Free software scares normal people
danieldelaney.net318 points by cryptophreak 6 hours ago
318 points by cryptophreak 6 hours ago
Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one.
Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I just need ..." is difficult. It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure, to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options or schizming into other projects.
Simply put, it is a desirable state, but an unstable one.
Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.) In dev work, the complexity is obvious, and that makes it easy for outsiders to understand— they look at the code we’re writing and say “wow you can read that?!” I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. With interface design, everybody knows what a button does and what a text field is for, and developers know more than most about the tools used to create interfaces, so the language seems simple. The problems you need to solve with that language are complex and while failure is obvious, success is much more nebulous and user-specific. So much of what good interfaces convey to users is implied rather than expressed, and that’s a tricky task.
It’s also about keeping things simple, hierarchical, and very predictable. These do not go hand in hand with the feature creep of collaborative FOSS projects, as others point out here.
In the 90s I did a tech writing gig documenting some custom software a company had built for them by one of the big consultancy agencies. It was a bit of a nightmare as the functionality was arranged in a way that reflected the underlying architecture of the program rather than the users’ workflows. Although I suppose if they’d written the software well, I wouldn’t have had as many billable hours writing documentation.
IMO they just don’t care enough. They want people to use it but it is not the end of world if it stays niche
> I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is.
Not at all. Talented human artists still impress me as doing the same level of deep "wizardry" that programmers are stereotyped with.
Trust me, there are enough people here that believe that.
Other engineering disciplines are simpler because you can only have complexity in three dimensions. While in software complexitiy would be everywhere.
Crazy to believe that
It always amazes me how even just regular every day users will come to me with something like this:
Overly simplified example:
"Can you make this button do X?" where the existing button in so many ways is only distantly connected to X. And then they get stuck on the idea that THAT button has to be where the thing happens, and they stick with it even if you explain that the usual function of that button is Y.
I simplified it saying button, but this applies to processes and other things. I think users sometimes think picking a common thing, button or process that sort of does what they want is the right entry point to discuss changes and maybe they think that somehow saves time / developer effort. Where in reality, just a new button is in fact an easier and less risky place to start.
I didn't say that very well, but I wonder if that plays a part in the endless adding of complexity to UI where users grasp onto a given button, function, or process and "just" want to alter it a little ... and it never ends until it all breaks down.
I always tell clients (or users): "If you bring your car to the mechanic because it's making a noise and tell them to replace the belt, they will replace the belt and you car will still make the noise. Ask them to fix the noise."
In other words, if you need expert help, trust the expert. Ask for what you need, not how to do it.
If you tell the mechanic "my car is making a noise, fix the belt please" and then they just fix the belt, that's on the mechanic as well.
In my experience, this is a communication issue, not a logical or technical or philosophical issue. Nor the result of a fixation caused by an idea out of the blue.
In my experience it may be solved by both parties spending the effort and time to first understand what is being asked... assuming they are both willing to stomach the costs. Sometimes it isn't worth it, and it's easier to pacify than respectfully and carefully dig.
You are describing a form of the XY problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
Don't fall into the trap of responding to the user's request to do Y a certain way. They are asking you to implement Y, and they think they know how it should be implemented, but really they would be happy with Y no matter how you did it. https://xyproblem.info/
Yeah I often will ask for a quick phone call and try to work from the top down, or the bottom up depending on the client. Getting to the thing we're solving often leads to a different problem description and later different button or concept altogether.
Sometimes it's just me firing up some SQL queries and discovering "Well this happened 3 times ... ever ..." and we do nothing ;)
On the other hand, I've not uncommonly seen this idea misused: Alice asks for Y, Bob says that it's an XY problem and that Alice really wants to solve a more general problem X with solution Z, Alice says that Z doesn't work for her due to some detail of her problem, Bob browbeats Alice over "If you think Z won't work, then you're wrong, end of story", and everyone argues back and forth over Z instead of coming up with a working solution.
Sometimes the best solution is not the most widely-encouraged one.
Bob saying "you should use Z end of story" it's just as a hardheaded and unhelpful as Bob saying "X doesn't do that end of story".
I think the XY problem thing is likely very common. But developers are tending to use the term in a very dismissive way, superior way now.
The contributors of free software tend to be power users who want to ensure their use case works. I don't think they're investing a lot of thought into the 80/20 use case for normal/majority or users or would risk hurting their workflow to make it easier for others
True; that's why we have companies with paid product who devote a lot of their time - arguably majority - to make the exact interfaces people want and understand:) it's a ton, a ton of difficult work, for which there is little to no incentive in the free software ecosystem
And this is precisely why desktop Linux has not knocked off Windows or MacOS.
I'd argue that's more because the average person has no interest in installing a new OS, or even any idea what an OS is.
Most people just keep the default. When the default is Linux (say, the Steam Deck), most people just keep Linux.
And that's fine. Those users who want something that's not like desktop Linux have plenty of options.
And increasingly it doesn't matter because they just live in a browser anyway.
Which also makes it easier than ever for more users to run Linux as a desktop OS :)
> contributors of free software tend to be power users
or, simply put, nerds
it takes both a different background, approach and skillset to design ux and interface
if anything FOSS should figure out how to attract skilled artists so majority of designs and logos doesn't look so blatantly amateurish.
My guess is that, as has always been, the pool of people willing to code for free on their own time because it's fun is just much larger than the people willing to make icons for software projects on their own time because they think it's fun.
Graphic designers and artists get ripped off, all the time; frequently, by nerds, who tend to do so, in a manner that insults the value of the artist's work.
It's difficult to get those kinds of creatives to donate their time (trust me on this, I'm always trying).
I'm an ex-artist, and I'm a nerd. I can definitively say that creating good designs, is at least as difficult as creating good software, but seldom makes the kind of margin that you can, from software, so misappropriation hurts artists a lot more than programmers.
This is a weird thread for me to read, as someone who a) works primarily with developer tooling (and not even GUI tooling, I write cryptography stuff usually!), b) is very active in a vibrant community of artists that care about nerd software projects.
I don't, as a rule, ever ask artists to contribute for free, but I still occasionally get gifted art from kind folks. (I'm more than happy to commission them for one-off work.)
