Do you think this prevents developers from building good looking, easy to use applications on the platform ? I'm curious to know your thoughts
However I do really appreciate the amount of effort that's gone into improving the usability of Blender and Gimp in recent years, and have given both projects money. I hope they use my money to focus on functionality, reliability, usability etc - I don't care what they look like.
I'd happily pay for a Linux-based laptop that's on par with a Mac. If it had an app store, I'd consider buying some applications.
The thing is, on a day-to-day basis, almost all desktop software that I use is either free, or has a good enough community version. I very rarely come across something that's useful enough that I pay for it.
FYI: What do I pay for? MakeMKV, TurboTax, VMware Fusion, and a disk recovery application.
Here's the challenge: When I think of Linux, I just assume that everything is 100% open-source (and thus free beer) because I assume that every Linux user is a GNU fanboy and wants to compile their own software by rubbing two sticks together. Maybe my biases are outdated or wrong?
Anyway, when your users plan to compile their own software from source, half of the value of paid software is gone! (Commercial software is more than the source code, BTW)
Again, I'd happily pay for a Linux-based laptop on par with Mac.
It's "good enough" for me, but if I was a very heavy user I'd consider paying for MS Office.
Apple did it years ago with OS X, so I don't see why can't it happen with Linux.
In buying sftware, in my experience, the real cost is in my time learing/mastering it. The ultimate example here is a text editor. If sublime was free as in speech I would still be paying to use it. As it is, I lost confidence that team could maintain it long term and have switched to Atom.
What good models are there for free speech consumer/individual developer software to actually make money?
I think Linux itself, and many applications on it, don’t look great because the developers behind those are highly technical and ideological people who can, and do, cater to other technical and ideological people. They seem to think of UI and UX as wasteful things over mere, and many a times complex, functionality (they probably also believe they’re good designers who don’t need help from UI/UX experts). Even larger projects don’t spend enough time or money to use better fonts, design better layouts, use nicer color schemes, design better user experiences, etc. (one glaring example of this is LibreOffice).
Stepping outside Linux while remaining on free software, Matrix is spending time and money on improving UX because the people behind it realize the importance of it. Within the Linux world, the attitude seems to be more of users being expected to qualify to use the system - “the users are capable and will figure it out” seems to be the background thinking.
Distributions like ElementaryOS have tried to charge (or accept, depending on how you see the website) money for more beautifully designed systems than you could get out of the box elsewhere. If larger companies take such an approach or even adopt some of the niceties from such distributions, the Linux world would be much better off.
Another theory is that the UI actually makes up a far larger share of development work than most assume, and that this is therefore the part where limited resources are most felt. A somewhat similar part that somewhat supports this theory is the install/update process.
Regarding ElementaryOS: there's nothing uglier than trying to steal a good design and just failing to even understand it.
> one glaring example of this is LibreOffice
Compared to MS Office? Excel yes, maybe PowerPoint. All other programs are inferior by now.
5 years ago I would have agreed MS Office to be far ahead in functionality and design. I use the 365 version and it is just terrible all around. And users fail even harder to create structured documents than 10 years ago. And helping them is far more difficult now because you just don't have the patience for ridiculous UI quirks of word processors anymore.
Google Docs is better than Word and it is extremely simple, but uses classical design philosophies. It still uses a sensible color palette and a good font. Not that I want to advocate Google too much right now...
GUI tends to be slow, buggy, unresponsive, less configurable, heavy on resources, ... So much code required to manage GUI interface compared to code doing real business stuff. So much wasted clock cycles.
I have a laptop with 64GB of RAM but I don't want to waste this RAM to display "beautiful" GUI apps. I need it for things more useful like VMs, processing big files, ...
I want to be productive. Not wasting my time with the latest UX "experts" enlightenment on what a "modern/futuristic" interface should look like.
BTW, Get off my lawn :P
EDIT: For your question... Would I pay for a more beautiful app? No. Would I pay for a software that have features I need that are not already available in software I use? Yes (don't care about how beautiful it is).
I suspect the incentives in software sales just don't support what makes linux environments actually worthwhile to use.
I'm also cheap as hell, ymmv.
"Beautifully designed" is not important to most users unless they get the source code and need to make changes or enhancements.
"Good looking" is nice, but hard to define depending on what kind of application it is, especially on Linux. What does it mean for a server daemon to be "good looking"? What does it mean for a command line tool to be "good looking"?
"Easy to use" is very important to most users, but is also rather subjective depending on individual user preferences and experience level. For example, I think vim and emacs are both "easy to use" because I have years of experience using both for various tasks. YMMV.
Most users value utility, "easy to use", and "good price" when it comes to paid software:
1) Utility is essential because if the sofware is not useful then what is it good for?
2) "Easy to use" is important, but subjective. Know your intended audience and design to meet their needs. Seek user feedback early and often to tailor your design to match the user's expected ideas of "easy to use".
3) "Good price" varies based on the user expectation and the value proposition that you offer. If the software is extremely useful (high utility) and easy enough to use, users will pay for it.
Ask yourself "What does my software offer that is worth paying for?"
As others have mentioned, the idea of it getting dumped when it turns out it isn't worth the effort, would put me off.
If the price was low enough, and the software simple enough, I might be willing to relax some of those conditions. For example, I have payed a couple of bucks for a simple pixel graphics editor, for which I was ok with the prospect that this is a toy I play with a little and then would likely drop.
I want software that I know, not that I lease. €5 per month means if I stop paying for reason x/y or z, I cannot use Office any more.
