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

  • jj4211@lemmy.world
    10·
    2 days ago

    Guess we have very different experiences.

    I work with a commercial software development group and they suck

    Not one of the developers had a shred of experience aligned with their target market segment. There is a design team, but they also don’t know the segment, but the division between design, architecture and development leads to a clunky mess.

    Professionals in the target market are frequently higher paid than the developers, so management refuses to fund hiring actual experts in the field, and instead just nominates seemingly arbitrary people in the organization to stand in for the “customer” in all those processes that should actually include customers.

    So when they are disappointed with losing to a number of open source solutions in the field, they just accuse customers of being cheap rather than facing the reality they have ivory towered themselves into a corner.

    Maybe for some markets it is different, but now those markets face the reality that the vendor is trying to game then for subscription revenue and add ons and is making deliberately customer hostile change for the sake of gaming the revenue in the short term.

    Now there are certainly markets with no FOSS option, as just no one is interested in developing. I suppose in markets with OSS software there’s may sometimes be a divide between what the developer inclined half of the market would want for themselves versus those not minded toward development, and that could be a weakness.

    Ultimately I’ll always remember one review for an open source project. They stated that at first they were underwhelmed because it felt like software they’d write for themselves, and not as flashy as commercial alternatives. Then they realized they would write that software because the commercial software was not for for purpose despite how nice it was, and the project was just they easy they wanted it.