Artists tragically undercharge for their labor, so I don't think the goal should be "coax them into contributing for $0" so much as "coax them into becoming an available and reliable talent pool for your community at an agreeable rate". If they're enthusiastic enough, some might do free work from time to time, but that shouldn't be the expectation.
It’s a long story, in my case.
There’s a very good reason for me to be asking for gratis work. I regularly do tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of work for free.
Why should they work for pay on free software? Nobody expects to be paid to work on the software itself. Yet artists expect to be treated differently.
If it is your job, then go do it as a job. But we all have jobs. Free software is what we do in our free time. Artists don't seem to have this distinction. They expect to be paid to do a hobby.
Doing a pro graphic design treatment is lot more than just "drawing a few pictures," and picking a color palette.
It usually involves developing a design language for the app, or sometimes, for the whole organization (if, like the one I do a lot of work for, it's really all about one app). That's a big deal.
Logo design is also a much more difficult task than people think. A good logo can be insanely valuable. The one we use for the app I've done a lot of work on, was a quick "one-off," by a guy who ended up running design for a major software house. It was a princely gift.
> Doing a pro graphic design treatment is lot more than just "drawing a few pictures," and picking a color palette.
Are you quoting someone? Yeah it's a real job, and so is programming. I don't think anyone in this conversation is being dismissive about either job.
It's just more common for artists to do small commission work on the side of a real job. 30 dollars for something is basically a donation or tip in my view, and the community can crowd fund for it the same way bug bounties work I think?
> Yet artists expect to be treated differently.
Because it's a different job!
Your post is like asking, "Why is breathing free but food costs money?"
Either you're implying that people should code for free, or your analogy is so vague as to be useless.
Yeah it's a different job but they're both jobs. Why should one be free and one not be free?
Because programmers consent to programming for free. That fact does not, in any way, obligate anyone else to.
The question/skepticism is why the programmers are consenting to this but not the artists.
Most fields just don’t have the same culture of collaborative everyone-wins that software does. Artists don’t produce CC art in anywhere close to the same influence as engineers produce software. This is probably due to some kind of compounding effect available in software that isn’t available in graphics.
Software people love writing software to a degree where they’ll just give it away. You just won’t find artists doing the same at the same scale. Or architects, or structural engineers. Maybe the closest are some boat designs but even those are accidental.
It might just be that we were lucky to have some Stallmans in this field early.
I think the collaborative nature of open source software dev is unlike anything else. I can upload some software in hopes that others find is useful and can build on top of it, or send back improvements.
Not sure how that happens with a painting, even a digital one.
Fonts are an interesting case. The field of typography is kind of migrating from the "fuck you, pay me" ethic of the pure design space into a more software-like "everyone wins" state, with plenty of high-quality open-source fonts available, whereas previously we had to make do with bitmap-font droppings from proprietary operating systems, Bitstream Vera, and illegal-to-redistribute copies of Microsoft's web font pack.
I think this is because there are plenty of software nerds with an interest in typography who want to see more free fonts available.
Much larger but not non-existent, people post their work (including laborious stuff like icon suites and themes) on art forums and websites for no gain all the time.
Going back to the winxp days there was a fairly vibrant group of people making unofficial themes for it, although I think that was helped by the existence of tools (from Stardock?) specialized on that task and making it approachable if your skill set didn't align perfectly.
UI != icons.
UI and UX are for all intents lost arts. No one is sitting on the other side of a 2 way mirror any more and watching people use their app...
This is how we get UI's that work but suck to use. This is how we allow dark patterns to flourish. You can and will happily do things your users/customers hate if it makes a dent in the bottom of the eye and you dont have to face their criticisms directly.
> UI and UX are for all intents lost arts. No one is sitting on the other side of a 2 way mirror any more and watching people use their app...
Which is also why UI/UX on open source projects are generally going to suck.
There's certainly no money to pay for that kind of experiment.
And if you include telemetry, people lose their goddamn minds, assuming the open source author isn't morally against it to begin with.
The result is you're just getting the author's intuitive guesswork about UI/UX design, by someone who is likely more of a coder than a design person.
Unless you get super invasive, telemetry will tell you how often a feature is used but I don't think it'll help much with bad and confusing layouts.
UX and interface designers are also nerds.
i think the bigger issue is that the power users usecases are different from the non-power users. not a skillset problem, but an incentive one
I'm optimistic that the rise of vibe coding will allow the people who understand the user's wants and needs to fix the world's FOSS UIs.
I have been beating this drum for many years. There are some big cultural rifts and workflow difficulties. Unless FOSS products are run by project managers rather than either developers or designers, it’s a tough nut. Last I looked, gimp has been really tackling this effort more aggressively than most.
I am not convinced bad UI is either a FOSS issue, or solved by having project managers. I know very non-tech people who struggle with Windows 11, for example. I do not like MS Office on the rare occasions I have used it on other people's machines. Not that impressed by the way most browser UIs are going either.
gimp has been my goto when I want to explain bad ui, developer designed ui, or just typical foss ui I'm glad they're fixing it. It's also my image editor of choice.
It's my belief that much of this flavor of UI/UX degradation can be avoided by employing a simple but criminally underutilized idea in the software world (FOSS portion included), which is feature freezing.
That is, either determine what the optimal set of features is from the outset, design around that, and freeze or organically reach the optimium and then freeze. After implementing the target feature set, nearly all engineering resources are dedicated to bug fixes and efficiency improvements. New features can be added only after passing through a rigorous gauntlet of reviews that determine if the value of the feature's addition is worth the inherent disruption and impact to stability and resource consumption, and if so, approaching its integration into the existing UI with a holistic approach (as opposed to the usual careless bolt-on approach).
Naturally, there are some types of software where requirements are too fast-moving for this to be practical, but I would hazard a guess that it would work for the overwhelming majority of use cases which have been solved problems for a decade or more and the required level of flux is in reality extremely low.
Spot on. Defending simplicity takes a lot of energy and commitment. It is not sexy. It is a thankless job. But doing it well takes a lot of skill, skill that is often disparaged by many communities as "political non sense"[1]. It is not a surprise that free software world has this problem.
But it is not a uniquely free software world problem. It is there in the industry as well. But the marketplace serves as a reality check, and kills egregious cases.