It is hard to justify paying for something when you have to spend an appreciable amount of time getting it to work in your set up. Working well out of the box and consistently with updates is the first step.
Let's take an example. Calibre is considered by most who use it a very handy tool. It is also considered by most who use it to be ... not very good to look at. I donate to Calibre because it is useful. Would I donate (or pay) for an app that wasn't quite as useful but was better to look at? Nope.
In case you're wondering whether that would really happen, Android is evidence that it works. The underlying OS is irrelevant.
ps- I make a small monthly donation to Slackware because that's where this all started for me.
I think the lack of a standard way of doing things hurt for-profit development rather than the resistance to pay. For example, it is hard enough to make an application work well with one DE and in Linux there is plenty.
That is why I believe web apps such as VSCode, Discord etc are the saviour for linux desktop. With that, creating a cross platform environment is rather easy.
I would worry that the pool of other people paying for it would be so small that unless the application also worked on Windows or OSX, the development team would not be able to sustain itself. Thus, I wouldn't be willing to pay the more substantial cost: spending my time learning to use it and integrate it into my workflows.
(This is a big part of the reason I moved to OSX when I left uni.)
Cross-platform electron apps would also apply, but generally I'd prefer more native applications, just for performance reasons.
It is also not completely clear to me what you mean by "beautifully designed". For instance, I run Ubuntu wih Gnome 3, and most (all?) of my applications are based on GTK+3. If you were to make an application that is very beautiful in itself, but is not written in GTK, it will stick out. This is going to make the application - in context - uglier than if it was GTK based. Now, if you use GTK, I think the application is going to look like all other GTK application, which nowadays is pretty nice.
In short the answer is: yes, I would pay for an application that solves me a problem, but I may consider not buying it if it is made with a custom toolkit instead of GTK.
EDIT: also, it has to be a one off payment, not recurrent, and I expect it to integrate with the OS (for instance, update by providing a PPA instead of running a custom updater)
Think of the complexities of designing an annual report. This is bread-and-butter for lots of design firms and plenty of web designers would do well to explore the work involved in clearly communicating the most important figures, while not mucking it all up.
So yeah, I don't think it's a problem. Admittedly I guess the bar may be a little higher than it would be on Windows, since the expectation is that a FOSS solution exists on Linux, whereas Windows/Mac users may have been conditioned to expect that good software must necessarily cost money. But if it's worth it, I'll pay.
Actually, I already donate to some applications I either use or think benefit to the whole free software ecosystem (eg. Krita, which is an awesome project, even though I'm more of a Gimp user myself).
Edit: I have to admit I've already spent money on non-FOSS videogames that run well on Linux. I'm not happy, but I don't regret it either.
As it stands, Ubuntu is a pretty desktop. Gnome software looks good and covers most of the basic things you need to do with an OS. I spend most of my time in Chrome, Atom and Steam, all work well.
There's functional software for most tasks and it would be a fairly big undertaking to replace it, so I'm curious what you'd actually be building. If it's just MacOS skinned equivalents to the Gnome/KDE apps then I'd say no, I'm not paying for it. If you create something truly useful then yes, I would.
The beautiful adjective bothers me though.
UX is tricky since it needs a benevolent dictator guiding the aesthetics of the whole system, not just the app.
I don't want it to be just pretty, it needs to be thoroughly thought out, function before looks always. It must play nice with the conventions of the environment it's running in. Avoid unnecessary impositions (stealing focus, modal dialogs, forcing use of a mouse, etc.)
That being said, Apple also releases iOS updates to previous phones, even after they've been paid for.
If this doesn't seem strange to you, then perhaps the same thought process of buying a specific version of software with the expectation that it will work for several years is not unreasonable.
I see no need for a subscription model on every type of software. I pay you once, you ensure that it's written in a way that will continue to work for years to come. End of transaction, as far as I'm concerned.
Traditionally when you 'buy' it gives you access to upgrades and support for a period of time.
For me, that is much preferable, especially compared to a model like creative cloud, which only allows cancellations of the subscription once per year, with no refunds.
- does the job
- has no free equivalent that works
- saves me a lot more time/money than the cost of the product, or doesn't cost over 20€ (this is my personal threshold, for personal work. I would be fine paying more for something that I would use in professionnal work)
- has useful and innovating features (especially if something that has already been made hundreds of times like a music player)
- has a good UX
- has good documentation/support
- has a trial version
- PyCharm
- GitKraken
- Dropbox
- Postman
- ExpanDrive
- ProtonVPNConsistent UI yes, eyecandy no.
Slapping on a theme instead of using the native GTK/KDE theme the user has configured? -1!
Have a well designed UX, make frequent workflows easy to access, but don't hinder the user from customizing certain aspects. Oh and don't crash on me all the time.
People would pay a lot for: 1. SQL ide 2. audio authoring 3. Sketch 4. Photoshop
Be warned though that the trend is for this kind of stuff to move to the web. Figma is a great example. Instead of trying to create a desktop client for Linux, they did some real complex stuff on WebAssembly and built a spectacular web client - https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... and https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-sys...
Figma is paid (and makes a lot of money)
It does not have to be good looking.
Just have to be a sane UX so that I can get it done.
But in reality I already paid for JetBrains while I would never have expected to, so why not?
The only other software I have bought for Linux are games I think
I think it makes sense for professional productivity apps, like CAD stuff.
I don't think basic desktop apps are worth a fee, since no one will buy them with all the free alternatives, but maybe a case can be made with something that ties into managed cloud compute services (like superhuman's use of AI).
I already paid for a Codeweavers Crossover lifetime license.
That's just a consumer saying, not a dev one