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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

This is why in so many problem domains, especially outside technical problems for IT people, proprietary software is the only option, or the only complete option. The best way to ensure people pay close attention to those last areas of fit and finish, and make sure they get attention from people with the different sets of skills needed to do a good job in all of those areas, is to pay them. That means you need a really solid revenue stream, and initially need enough capital up front to get the project going.

I know, there are open source business models which work for some companies and that's true but generally in the sorts of technical problems for IT people. Compared to the IT industry as a whole those are edge cases. They seem more important to us embedded in the IT industry, but compared to the overall multi-trillion dollar global IT industry they're peanuts.

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There's a third category: "enterprise" software, where the people doing the purchasing are completely disconnected from the people using it and the developers. This results in appalling UI disasters like Lotus Notes.

There used to be meme among my friends that we’d express how much a piece of enterprise software sucked by how expensive we thought it cost. For example, “Wow, this sucks. This must cost $500k a year.”

It was scary how close we got to some published prices.

This is why most linux distros have interfaces that are missing minor features and can be frustrating for users who don't have command line experience. For example, why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu? Or how about the fact that you can't get full file paths shown in the default file manager, I often know what directory I want to get to but have to figure out what maze of folders I have to go through to get there.

> Or how about the fact that you can't get full file paths shown in the default file manager, I often know what directory I want to get to but have to figure out what maze of files I have to go through to get there.

Did you mean MacOS?

Windows also has a similar problem: The URL might not actually have the "true" path. It's so infuriating each time I try to get the path to my Downloads folder on Windows, and end up getting "This PC\Downloads". Please. I'm a grown up. Give me the real damn path...

Seriously, Linux has a lot of UX issues, but hiding the full path of files is a problem that plagues literally every single OS file manager. It seems that at some point, all the major OS makers agreed that users are too stupid to understand a file hierarchy, and came up with tricks to hide it.

> "This PC\Downloads"

I find this annoying as well, but it only happens when you use quick access shortcuts. And then once you're in a sub folder it'll display the full path in the title bar provided you turn on "Display the full path in the title bar" in the Folder Options.

Navigating directly to c:\Users\MyUser\Downloads will also show the full path in the title bar.

It seems some of these shortcuts have "special" behaviours in explorer.

According to https://superuser.com/questions/1362386/always-show-absolute... Windows does not mess up the path (yet) if it is a UNC path of the format \\Computer-Name\Users\MyUser so you can pin these folders to Quick Access to benefit from bookmarking folders while keeping the ability to copy folder paths easily.

Thanks for that.

> It seems that at some point, all the major OS makers agreed that users are too stupid to understand a file hierarchy, and came up with tricks to hide it.

And this is why I find myself mostly in the text shell.

Were I to go graphical the minimum I want is a simple address bar that I can override the current path with a specified path at will.

Maybe a tree view like in Windows 95 Explorer just to pretty things up. Some of the modern comforts like thumbnail images would also be welcome.

I wish they would stop insulting their users who have taken the time to understand the underlying technicalities of a file system. All this should be user-configurable in a good file manager. SpaceFM and PcmanFM come closest to what I've specified.

Hm. Cater to the 1% who have shown that they're able to learn complex concepts easily, or support the 99% who would rather not think about internals and use a computer as a simple tool.

That's not a difficult question. The only time it makes sense to expose the internals is if you build a specialist tool for people who like internals exposed.

This means that no, it shouldn't be "user configurable" either. You don't want a combinatorial explosion of states in your UI for a tiny set of users in the general purpose case, and you don't want to create a honking fat tool for specialists who'll only use the specialist path.

The computer industry is discovering what the mechanical tools industry has known for a while: You can build a general purpose tool that's simple & straightforward, or you can make a specialist tool.

Pretty much any specialist will be slightly unhappy with the specialist tool and modify it to their own requirements, but you can't build a specialist tool that makes even close to all specialists happy. The specialists will also continue to use the generalist tool if it gets the job done, but they'll complain every step of the way.

Being able to see the path in Finder doesn't seem like something that only 1% of users would want, though. I've seen "normal people" get very frustrated because they couldn't figure out where they saved a file. They saved it in a folder called "Documents", but they then tried to find it in a different folder also called "Documents". Hardly seems problematic to show the path to the folder.