[1] Granted, "Political non sense" is a dual-purpose skill. In our context, it can be used both for "defending simplicity", as well as "resisting meaningful progress". It's not easy to tell the difference.
The cycle repeats frequently in industry. New waves of startups address a problem with better UX, and maybe some other details like increased automated and speed using more modern architectures. But feature-creep eventually makes the UX cumbersome, the complexity makes it hard to migrate to new paradigms or at least doing so without a ton of baggage, so they in turn are displaced by new startups.
> It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure...
I'd say it's even more than you've stated. Not only for defending an existing project, but even for getting a project going in the first place a dictator* is needed.
I'm willing to be proven wrong, and I know this flies in the face of common scrum-team-everybody-owns approaches.
* benevolent or otherwise
Good points, but to add to the sources of instability ... a first time user of a piece of software may be very appreciative of its simplicity and "intuitiveness". However, if it is a tool that they spend a lot of time with and is connected to a potentially complex workflow, it won't be long before even they are asking for "this little extra thing".
It is hard to overestimate the difference between creating tools for people who use the tools for hours every day and creating tools for people who use tools once a week or less.
And why exactly should free software prioritise someone's first five minutes (or first 100 hours, even) over the rest of the thousands of hours they might spend with it?
I see people using DAWs, even "pro" ones made by companies presumably interested in their bottom lines. In all cases I have no idea how to use it.
Do I complain about intuitiveness etc? Of course not. I don't know how to do something. That's my problem. Not theirs.
> And why exactly should free software prioritise someone's first five minutes (or first 100 hours, even) over the rest of the thousands of hours they might spend with it?
Well, if people fail at that first five minutes, the subsequent thousand hours most often never happens.
Right. For most people, gimp is not only overkill but also overwhelming. It's hard to intuit how to perform even fairly simple tasks. But for someone who needs it it's worth learning.
The casual user just wants a tool to crop screenshots and maybe draw simple shapes/lines/arrows. But once they do that they start to think of more advanced things and the simple tool starts to be seen as limiting.
But the linked article addresses that. They're not advocating for removing the full-feature UI, they just advise having a simple version that does the one thing (or couple of things) most users want in a simple way. Users who want to do more can just use the full version.
Users don't want "to do more". They want to do "that one extra thing". Going from the "novice" version to the "full version" just to get that one extra thing is a real problem for a lot of people. But how do you address this as a software designer?
I'm not a coder, so I'm not going to pretend that this solution is easy to implement (it might be, but I wouldn't assume so), but how about allowing you to expose the "expert" options just temporarily (to find the tool you need) and then allow adding that to your new "novice plus" custom menus? I.e., if you use a menu option from the expert menu X number of times, it just shows up even though your default is the novice view.
Progressive disclosure? If you know your audience, you probably know what most people want, and then the usual next step up for that "one extra thing". You could start with the ultra-simple basic thing, then have an option to enable the "next step feature". If needed you could have progressive options up to the full version.
> The casual user just wants a tool to crop screenshots and maybe draw simple shapes/lines/arrows. But once they do that they start to think of more advanced things and the simple tool starts to be seen as limiting.
Silksong Daily News went from videos of a voiceover saying "There has been no news for today" over a static image background to (sometimes) being scripted stop-motion videos.
It does shed light on a possibly better solution though that gives the user a list of simple, common use case options or access to the full interface.
I do feel quite strongly that this should be implemented in the app though.
There must be examples of this approach already being used?
> to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options
Microsoft for a loooong time had that figured out pretty well:
- The stuff that people needed every day and liked to customize the most was directly reachable. Right click on the desktop, that offered a shortcut to the CPL for display and desktop symbols.
- More detailed stuff? A CPL that could be reached from the System Settings
- Stuff that was low level but still needed to be exposed somewhat? msconfig.
- Stuff that you'd need to touch very rarely, but absolutely needed the option to customize it for entire fleets? Group Policy.
- Really REALLY exotic stuff? Registry only.
In the end it all was Registry under the hood, but there were so many options to access these registry keys depending what level of user you were. Nowadays? It's a fucking nightmare, the last truly decent Windows was 7, 10 is "barely acceptable" in my eyes and Windows 11 can go and die in a fire.
A lot of this type of stuff boils down to what you're used to.
My wife is not particularly tech savvy. She is a Linux user, however. When we started a new business, we needed certain applications that only run on Windows and since she would be at the brick and mortar location full time, I figured we could multi-purpose a new laptop for her and have her switch to Windows.
She hated it and begged for us to get a dedicated Windows laptop for that stuff so she could go back to Linux.
Some of you might suggest that she has me for tech support, which is true, but I can't actually remember the last time she asked me to troubleshoot something for her with her laptop. The occasions that do come to mind are usually hardware failure related.
Obviously the thing about generlizations is that they're never going to fit all individuals uniformly. My wife might be an edge case. But she feels at home using Linux, as it's what she's used to ... and strongly loathed using Windows when it was offered to her.
I feel that kind of way about Mac vs PC as well. I am a lifelong PC user, and also a "power user." I have extremely particular preferences when it comes to my UI and keyboard mappings and fonts and windowing features. When I was forced to use a Mac for work, I honestly considered looking for a different position because it was just that painful for me. Nothing wrong with Mac OS X, a lot of people love it. But I was 10% as productive on it when compared to what I'm used to... and I'm "old dog" enough that it was just too much change to be able to bear and work with.
One summer in middle school our family computer failed. We bought a new motherboard from Microcenter but it didn’t come with a Windows license, so I proposed we just try Ubuntu for a while.
My mom had no trouble adjusting to it. It was all just computer to her in some ways.
Same, my mom ran Linux for years in the Vista days cuz her PC was too slow for Windows. She was fine. She even preferred Libreoffice over the Office ribbon interface.
Familiarity is massively undersold in the Linux desktop adoption discussion. Having desktop environments that are near 1:1 clones of the commercial platforms (preferably paired with a distribution that's designed to be bulletproof and practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window) would go so far for making Linux viable for users sitting in the middle of the bell curve of technical capability.
It's one of those situations where "close enough" isn't. The fine details matter.
What do you see as wrong or missing "fine details" in, say, Cinnamon?
