> Old-school FOSS nerds have a hard time admitting that they tend to be absolutely useless at considering user experience, because then that’s something On Computers that they’re not good at.
New-school FOSS nerds don't seem to understand that all poor user experience concerns are because we are trying to be productive. The new style of of reduced information density and easy-to-remember names isn't useful when you are paid to have production systems up and running. What I need are tools that give me the exact information I need quickly and get the fuck out of my way for everything else.
> It’s such an outdated user-hostile boys club attitude fuelled by insecurity and misplaced and not even well-thought-out elitism, and I’ll never pull any punches when talking about it.
Most people that complain about this put the minimal viable effort into actually learning what they are doing. Somehow I'm the idiot after spending hours of my life to learn this professionally and for wanting expert interfaces. You can call me elite all you like but when the whirlpool of disaster is pulling us both under, I'll be in my elite raft surfing the waves while you struggle.
I've been using Linux for 25 years, spent 6 or so years doing administration type work on large Unix systems, and spent 10 years in a back-end developer role. I've somewhere in the high five figure range of hours spent contributing to FOSS software. More recently, I've gotten formal interface design education and worked in design roles. I am not a 'new school' FOSS nerd by any measure.
> New-school FOSS nerds don't seem to understand that all poor user experience concerns are because we are trying to be productive. The new style of of reduced information density and easy-to-remember names isn't useful when you are paid to have production systems up and running.
The reason you find them more productive is because you already know how to use them. Needlessly reduced information density is usually a bandaid applied to a shitty, confusing interface by a non-designer because they don't know how to organize it to be easily parseable, but still dense. Maybe denser than before. You don't even realize when a good designer has done a good job because it just makes sense— it's so intuitive and useful to cite users that you don't have to think about it. If it's a utilitarian tool that "looks designed," it was probably a non-designer trying to gussy it up, or "work on UX" without realizing that involves a pile of intellectual work before even considering things like white space, colors, and fonts. I can't tell you how many times I've seen developers do something like implement custom color themes in response to people saying their UX sucked; it doesn't even begin to address the problem. It would be like a designer changing the CSS on a web app because people said was performing poorly. At least the designer, when confronted about it, probably wouldn't have the unbridled hubris to claim enough development expertise to tell the developer what's what. I can't tell you how many clueless developers have tried to explain design to me.
A solid understanding of visual hierarchy would solve at least half of FOSS interface problems without changing anything other than layout. The problem is project maintainers who think any attempt to remediate their non-designed cobbled-together interface is an attack by 'designers trying to dumb things down' or 'new school' or other who don't understand what the 'real technologists' do. They either dismiss proposals out of hand, or reflexively bikeshed them into oblivion because they're defensive, and lack the design sophistication to knowledgeably engage. As a senior developer and someone who enrolled in art school as an adult, I know how much more defensive people get about work they're not confident in. When those people are in charge of a project AND have the misguided notion that their "design" (read as cobbled-together assembly of user-facing functionality) is more functional than an expert's design, just uglier, good luck pushing change through.
> Most people that complain about this put the minimal viable effort into actually learning what they are doing. Somehow I'm the idiot after spending hours of my life to learn this professionally and for wanting expert interfaces. You can call me elite all you like but when the whirlpool of disaster is pulling us both under, I'll be in my elite raft surfing the waves while you struggle.
And fraternities keep paddling pledges and making them drink gallons of grain alcohol because they all had to do it too, so everybody else should. Complaining that nobody wants to spend time studying something that they wouldn't have to if it was properly designed is an asinine argument against progress. The only people here who should be chastised for refusing to learn new things are the people who refuse to consider better approaches and insist everybody else learn the same inscrutable incantations they did, because it's easier for them... Because they already know them. Just because you can't imagine productive ways to update these tools to a post-teletype world doesn't mean that nobody can.
> I've been using Linux for 25 years, spent 6 or so years doing administration type work on large Unix systems, and spent 10 years in a back-end developer role. I've somewhere in the high five figure range of hours spent contributing to FOSS software. More recently, I've gotten formal interface design education and worked in design roles. I am not a 'new school' FOSS nerd by any measure.
If you have trouble with tools like dig, you have wasted a lot of fucking time.
Edgy. Asserting that my deep consideration and professional concern with usability means that I don't understand the software is the most deliberately obtuse thing I've read this week, and I browsed Slashdot comments.
Measuring usability by your own comfort level is the reason user-facing "open source alternatives" that aren't foundation-backed with dedicated designers will remain "alternative" in perpetuity. It's also the reason that centralized managed environments like AWS et al will keep replacing in-house self-hosted systems throughout the world, despite the cost, as the need for that functionality exceeds the number of people willing to learn to use the archaic unix admin tool kit circa 1985.
New-school FOSS nerds don't seem to understand that all poor user experience concerns are because we are trying to be productive. The new style of of reduced information density and easy-to-remember names isn't useful when you are paid to have production systems up and running. What I need are tools that give me the exact information I need quickly and get the fuck out of my way for everything else.
> It’s such an outdated user-hostile boys club attitude fuelled by insecurity and misplaced and not even well-thought-out elitism, and I’ll never pull any punches when talking about it.
Most people that complain about this put the minimal viable effort into actually learning what they are doing. Somehow I'm the idiot after spending hours of my life to learn this professionally and for wanting expert interfaces. You can call me elite all you like but when the whirlpool of disaster is pulling us both under, I'll be in my elite raft surfing the waves while you struggle.