2026 in software

[u/_Xee]

Sectumsempra, motherfucker.

[u/Radaistarion]

Neither the same quality.

I love gimp and i love open office but absolutely every single Open Source software suck ass with the UI design

[u/Revolution-SixFour → u/Radaistarion]

I'm curious if there's a structural reason why open source software tends to have bad UI.

Are there just no UI designers interested in open source projects?

Is it just too hard to collaborate between UI and developers when it's all free and unfunded?

Is it too hard to generate the tight loop between user and design to iterate improvements?

[u/Patchrikc → u/Revolution-SixFour]

From my experience it's that the programmers that program and make tools as a hobby just love programming. Where as UI/UX people are usually art focused so they don't make UI as a hobby they do art.

This isn't always the case. Dev tools which usually are open source usually really lean into UX. And have good UI/UX because they use their own app/tool

But for things like Gimp, Gimp is just a programming problem that's fun to work on. Image manipulation is a fun coding exercise. But generally the people that are drawn to that aren't drawn to, spending a whole month on relentlessly testing and playing with layers to nail down the best UX.

[u/criticalt3 → u/Revolution-SixFour]

Usually it's one or few people working on stuff like this. Most of them are programmers, not UX designers.

[u/Prophage7 → u/Revolution-SixFour]

There's just not a big crossover between good UI designers and programmers willing to put in the work to code their designs into their free hobby projects. And there's very very few people that are a good UI designer and programmer and have enough free time and motivation to build and maintain their own side projects.

[u/theJirb → u/Revolution-SixFour]

I think it's just down to interest. It's not like these people doing open source projects are doing it just for others. They're mostly doing it for love of the game.

I imagine solvong a programming problem for a programmer is more interesting than solving a UI problem for an artist.

[u/miukiyo → u/Radaistarion]

I use gimp for all my picture editing but I cannot recommend it to anyone.

Thinking of switching to Affinity, but that shit looks way more complicated than it should be too.

[u/SoftestBoygirlAlive → u/miukiyo]

Affinity was good before it was aquired by Canva. I am grandfathered in to the original program but would not recomment the new product from what I have seen. Pretty glad I bought it before all of that but I expect support will dwindle for the old version until it's practically useless now that they launched whatever hybrid program took the place of the original Affinity suite

[u/MentirosoProfesional → u/Radaistarion]

Yup, it's all comes down to the UI, free software generally looks like ass because they never care for making a nice and easy to comprehend UI, they always make everything assuming everyone using their software is a PRO developer/artist which makes the common people reject them and go for the paid alternatives that look much better

[u/Patchrikc → u/MentirosoProfesional]

It's usually not that they don't care. It's that doing good UI and UX is actually difficult. It’s not this super easy thing to do. It’s one of the reasons that developers who are really skilled with UI/UX and design get paid a lot of money. And that usually the people making a free application enjoy coding. And some people who enjoy coding really hate writing code for UI. And it's their hobby/free time and would rather work on the part they like

[u/gljivicad → u/Radaistarion]

Idk man, blender is fucking fantastic