Assuming that the point of comparison is Windows (since it’s a rough XP/7 analogue), any difference in behaviors, patterns, or conventions that might differ from what a long time Windows user would expect, including things that some might write off as insignificant. In particular, anything relating to the user’s muscle memory (such as key shortcuts, menu item positions, etc) needs to match.
The DE needs to be as close to a drop-in replacement as possible while remaining legally distinct. The less the user needs to relearn the better.
For example, practically every text box in practically every Linux system handles ctrl+backspace by deleting a word. This clashes with a Windows user's expectation that ctrl+backspace deletes a word in some system applications while inserting a small square character in others.
People want features, and they're willing to learn complicated UIs to get them. A software that has hyper simplified options has a very limited audience. Take his example: we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file, yet whose understanding of video amounts to wanting it to be "normal" so they can play it. For such a person, there are two paths: become familiar enough with video formats that you understand exactly what you want, and correspondingly can manipulate a tool like handbrake to get it, or stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works. A software that appeals to the weird purgatory in the middle necessarily has a very limited audience. In practice, this small audience is served by websites. Someone searches "convert x to y" and a website comes up that does the conversion. Knowing some specialized software that does that task (and only that one narrow task) puts you so far into the domain of the specialist that you can manage to figure out a specialist tool.
> Free audio editing software that requires hours of learning to be useful for simple tasks.
To be fair, the Audacity UX designer made a massive video about the next UX redesign and how he tried to get rid of "modes" and the "Audacity says no" problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38
So this problem should get better in the future. Good UX (doesn't necessarily have to have a flashy UI, but just a good UX) in free software is often lacking or an afterthought.
UX is the biggest debt.
You're making application for yourself and somewhere down pipeline you decide that it could benefit others, so you make it open-source.
People growl at you "It's ugly UX but nice features" when it was originally designed for your own tastes. The latter, people growl at you for "not having X feature, but nice UX".
Your own personal design isn't one-fits-all and designing mocks takes effort. Mental strain and stress; pleasing folks is hard. You now continue developing and redesign the foundations.
A theming engine you think. This becomes top-priority as integration of such becomes a PITA when trying to couple it with future features later.
That itself becomes a black hole in how & schematics. So now you're forever doomed in creating something you never desired for the people who will probably never use it. This causes your project to fail but at least you have multiple revisions of the theming engine. Or you strike it lucky and gain a volunteer.
The problem with the new Audacity isn't the new version, it's that it replaces the old version. If the new version came out but it was called "DARing" and Audacity continued to be the thing we have now, people might question the name but no other eyes would be batted.
Pre-emptive anti-snark: yes, the old version will still exist... if you can dig up the right github commit and still make it compile in 2030.
Well, Tantacrul did answer that objection: it just shows you a popup dialog on first start: "which theme do you want" (colorful or colorless, light / dark) and "which experience do you want" (classic / new). So if you pick the "colorless, light, classic" option, it's going to look pretty much like the current Audacity, except that they moved from wxWidgets to Qt.
Some reasons for this:
1. Free software is developed for the developer's own needs and developers are going to be power users.
2. The cost to expose options is low so from the developer's perspective it's low effort to add high value (perceiving the options as valuable).
3. The developer doesn't know who the customer is and rather than research/refine just tries to hit all the boxes.
4. The distribution of the software itself means anyone who successfully installs it themselves really is a power user and does like the options. Installing it for family and friends doesn't work.
Probably many other factors!
It takes a lot of time and energy to refine and maintain a minimalistic interface. You are intentionally narrowing the audience. If you are an open source developer with limited time you probably aren't going to invest in that.
That’s one of the great things about the approach demonstrated in the post. The developers of Handbrake don’t need to invest any time or energy in a minimalist interface. They can continue to maintain their feature-rich software exactly as it is. Meanwhile, there is also a simple, easy front end available for people who need or want it.
If handbrake scares them, don’t you dare to demonstrate how to use ffmpeg. I remember when I used handbrake for the first time and thought “wow, it’s much more convenient than struggling with ffmpeg”.
I actually think ffmpeg’s UI is simpler than Handbrake for those at all acquainted with the command line (i.e., for those who understand the concept of text-is-everything-everything-is-text). Handbrake shows you everything you can possibly fiddle with whether or not you plan on fiddling with it. Meanwhile ffmpeg hides everything, period, and you ask for specific features by typing them out. It's not great for discovery but once you get the hang of it, it is incredibly precise. One could imagine taking someone for whom Handbrake was too much and showing them “look, you just type `ffmpeg -i`, the input file, and the output file, and it does what you want”. I imagine for many people this would be a perfectly lovely interface.
FFMpeg's command line is practically a programming language.
Someone who only wants to convert from one format to another, and isn't accustomed to CLIs, is far better served by "drag the file here -> type an output filename and extension in the text box".
The problem (and the reason both FFMpeg and Handbrake exist) is that tons of people "only" want to do two or three specific tasks, all in the same general wheelhouse, but with terrible overlap.
At least with ffmpeg, for 99% of use cases you can just google "how do I do X with ffmpeg" and get a copypasta command line.
Whereas with complicated GUI tools, you have to watch a video to learn how to do it.
I think GUI tools lend themselves more to being able to discover functionality intuitively without needing to look anything up or read a manual, and especially so if you’re coming back to a task you haven’t done in a while. With CLI I constantly have to google or ask an LLM about commands I’ve done many times, whereas with a gui if I do it once I can more easily find my way the next time. Anyway both have their place
> I think GUI tools lend themselves more to being able to discover functionality intuitively without needing to look anything up or read a manual
Well, there are different issues.
Reading a manual is the best you can do, theoretically. But Linux CLI tools have terrible manuals.
I read over the ssh man page multiple times looking for functionality that was available. But the man page failed to make that clear. I had to learn about it from random tutorials instead.
I've been reading lvm documentation recently and it shows some bizarre patterns. Stuff like "for more on this see [related man page]", where [related man page] doesn't have any "more on this". Or, here's what happens if you try to get CLI help:
1. You say `pvs --help`, and get a summary of what flags you can provide to the tool. The big one is -o, documented as `[ -o|--options String ]`. The String defines the information you want. All you have to do is provide the right "options" and you're good. What are they? Well, the --help output ends with this: "Use --longhelp to show all options and advanced commands."
