That goes way beyond OSS. Remember early Windows 95? When every Office release revamped the style guides (button bars are now flat!), Borland applications looked entirely different and there was a plethora of badly mashed together VB5 shareware?

Heck, I remember Amiga-heads complaining about MUI applications…

It's rare that you get something consistent once you throw enough developers at it, especially if different tooling is involved. And this only increases with the age and popularity of the platform…

Most programmers can't design. And designers are only marginally better at it.

Not never as you write but surely very often. For UIs to be gorgeous they should be left to tech savy designers (that is, not painters), not programmers (having the two teams communicate closely though). A programmer usually focuses on functions, bugs, speed, which inevitably detracts the attention from aesthetics or usability, so having some people working exclusively in that field would benefit a lot. Unfortunately not all projects can afford or even find for free a good designer, just like not all FOSS games can get the same amount of graphics primitives as commercial games have. Consistency is a different problem due primarily to fragmentation (it's thousands developers!) and lack of a central entity benevolently dictating standards also in the GUI field. I was just downvoted by someone who clearly missed my point in yesterday's post about Linus taking some time off: I wrote that Linux would benefit a lot if we had someone like him forcing consistency in the GUI and other fields. It is a necessary "evil" intended to help more developers build a solid single standard until the gap with Windows/MacOS is filled.

The one much more important thing that OSS never did well is managing/making device drivers. I know it's not primarily OSS's fault, but it has made Linux on consumer devices unusable for me and for many others. Unusable or simply non-existant in the case of mobile devices.

And it's a huge shame if you look at the current historical situation, which is, I think, pretty dramatic.

We have a handful of huge, all-knowing corporate gatekeepers taking a ridiculously disproportionate cut of software developers' revenues and restricting what we are allowed to do with our devices.

We are suffering from collective amnesia as to the dangers of the authoritarian surveillance state.

We are struggling with a massive onslaught of organised crime trying to take over our data, our identities, our money and our democracies.

I'm not a computer security expert by any stretch, but it seems pretty clear to me that without controlling the end user device, there is basically no chance of ever being in control of your data.

OSS has failed where it matters most, where it's literally about freedom.

You could argue that it's not OSS that has failed but me not setting the right priorities. I don't deny that, but the choice really shouldn't be that stark.

My girlfriend is far more determined than I am. She does use Linux on her laptop.

But just in the last couple weeks this is what happened:

I had to scan documents for her on my Mac because her scanner driver isn't working properly, creating tiny, grainy images if it works at all.

When I wanted to close the lid on her laptop because we were heading out she shouted "STOP!! I need to switch graphics cards before shutting down or the computer won't boot".

She found her OpenVPN installation to be leaking DNS (again, after fixing it several times).

Her Chrome browser has stopped rendering fonts properly. There are small pixel artifacts, even lines, next to the letters. Before the previous dist-upgrade that wasn't the case but none of the point upgrades since then has fixed the problem (we know what causes this but the fix is tedious to apply and Firefox is working).

Her laptop is running hot. This has always been the case but when the nvidia card is active the heat goes through the roof (hence the constant manual graphics driver switching).

Many days have gone into trying to fix some of these things and some fixes have worked, temporarily, until the next dist-upgrade.

I just can't take this, so I'm withdrawing silently and a bit ashamed into my Apple walled garden.

I'd take just consistent. Linux userspace people seem to have a culture of doing things different from each other just for the sake of it. How many distributions are there? How many of them are just a change in the default package install list of Ubuntu?