After reading r/talesfromtechsupport for a while, it's apparent that there are quite a few people who are too stupid to understand a file hierarchy.

Seems unlikely, given that in MacOS you could e.g.:

- Drag and drop the file into a terminal to insert the path

- Copy and paste the file into the terminal, which inserts the path

- Press Command+I to show a popover describing the path to the file

- Enable the "show path bar" option in the Finder's "view" menu, which will show a nice graphical representation of the path to the current location at the bottom of the window (which lets you copy the POSIX path to each item)

- For more advanced users, run the command `defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES` to show the full path to the current folder in each Finder window title

> defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

THANK YOU!

Here's one more:

- use columns view

Also in the same ballpark, you can right-click on the window title and see a dropdown with the parent directories. Which primarily lets you navigate to them.

Ah, and also if you alt-rightclick on an item, you can copy its path to the clipboard. Or you can open the ‘Edit’ menu with alt pressed and copy the path to the current folder. Apparently there's even a shortcut for this.

MacOS has been a pain for me with this; in some of the later revisions it's always a pain to get around to the right place. I don't spend time learning Mac in depth; I'm mostly a Unix person, using a Mac as just a terminal to the stuff I actually deal with (which mostly is web based or run on a datacenter somewhere.)

It's certainly fine if you work a lot locally with the Mac; but for me, the cost-effective thing has been to fumble around each time (since I only do this a few times a year) rather than memorize handling that I use so seldom.

The parent comment was complaining about that being impossible in Linux before the conversation switched to Mac. Which is it?

Also, nothing to memorize about copy & paste or drag & drop. I would say you’re used to Linux GUIs not doing what you expect so the obvious solutions aren’t even considered.

Dragging a file from a file-browsing application into a different application (like the terminal) just to get the path is unintuitive and not obvious.

Showing the Finder path bar is the more obvious option. Nautilus, the file browser on some Linux distros, supports this as well.

Dolphin, in KDE land, has this functionality as well.

Not any application, the operation is “convert this thing i am dragging into text” for which the result is obvious.

> Also, nothing to memorize about copy & paste or drag & drop.

To a terminal. I thought Linux was the one where you needed to open a terminal to do basic things, yet from my experience it's usually MacOS that needs a terminal for such basic things as turning off mouse acceleration.

Where did Linux enter into it? I just don't typically use GUIs much, and I use the Mac GUI much more than I use Linux GUIs. But I've used command lines since I started with computers (before GUIs were common.)

On linux side:

- Drag and drop the file into a terminal to insert the path

- Copy and paste the file into the terminal, which inserts the path

- Press Alt + Enter to see details describing the path to the file

- Press Ctrl+L to see full path. Or just use better file manager like Nemo

> Did you mean MacOS?

In macos I don't have to edit random .conf files in system/application directories just to make my wifi work correctly. The graphical UI is configurable enough that I rarely need to modify anything outside of my normal user directories.

Where as in ubuntu the forums/stack overflow usually say "go to this file at /sys/whatever and write in this". Hence the need for full file paths.

Oh really? MacOS is fine when things works, but when they don't it's pretty much the same as linux, for better or for worse.

Quick example, because I'm trying to make my nas usable on a mac and it's given me a headache.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208209

On your NAS, put /.DS_Store/ into veto criteria.

Really, don't you?

The first thing I do on any Mac is to drop into Terminal to run this:

    defaults delete com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs

And don't get me started on the wiping `/private/var/db/mds/messages/${UID}/se_SecurityMessages` after each update, without which SMB doesn't work.

I mean, I just learned that to show the path in the title of the Finder window I need to run:

    defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Please tell me how to turn off mouse acceleration in MacOS without opening a terminal, because I didn't find another way.

It's quite a basic thing, most games include it in their settings yet it doesn't seem important enough to have a setting in the OS itself.

View/Show Path Bar.

My most-used MacOS shortcuts for navigation:

Terminal -> Finder:

    open .

Finder -> Terminal:

I made a Bash function:

    function cdf {
        DIR=$(osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to POSIX path of (insertion location as alias)')
        cd "$DIR"
    }

At least in KDE's default file manager, if you click on the right of the "prettied up" location view, it gives you a plain old text-based path field.