2. Invoke --longhelp and you get nothing about options or advanced commands, although you do get some documentation about the syntax of referring to volumes.
3. Check the man page, and the options aren't there either. Buried inside the documentation for -o is the following sentence: "Use -o help to view the list of all available fields."
4. Back to the command line. `pvs -o help` actually will provide the relevant documentation.
Reading a manual would be fine... if it actually contained the information it was supposed to, arranged in some kind of logically-organized structure. Instead, information on any given topic is spread out across several different types of documentation, with broken cross-references and suggestions that you should try doing the wrong thing.
I'm picking on man pages here, but actually Microsoft's official documentation for their various .NET stuff has the same problem at least as badly.
We're going full-circle, because LLMs are amazing for producing just the right incantation of arcane command-line tools. I was struggling to decrypt a file the other day and it whipped me up exactly the right openssl command to get it done.
From which I was able to then say, "Can I have the equivalent source code" and it did that too, from which I was able to spot my mistake in my original attempt. ( The KDF was using md5 not sha ).
I'm willing to bet that LLMs are also just as good at coming up with the right ffmpeg or imagemagick commands with just a vague notion of what is wanted.
Like, can we vignette the video and then add a green alien to the top corner? Sure we can (NB: I've not actually verified the result here) : https://claude.ai/share/5a63c01d-1ba9-458d-bb9d-b722367aea13
> I'm willing to bet that LLMs are also just as good at coming up with the right ffmpeg or imagemagick commands with just a vague notion of what is wanted.
they are. ive only used ffmpeg via llm, and its easy to get the LLM to make the right incantation as part of a multi-step workflow.
my own lack of understanding of video formats is still a problem, but getting ffmeg to do the right thing only takes a vague notion
One of the things LLM shines. For double checking the command explanations, I ask commands to grep the sections from manual instead of relying LLM output blindly.
If you only care about converting media without tweaking anything, ffmpeg offers the simplest UI ever.
ffmpeg -i input.avi output.mp4Proposing a CLI command as a candidate for "simplest UI ever" is a great gag.
Come on. "type ffmpeg, then hyphen i then the input filename then the output filename". I would've understood this when I was 8. Because I was super smart? No, because I was making a genuine effort.
The portion you've overlooked is there is an entire population of users out there who have never seen, nor used, a command line, and telling them to "just type this out" ignores all the background command line knowledge necessary to successfully "just type this out":
1) They have to know how to get to a command line somewhere/how (most of this group of users would be stymied right here and get no further along);
2) They now have to change the current directory of their CLI that they did get open to the location in their filesystem where the video is actually stored (for the tiny sliver who get past #1 above, this will stymie most of them, as they have no idea exactly where on disk their "Downloads" [or other meta-directory item] is actually located);
3) For the very few who actually get to this step, unless they already have ffmpeg installed on their PATH, they will get a command not found error after typing the command, ending their progress unless they now go and install ffmpeg;
4) For the very very few who would make it here, almost all of them will now have to accurately type out every character in "a-really_big_filename with spaces .mov", as they will not know anything about filename completion to let the shell do this for them. And if the filename does have spaces, and many will, they now need to somehow know 4a) that they have to escape the spaces and 4b) how to go about escaping the spaces, or they will instead get some ffmpeg error (hopefully just 'file not found', but with the extra parameters that unescaped spaces will create, it might just be a variant of "unknown option switch" error instead).
They are using text inputs, where you press enter to send stuff daily. Most of the hurdle is just overcoming the preconception that at black in put window means hard mode.
They can right-click in the folder view of their OS file viewer. On Windows they can also just type the command into the path bar.
When you tell them the command, you could also just install it. Also you could just tell them to type the name of the app 'ffmpeg' into the OS store and press install. They do this on their phone all the time.
To add on to this, there's no standardized way of indicating what needs to be typed out and what needs to be replaced. `foo --bar <replace me>` might be a good example command in a README, but I had to help someone the other day when they ran `foo --bar <test.txt>`, not realizing they should have replaced the < and > as well as just the text.
This describes me somewhat. I use FEA software and only recently started using it to execute jobs in CLI. I still trip over changing directories. Fortunately notepad++ has an option to open CLI with the filepath of the currently open file. I also didn't know right-click is paste in CLI. Don't use ctrl+c accidentally. But ctrl+v does work in powershell (sometimes?). "Error, command not found" is puzzling to me. Where does the software need to live relative to the directory I am using? This is all still very foreign to me, and working in CLI feels like flipping light switches in a dark room.
To answer your last question, on your operating system there is something called “PATH”. It is a user- or systemwide variable that dictates where to look for programs. It basically is a list of directories, often separated by “:” Further reading: https://www.java.com/en/download/help/path.html (this may have Java references but still applies)
The GP here appears to be on Windows, given their reference to PowerShell. And on Windows, the path separator is ";", not ":".
One of the things I've noticed is that people trying to help the true beginners vastly overestimate their skill level, and when you get a couple of people all trying to help, each of them is making a completely different set of suggestions which doesn't end up helpful at all. Recently, I was helping somebody who was struggling with trying to compile and link against a C++ library on Windows, and the second person to suggest something went full-bore down the "just install and use a Linux VM cause I don't have time to help you do anything on Windows."
How are we so blind to these beginner hurdles?
Few people are able to see through the eyes of a beginner, when they are a master.
The 4th one is a pain to teach. Every other file and directory has spaces... so I encourage liberal use of the TAB key for beginners.
The reality is that we've been infantilizing users for far too long. The belief that people can't handle fundamental concepts is misguided and primarily serves to benefit abusive tech companies.
Two decades ago, users understood what "C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents" meant and navigated those paths easily. Yet, we decided they were too "stupid" to deal with files and file paths, hiding them away. This conveniently locked users into proprietary platforms. Your point #2 reflects a lie we've collectively accepted as reality. Sadly, too many people now can’t even imagine that a straightforward way to exchange data among different software once existed, but that's a situation we're deliberately perpetuating.
This needs to change. Users deserve the opportunity to learn and engage with their tools rather than being treated as incapable. It’s time we started empowering users for a change.
