From my experience, most FOSS software is very user friendly user-centric / user-focused, while proprietary stuff is shit. What is the most notable exception to this rule that comes to your mind?

Edit: With user friendliness, I don’t mean UI design, but things like how the software is handling user privacy, whether it sees its users as users or as money-making cattle, how it handles user feedback, compatibility with other software the user uses (vs. vendor lock-in), configurability, and similar issues.

Edit2: I was made aware that user friendliness is a defined term: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Userfriendliness

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    I guess if you’re looking at it through the lens of a user who actually knows what the fuck they are doing, and not the average, common denominator that the proprietary shit is designed for. 🤷🏻‍♂️

    Proprietary shit is always easier to work with, if you’re just wanting the most basic thing that software does. It’s unfriendly when you try to do more than that with it. FOSS is the other way around in my experience. If you don’t know shit, it won’t help you. But if you’re familiar with what you’re trying to do, FOSS software actually lets you get into it and do all the nitty-gritty without fussing.

    Every piece of free and open source software I use is because I wanted to do something more than what a commercial piece of software would allow me to do.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      While I generally agree, I can think of some examples from the professionally-oriented software field where the commercial stuff fares well, like CAD. I am very out-of-date on Photoshop, but I’d guess that it’d probably also qualify – GIMP isn’t bad, but I can think of only a single example off-the-cuff where it led Photoshop on functionality.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        To be fair, Photoshop is (or was the last time I ever used it) expandable with user plugins. If you want something it doesn’t have, you can add it. Which is also one of the main draws, at least for me, to FOSS; open source means I can add/remove/change things for my own personal usage and needs. That really only applies because I know enough about programming to do it, though.

    • Speiser0@feddit.orgOP
      21·
      1 day ago

      Proprietary shit is always easier to work with, if you’re just wanting the most basic thing that software does.

      Do you have examples?

      My image viewer shows images, my pdf viewer shows pdfs, my file browser shows files, my music player plays music files, and so on. All of them can do a little more, but the basic functionality is just there usually.