And in most KDE and Gnome file explorers and open/save dialogs, Ctrl+L shows the whole path in plain text.

Same thing in GNOME files if you press ctrl+l. Just like you would to get to Firefox's URL.

Uh.. I get to Firefox's URL by clicking on the address field.

Ctrl+L works on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Windows Explorer FYI

Okay?

I just mean it's a seemingly ubiquitous hotkey so you may find it useful to memorize it

Right, and I mean there's no way to discover that hotkey if you don't already know it, which is why requiring it for a common UI function is bad design.

Well, to be fair it is entirely optional.

> Right, and I mean there's no way to discover that hotkey if you don't already know it

True of any hotkey.

> which is why requiring it for a common UI function is bad design.

it isn't required.

So how do you get the path field in the Gnome file dialog without ctrl-L?

Pretty sure it's a setting in gnome-tweaks. If it's not, it's not any harder than MacOS at least.

When you opened an issue on the respective but trackers what did they answer?

Thank you for posting this, a thousand times. It really clearly illuminates precisely why in open source the interests of the user and the developer are fundamentally differently aligned than in commercial software. Not miss-aligned necessarily, but differently aligned.

In open source the developer has the power, they get to decide what they work on and nobody can tell them otherwise. The best a user can do is post a begging letter in a bug tracker. It doesn't matter what the user thinks, even a majority of users, all they can do is ask.

In commercial software it's the user putting bread on the developer's table. The user feeds and clothes the developer's children, and/or pays for their supply of mountain dew. If the user wants something, bye and large they get it, or at least they have a pretty solid chance of it more often than not. A vote for a feature speaks a lot more convincingly when it's backed up by a wallet.

There's nothing wrong with open source or free and libre software. It's great, I love it, but a lot of it's proponents seem to think proprietary software is some sort of crime and genuinely don't understand why proprietary software dominates so completely in so many domains outside of IT infrastructure.

Good luck convincing a commercial software developer to apply the changes you want. It's rare that a company, commercial or not, changes software because of what customers want (marketing department koolaid doesn't apply).

Developers know best, even when they don't, because they're the ones doing the actual work. But in the FOSS ecosystem you have: i) the freedom to do the changes yourself ii) the freedom to offer help with design, documentation, ideas iii) a public bug tracking and issues manager

Let me know when you can do this commercially.

On a tangent: it is indeed a crime to use commercial software when there are libre alternatives; every use moves the needle one tick deeper towards Eternal September

Is it also a crime to create and sell software, even if that's the only path available to you that will result in the product you see a need for?

You answered yourself with your own question, best regards

> Developers know best, even when they don't, because they're the ones doing the actual work.

For me, a large part of the fun of being a developer is enabling others to do stuff they otherwise couldn't. As such we absolutely entertain feature requests and similar, and implement a lot of them.

When sales come back from a sales presentation laughing and telling of jaws hitting the floor, it's almost always due to features that started as a suggestion from one of our users.

Very often though the feature requests are trying to solve XY problems. Often there's a better route to achieving what the user wants, which almost always is some way of avoiding redundant work or other workflow simplifications.

Us devs often do know best when it comes to edge cases and limitations, and about other use-cases that this particular user haven't considered.

However most requests are born from something real, so we will usually inquire what the user is after, in an effort to determine the impact and alternate routes. I might even contact other customers who I know use that module or have a similar work flow and ask them what they think.

And based on that implement changes that make the program better not just for that user but for all our customers.

If you don't have the skills to make the open-source changes you want yourself, but you have the money to make it happen, there is nothing stopping you hiring a developer to build the patch that you need. I don't know of a reliable way to do that with proprietary software.

I've worked for two ISVs who's business model was partly based on exactly this. Their customers would directly fund the development of custom features they needed. The first company developed cellular radio network planning software, the other developed business middleware.

> there is nothing stopping you hiring a developer to build the patch that you need

unless it's accepted upstream, you've got an ongoing maintenance problem on your hands. getting an idea in isn't always just about time/resources/money. if your idea doesn't fit their 'vision', it won't be accepted, regardless of how much you have funded your feature. do you now take on maintaining a fork? sometimes the answer might be 'yes', but I suspect in most cases it's going to be 'no'.

And the decade-plus-old bugs I've filed on Google's various tools say what?