C:\Users\Vladimir>ffmpeg -i input.avi output.mp4
'ffmpeg' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.To grab a random part of an ffmpeg command in my history: "-q:a 0 -map a"
Sorry, that's pretty damn indecipherable.
Yes, your example that completely ignores the premise is pretty damn indecipherable.
"If you only care about converting media without tweaking anything"
Using ffmpeg to convert one file to another remains probably my main use of general LLM web searches. This isn't to say it does a good job with that, but it's still ahead of me.
Yes. It's been a few years since I regularly used Handbrake, but I remember thinking of it as very simple, especially with its presets-based workflow. I was used to stuff like various CLI tools, mkvmerge and its GUI, and avidemux at that time.
It struck me as a weird example in the OP because I don't really think of Handbrake as a power user tool.
Handbrake's UI is in the uncanny valley for me -- too complicated for use by laymen, and way too limiting for use by people who know what they're doing...
My dad, a total layman, was able to use handbrake as a step in digitizing old family video tapes.
I think in the context of this thread, we shouldn't overgeneralize or underestimate "normal people".
A "normal person" is just someone whose time and mental energy are focused on something other than the niche task your app is aiming to solve. With enough time and focus, anyone can figure out any interface. But for many, something which requires a smaller investment to achieve the results they need is preferrable.
Also, even the most arcane and convoluted interfaces become usable with repetition. Normal people learn the most bureaucratic business workflows and fly through them if that is their job. Then if you dare to "improve" any aspect of it you will hear them complain that you "broke" their system.
Was he able to use it correctly though to be able to digitize video with exacltly the correct setttings so that no notable loss of quality was introduced? How long did it take him to randomly test settings?
ffmpeg with disposable or llm backed dnd interfaces.
for certain types of tooling UIs should be cheap, disposable and task/worlflow specific.
Actually I think this is a killer use case for local LLMs. We could finally get back to asking the computer to do something without having to learn how to string 14 different commands together to do it.
I’ve been computer touching since the mid eighties.
Exactly what golden era of computing are you harking back to, and what are you doing that requires 14 different commands?
The last thing we want for a user-friendly interface is nondeterminism. Some procedure that works today must work tomorrow if it looks like you can repeat it. LLMs can't be the answer to this. And if you go to the lengths of making the llm deterministic, with tests and all, you might as well code the thing once and for all and not ship the local llm to the end user at all.
Sorry, I see how my post lacked sufficient clarity.
The idea behind a cheap UI is not constant change, but that you have a shared engine and "app" per activity.
The particular workflow/ui doesn't need to ever change, it's more of a app/brand per activity for non-power users.
This is similar to how some apps historically (very roughly lotus notes springs to mind) are a single app but have an email interface/icon to click, or contacts, or calendar, all one underlying app but different ui entry points.
The problem is that everyone wants a different 20% of the functionality.
Actual good UI/UX design isn't trivial and it tends to require a tight feedback loop between testers, designers, implementers, and users.
A lot of FOSS simply doesn't have the resources to do that.
> The problem is that everyone wants a different 20% of the functionality.
I'm not disagreeing with your basic take, but I think this part is a little more subtle.
I'd argue that 80% of users (by raw user count) do want roughly the same 20% of functionality, most of the time.
The problem in FOSS is that average user in the FOSS ecosystem is not remotely close to the profile of that 80%. The average FOSS user is part of the 1% of power users. They actively want something different and don't even understand the mindset of the other 80% of users.
When someone comes along to a FOSS project and honestly tries to rebuild it for the 80% of users, they often end up getting a lot of hate from the established FOSS community because they just have totally different needs. It's like they don't even speak the same language.
There's a good report/study about the complexity of Microsoft Word floating around somewhere.
It was something like:
- almost everybody only uses about 20% of the features of Word
- everybody's 20% is different, but
- ~80% of the 20% is common to most users.
- on the other hand, the remaining 20% of the 20% is widely distributed and covers basically all of the product.
So if you made a version of Word with 16% of its feature set you would almost make everybody happy. But really, nobody would be happy. There's no small feature set that makes most people happy.
Kind of like how the author likely knows about the report and wanted to make a blog post about it without saying anything about or citing the report itself. IT seems like it but 80/20 can be found in lots of places, just like 60/40 can.
Yeah but MS Word is also designed with the guidance of an army of accountants and corporate shareholders. Your study plays into that, but there's a much bigger picture when you talk about analyzing how any product came to be that has MS as a prefix.
Resources or the care, tbh. FOSS is a big umbrella and a lot of it simply isn't meant for "customers". Some FOSS apps clearly are trying to build a user base, in which case yeah the points this post makes are worth thinking about.
But many other projects, perhaps the majority, that is not their goal. By devs for devs, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.
Pleasing customers is incredibly difficult and a never-ending treadmill. If it's not the goal then it's not a failure.
For a lot of usecases there is a strong 80% functionality. E.g. For Handbrake, 80% of the time I am reducing the size of my video screen grabs from my computer or phone. Don't need any resolution change, etc.
There are other times I want cropping or something similar, but it's really only 10-30% of the time. If people want to have a more custom workflow they can use an advanced UI
> tends to require a tight feedback loop between testers, designers, implementers, and users
Some FOSS projects attempt something like this, but it can become a self-reinforcing feedback loop: When you're only testing on current users, you're selecting for people who already use the software. People who already use the software were not scared away by the interface. So the current users tend to prefer the current interface.
Big software companies have the resources to gather (and pay) people for user studies to see what works and what does not for people who haven't seen the software before, or at least don't have any allegiances. If you only ever get feedback from people who have been using the software for a decade, they're going to tell you the UI must not change because they know exactly how to use it by now.
FOSS is ~99% developers, ask anyone in UI/UX to contribute to free projects and they'll look at you like you have two heads.
You don't need two different versions of the software, one that is easy and one that is powerful. You can have one version that is both easy and powerful. Key concepts here are (1) progressive disclosure and (2) constraints.
See Don Norman's Design of Everyday things.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/progressive-disclosure/
https://www.nngroup.com/videos/positive-constraints-in-ux-wo...
Progressive disclosure can be intensely annoying to actual power users.
