UX in FOSS (without the rage)

There was a leaflet here that tried to be about UX in 'Open Source' (and in her case Obsidian which isn/t even open source) software generally sucking, but it devolved into weird race science and TERFy shit. It's since been deleted, but it did make me think about the software I use and enjoy both through the adoration i experience and the pain I suffer, and I want to write about it.

Growing up I was stuck on a lap burning device that claimed to be a Dell laptop but would instead be on my desk that it badly damaged from all the heat. On it I played Payday 2, a heisting shoot 'em up built on a game engine meant for racing games, and Minecraft, both made me interested in coding as modding for those games were so damn easy. I also did a lot of rudimentary photoshop and drawing on a program called paint (dot)net because again, it was so damn easy.

The common thread between these three pieces of software is that they were closed source (arguable about Minecraft, recently theyve fully become source available officially but the source was always easy to decompile and study) yet the user experience was great, and they were launching points for me to further develop my skills and interests as good experiences should. Then too I also used open source software like OBS, Audacity, Notepad++ that also further developed my skills and interests and made me who I am. Those pieces of software also have just damn easy to use interfaces.

Now I daily drive the big three operating systems: Windows, MacOS, Linux two of which are closed, one is open. I draw on both Procreate and Krita, closed and open respectively. I code on Cursor and Zed, same story. I don't mind writing on Google Docs if its stuff that isn't too dearly personal yet I also blog here on Leaflet. Again closed and open. Why? There's almost no friction in all of this most of the time.

My overall point is that as long as I trust the software, it does not matter much to me if the software is closed or open. But put another way, bad UX is defined as friction. What gave me tons of friction lately?

Windows and Linux:

I got a new to me laptop recently from Lenovo that came out just this year. It is a 2 in 1 with hardware from companies (Realtek and of course Lenovo) who are notorious recently for terrible linux support. So of course, I knew going forward my user experience using this laptop on linux will be terrible. Sure you can ultimately blame the hardware, but still, its fine on windows, its bad on linux, why should I be on linux? And there were issues on linux, the display would not rotate which is quite painful for a laptop that can become a tablet, audio was just fucked with the subwoofers not working and volume control being a simple on/off. For a laptop I bought for drawing and me liking to listen to music with the speakers (some of do that!), I just had to get off.

So I reinstalled Windows. And well, the operating system is paternalistic to say the least. Loads of energy saver garbage that would not let me use my laptop to its fullest extent, constantly disconnecting me from my offline Wi-FI connection that was down because of ISP issues that I needed to stay connected to to fucking put out the fires from my own LAN that I had to registry edit to fix, trackpad input having such an annoying delay that I had to registry edit to fix, then after all this, the operating system fucking killed itself.

Great user experience amirite? At this point I thought, "Okay, let me see if someone upstreamed driver fixes for my laptop." I went to Google (closed source!), typed in '14akp10 site:lwn.net', and saw something marvelous:

J-Donald Tournier (1):
ALSA: hda/realtek: Add quirk for Lenovo Yoga 7 2-in-1 14AKP10

J-Donald Tournier? Thank you for making audio usable on my laptop when it's running linux. So plugged in my nvme that has ventoy (open source!) and fedora (open source!), and discovered Gnome even fixed the autorotate issues I have!.

I got to make a fun drawing on my laptop finally on Krita (lovely open source software) too:

The difference here is that anyone can contribute to FOSS. Anyone can just fix shit. Barring that, at least anyone can whine shit that sucks and eventually someone will fix it. The issues I've had with Windows are decades old at this point. I found the regedit for the trackpad on a 11 year old Stack Exchange post. No one is able to complain about this to Microsoft. No one is able to go to github.com/microsoft/windows and just fucking fix it, because its not fucking there. That's why Linux is now an almost flawless experience on my new laptop when literally three weeks ago I found it unusable.

That Leaflet I mentioned at the start outlined a long list of routine issues the author had with some FOSS software (beneath the racist TERFy rage). She blamed it on the entirety of the FOSS community being elitist dirtbags who never care for the opinions of UX designers. I will not deny these elitist dirtbags exist. We've all been RTFM'd before by devs who we've pointed out issues to. But that article never mentioned her actually contributing to FOSS by either bringing up issues or just fixing issues. Just an overall damning of FOSS software that people develop in their spare time after a job that burns the fuck out of them and with the intended audience of just themselves because ultimately the most $ they will make out of it is just a few hundred dollars - if they are lucky. Damning hobbyist software for not being as good as closed source software developed by million/billion/TRILLION dollar companies.

I'm sorry to say, but I don't think you ever understood what UX is.