(I've given up either reporting bugs or, where at all possible, using their software, as it's abundantly clear my interests and theirs are not in the least aligned.)

How much did you pay Google? Thanks for lending support to my argument that paying for software is the best way to ensure the user and developer's interests are aligned.

Even if you pay annual maintenance fee with 4 or 5 zeros at the end, your bugs are going to be ignored, especially if they are feature requests.

If they are critical bugs, they might or might not be addressed.

Some people pay for Google apps on a custom domain ($12/month exactly), but I don't expect Google to even answer the phone since that's small change for you.

At a certain scale (much smaller than Google's, probably already at about 100 customers) it's impossible to please _all_ users of your software, so you try to please the majority. And whatever you change, there will always be that 'one guy' whose workflow will break.

You were specifically contrasting open-source and proprietary (commercial) software.

The Google model dominates the proprietary world presently, and even long-term shrinkwrap / clickwrap vendors such as Microsoft are shifting in whole or part to advertising-supported software.

What I pay for Google software is indirect, but given a roughly $100 billion global spend on online advertising, allocated largely among the world's richest 1 billion people, that amounts to about $100/year for the privilege of tools which frustrate rather than delight me.

As I've described in "The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User", odds are strong that mass-market software of any stripe, including proprietary whether paid, subscription, or advertising-supported, will fail to address power-user / elite-user interests:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

I think the things you are complaining about are more personal preferences and being accustomed to Mac / Windows system.

> why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu? > how about the fact that you can't get full file paths shown in the default file manager,

Is it any worse than needing to find the setting to display file extension in windows?

I am on Cinnamon desktop as it's a bit old school and predictable (for people who have been around since windows 98). I right click a file and I have an option to create a link. And my default file manager shows the full file path in the address bar . So I don't think it's a Linux problem rather than a Gnome 3 problem. But I am sure plenty of people don't mind Gnome 3 (everyone else at my work used the standard Ubuntu desktop.

>why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu?

Blame GNOME 3. After a decade it's still lacking polish everywhere. The day Canonical decided to drop the ball on Unity was a sad day.

> proprietary software is the only option

What do you mean by "proprietary" in this context? I believe that the availability of the software's source code to its users is unrelated to the fact of whether the actual development of such software is paid or not.

Moreover, free and open source software (free as in "freedom", not necessarily free as in "free beer"), makes it generally simpler for the regular users to provide input regarding the features they need changed. So, in a way, it also helps to achieve the goal you describe:

> The best way to ensure people pay close attention to those last areas of fit and finish...

> simpler for the regular users to provide input regarding the features they need changed

Don't get me wrong, a good interface needs to take user feedback into account. But trying to accommodate the union of all features needed by all users is a recipe for madness. Somewhere you need an engineer, PM, designer, CxO, or someone who can make judgement calls and decide which user needs are more important than others.

>I believe that the availability of the software's source code to its users is unrelated to the fact of whether the actual development of such software is paid or not.

This is true, and I've seen that happen too, one of the companies I worked with would sell source licenses to customers, and as I understand it this was very common in the mainframe business going way back. The software vendor retained rights to sell and distribute the software though, that's what I mean by proprietary.

I've seen these arguments for open source and libre software before many times, but there's a huge discontinuity between the theory and what actually happens in reality. In the real world there are tens of thousands of small and large software houses producing niche software for diverse use cases for businesses all over the world. Hundreds of niche engineering design, test and optimisation applications, B2B services, audio and video tools, chemical engineering tools, automation and industrial control systems, booking and billing systems, here are an almost infinite variety. Most of them are only known to people actually in these niche specialisms. In that world customers paying for customisations is stock in trade, it's entirely normal. In fact the company I'm at right now is paying the vendor for customisations to our incident and change management ticketing system.

In comparison open source, outside nerdy IT oriented tech projects, might as well not exist. It's minuscule. Barely even a footnote.

> proprietary software is the only option, or the only complete option.

If only that were true. I've watched a completely non-IT person work with both vanilla Gnome 3 and Windows 10; they found the former far more intuitive and unobtrusive (not looking at the individual apps, just the basic desktop UI). Proprietary design-by-committee doesn't necessary make for better solutions: hence the numerous complaints recently from people (often with accessibility issues) trying to book vaccination slots on government websites.

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