Definitionally, it means you're hiding (non-disclosing) features behind at least 1 secondary screen. Usually, it means hiding features behind several layers of disclosures.
Making a very simple product more powerful via progressive disclosure can be a good way to give more power to non-power users.
Making a powerful product "simpler" via progressive disclosure can annoy the hell out of power users who already use the product.
It's easy to make the powerful version
It's a little harder to make an easy version
Making the progressive version is very difficult. Where you can please one audience with the powerful and easy versions, you can often disappoint both with the progressive version despite it taking much more effort.
In my personal experience, you're lucky if free software has the budget (time or money) to get to easy. There's very little free software that makes it to progressive.
Relevant Steve Jobs quote: "Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple."
So yes, it is hard to make the simple version. You have to have a very good understanding of what the user wants out of your product. Until you have this clarity, every feature seems important. Once you have this clarity you understand what the important features are. You make those features more prominent by giving them prime real estate, then tuck away the less important features in a less visible place. Simple things should be simple. Complex things only need to be possible.
The better example for this design principle is the big green button on copy machines. The copier has many functions, but 99% of users don't bother with 99% of them.
For a little history on this design, see https://athinkingperson.com/2010/06/02/where-the-big-green-c...
Oh man, I have literally done that to my parents’ remote controls. Actually more controls, because they still watch VHS tapes. But I have to admit it never occurred to me to do that to their software.
Logic Pro has a “masking tape” mode. If you don’t turn on “Complete Features” [0], you get a simplified version of the app that’s an easier stepping stone from GarageBand. Then check the box and bam, full access to 30 years’ accumulation of professional features in menus all over the place.
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/advanced-settings-l...
This has been a major UX problem for me when building my app [0] (an AI chat client for power user).
On the one hand, I want the UI to be simple and minimal enough so even non savvy users can use it.
But on the other hand, I do need to support more advanced features, with more configuration panels.
I learned that the solution in this case is “progressive disclosure”. By default, the app only show just enough UI elements to get the 90% cases done. For the advanced use cases, it takes more effort. Usually to enable them in Settings, or an Inspector pane etc. Power users can easily tinker around and tweak them. While non savvy users can stick with the default, usual UX flow.
Though even with this technique, choosing what to show by default is still not easy. I learned that I need to be clear about my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and optimize for that profile only.
[0]: https://boltai.com
As a UX guy, I'd like to note that the normal people aren't so great at knowing what they want, either.
I dread "Can you add a button..." Or worse, "Can you add a check box..." Not only does that make it worse for other users, it also makes it worse for you, even if you don't realize it yet.
What you need is to take their use case and imagine other ways to get there. Often that means completely turning their idea on its head. It can even help if you're not in the trenches with them, and can look at the bigger picture rather than the thing that is interfering with their current work flow.
There are literally thousands of wrappers for ffmpeg (other examples: imagemagick, ghostscript) that do exactly that. E.g. all commercial and dozens of open source video converters. So there is no lack of simple software for people who know little about the problem they're trying to solve (e.g. playing a downloaded mkv their shitty preinstalled video player doesn't accept), the problem is rather one of knowing that open source software exists and how to find it. Googling or asking an LLM does mostly present you software that costs money and is inferior to anything open source (and some malware).
Does it? I often ask ChatGPT such things and specifying I want free software options is enough (it often mentions which options are and aren’t free on its own).
> 80% of the people only need 20% of the features. Hide the rest from them and you’ll make them more productive and happy.
True but with a caveat: Those people rarely need the same 20% of your features.
I'd argue most software scares normal people. They only learn because of a strong intrinsic motivation (connecting with other people/access to entertainment) or work requirements which come with mandatory trainings and IT support
*Software with UI designed for people who aren't the median user scares the median user
Therefore: If you want lots of users, design for the median user; if you don't, this doesn't apply to you
Meanwhile, every time Gnome makes UI adjustments along these lines, there's an outcry that it's dumbed downed, copying apple, removing features etc etc.
Well Gnome tells people that they should just know keyboard shortcuts for everything - which is literally something only power users know to do. Their entire design ethos is a weird opposition to itself where it is aiming to be so simple and minimal that in order to do basic things you have to memorize keyboard shortcuts as there is no visual interface possibility to do those things.
Yeah, and that's because the article's advice is bad.
It works exactly for TV remote controls. Or, rather, it worked before everybody had an HDMI player or smart TVs. It doesn't work for TV remotes now either.
Handbrake is a bit like TV remotes in the turn of the century. That's an exception even among free software, and absolutely no mainstream DE is like that.
There is a massive amount of compromise in a UI. Adding features adds complexity. If you need that feature you have to accept the complexity that goes with it, and generally you are happy to. However if you don't need that complexity you don't want it. The average person uses 5% of the features of there word processor - but there is very little overlap between any two random users, and each wants the other 95% they don't use hidden (or perhaps 90% as there is another 5% they will need or think they will need) Gnome seems to be focusing on the 1% of features that are common to everyone, which means you can't get your 5%.
Note that I've always been a KDE user...
Its an entire desktop environment, its not as simple as choosing between two different apps. Although people who make this complaint should probably just use KDE, maybe they've used Gnome for a long time and don't want to change.
I think there is something deeper here: people have become scared of the unknown, therefore we need to hide things for them. But people don't have to be scared. In fact even for people who are using Handbrake comfortably, a lot of things Handbrake presents in its UI are probably unknown to them and can safely be ignored. The screenshot in the article shows that Handbrake analyzed the source video and reported it as 30 FPS, SDR, 8-bit 4:2:0, 1-1-1. I think less than a tenth of a percent of Handbrake users understand all of that. 30 FPS is reasonably understandable but 4:2:0 requires the user to understand chroma subsampling, a considerably more niche topic. And I have no idea what 1-1-1 is and I simply ignore it. My point is, when faced with unknown information and controls, why do people feel scared in the first place? Why can't they simply ignore the unknown and make sense of what they can understand? Is it because they worry that the part of the software they don't understand will damage their computer or delete all their files? Is it just the lack of computer literacy?
I do not readily empathize with people who are scared of software, because my generation grows up tinkering with software. I'd like to understand why people would become scared of software in the first place.
Not scared, time limited.
