocessing mode and individually test extensions from the official addon hub for compatibility. And while the dev tools certainly feel like a lot of effort went into them they come nowhere near the UX of Chrome's.

Even GitLab needed a lot of time to reach a state where it can be considered a serious alternative to GitHub (sans the community around GitHub, sadly). And GitLab has an entire company around it and is "merely" open core.

These days when evaluating software alternatives for any given problem the words "open source" are no longer a selling point for me. Even worse: if it's not tied to a commercial entity somehow deriving profit from it, I'm less inclined to use it. Self-hosted open source web app maintained by volunteers? That's usually code for terrible UX and show-stopping bugs.

> The only reason I use GIMP is that Adobe software isn't available on Ubuntu. Sure, some artists have used it to create great works but that speaks more to their capabilities as artists than GIMP's as software.

Do you think the tool ever makes the artist? I have seen great works of art made with a pencil. A piece of coal. A twig and blood. A simple needle and ink. I have seen great works of art made using Microsoft Paint.

> Ubuntu is pretty solid but I would be a liar if I wouldn't admit it has serious flaws (e.g. making the user execute superuser shell commands to test and enable hibernation is pretty shitty UX). I'm tech-savvy enough to be willing to accept these trade-offs but I can easily see the appeal of macOS (even if the naysayers are right and Apple have lost their way).

I don't like Ubuntu and I don't use it. But, there are plenty of things that can only be done using a terminal in macOS, as well. In fact, macOS/Apple is pretty much known for hiding things from their GUIs.

Anyway, I do not agree that typing in commands are bad UX. Many things are far easier and faster to do in a terminal than through a GUI. One example: installing software.

> I started off the year by giving a couple of alternative browsers a chance to wean me off my reliance on Google Chrome and even Brave was a more workable solution than Firefox: in order to make Firefox work properly I had to learn about its multiprocessing mode and individually test extensions from the official addon hub for compatibility. And while the dev tools certainly feel like a lot of effort went into them they come nowhere near the UX of Chrome's.

Why are you talking about browsers and comparing Firefox to Chrome, are you trying to compare open source vs closed-source? Do you know what Chromium is?

It sounds like you are actually trying to say something as stupid as: open source projects are generally worse than closed source projects?

GitLab is a good example of excellent software. It has a proper business model and has built a great community.

Most Linux desktop applications sadly have no good business model. If you have a business model you can pay developers, designers, support, writers, etc.

I agree, and it would be nice to have those things done. Free software has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem now where there is a lot of demand for certain things like you mention, but it's difficult to find funding to actually do them. I don't know what the way forward is, but it's something our community needs to be better about.

Open source and free software is thriving. Always have. Look around you. Look at what runs the internet you use. Look at the number of projects and the number of contributors.

Free software has always thrived all the way back to magazine listenings, PD and several variations of shareware, postware, beerware, whateverwere.

Adoption of business friendly licenses in detriment of GPL, means we will get back to those days.

A business friendly license (like BSD) usually results in exactly what Apple has done. Take whatever they want, close it off, and hardly contribute back upstream.

This and hostility towards confused newbies. Newbie gets confused over UX, seeks help, gets told he is an idiot or gets redirected towards badly written unhelpful manual.

If open source licensed software has a pervasive problem like this, how can you be sure it has "nothing" to do with the licenses?

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