The world is a complicated place, and there is a veritable mountain of things a person could learn about nearly any subject. But sometimes I don't need or want to learn all those things - I just want to get one very specific task done. What I really appreciate is when an expert who has spent the time required to understand the nuances and tradeoffs can say "just do this."
When it comes to technology 'simple' just means that someone else made a bunch of decisions for me. If I want or need to make those decisions myself then I need more knobs.
How do you gain the confidence that what you choose to ignore is safe to ignore?
Computer damage is one potential consequence on the extreme end. On the conservative end, the software might just not work the way you want and you waste your time. It’s a mental model you have to develop. Even as a technical power user though, I want to reduce the risk of wasting my time, or even confront the possibility that I might waste my time, if I don’t have to.
How do you know the software in the article will do what you want?
For handbrake you can pick a preset and see what happens. Or don't even do that: when you open it it'll make you pick a video file, then you can just jam the green start button and see if it gives you what you need. Very little time spent.
its complexity. assuming binary flags, the amount of different ways the tool might operate is O(2^n) if the tool isnt doing what you want, thats a gigantic search space for fixing it. hiding options, and putting sane defaults makes n smaller and exponentially reduces the search space.
people arent afraid of doing 2^n stuff, its just that we have a gut sense that its gonna take more time than its worth. im down to try 10-100 things, but if its gonna be 100 million option combinations i have to tinker with, thats just not worth it.
True in many ways.
I wanted to write an article or short blog post about how Windows 10, menus and javascript, increasingly tuck away important tools/buttons in little folds. This was many months ago.
I want to write it and title it, "What the tuck?" But tuck refers exactly to the kind of hidden menus that make those so called sleek and simple UIs for the the 80% of users.
The problem is that it stupefies computing literacy, especially mobile web versions.
Perhaps not every casual web browser needs to sit at a desk to learn website navigation. Then again, they may never learn anything productive on their own.
As one of the main developers of Krita said, just being free isn't good enough, the software needs to be great.
I am in favour of simplified apps like this, maybe it can be a simple toggle switch in the top right corner between simple and advanced. Similar to that stupid new version of outlook I have to constantly switch back to the old version.
The advice looks sensible, but not sure if it does more good than harm. I recall simplified user interfaces standing in the way, hiding (or simply not providing) useful knobs or information/logs. They are annoying both when using them directly as a "power user", and when less tech-savvy users approach you (as they still do with those annoyingly simplified interfaces), asking for help. Then you try to use that simplified interface, it does not work, and there is no practical way to debug or try workarounds, so you end up with an interface that even a power user cannot use. I think generally it is more useful to focus on properly working software, on documentation and informative logs, sufficient flexibility, and maybe then on UI convenience, but still not making advanced controls and verbose information completely inaccessible (as it seems to be in the provided examples).
I agree, that having better documentation and properly working software is a much better idea, and that simplified user interface have many problems.
I like the design pattern of a "basic mode" and an "advanced mode".
The "advanced mode" rarely actually covers all the needs of an advanced user (because software is never quite everything to everyone), but it's at least better at handling both types of users.
Not all free software has this problem... Mozilla and Thunderbird I've had my parents on for years. It's not a ton to learn, and they work fine.
Taking the case of Photoshop vs. Gimp - I don't think the problem is complexity, lol. It's having to relearn everything once you're used to photoshop. (Conversely, I've never shelled out for Adobe products, and now don't want to have to relearn how to edit images in photoshop or illustrator)
Let's do another one. Windows Media Player (or more modern - "Movies & TV"). Users want to click on a video file and have it play with no fuss. VLC and MPC work fine for that! If you can manage to hold onto the file associations. That's why Microsoft tries so hard to grab and maintain the file associations.
I could go on... I think the thesis of this article is right for some pieces of software, but not all. It's worth considering - "all models are wrong, but some are useful".
> Taking the case of Photoshop vs. Gimp - I don't think the problem is complexity, lol. It's having to relearn everything once you're used to photoshop. (Conversely, I've never shelled out for Adobe products, and now don't want to have to relearn how to edit images in photoshop or illustrator)
I don't think this comparison is really accurate, the Adobe Suite is designed for professionals that are working in the program for hours daily (e.g., ~1000 hours annually for a creative professional). There are probably some power users of The GIMP that hit similar numbers, but Creative Cloud has ~35-40 million subscribers, these are entirely different programs for entirely different classes of users.
Makes a good point, but the headline bothers me. It isn't the free that is the problem, it is the complexity.
Yep, the Adobe tools and basically all professionally-used CAD software are incredibly intimidating to 'normal people', and they ain't free.
Same problem though. Half of UX is knowing which features to include, and the other half is knowing where to put them.
Intuitive UX for the average non-nerd user is task-based. You start with the most common known goals, like sending someone money, or changing the contrast of a photo, and you put a nice big button or slider somewhere on the screen that either makes the goal happen directly or walks you through it step by step.
Professional tools are workbench-based. You get a huge list of tools scattered around the UI in various groups. Beginners don't know what most of the tools do, so they have to work out what the tools are for before they can start using them. Then, and only then, can they start using the tools in a goal-based way. Professionals already know the tradecraft, so they have the simpler - but still hard - "Which menu item does what I need?" problem.
Developer culture tends to be script-based. It's literally just lists of instructions made of cryptic combinations of words, letters, and weird punctuation characters. Beginners have to learn the words, the concepts behind them, and the associated underlying computer fundamentals at multiple levels - just to get started. And if you start with a goal - let's say you want a bot that posts on social media for you - the amount of learning if you're coming to it cold is beyond overwhelming.
FOSS has never understood this. Yes, in theory you can write your own almost anything and tinker with the source code. But the learning curve for most people is impossibly steep.
AI has some chance of bridging the gap. It's not reliable yet, but it's very obvious now that it has a chance to become a universal UI, creating custom code and control panels for specific personal goals, generating workbench UIs and explaining what the tools do if you need a more professional approach, and explaining core concepts and code structures if you want to work at that level.
And the very freedom they got with free software let them change it to suit their fit, which would have been impossible with proprietary or otherwise restricted software.
Handbrake scares me and I’m a big nerd!
I’ve been ripping old DVDs recently. I just want something that feels simple from Handbrake: a video file I can play on my Apple TV that has subtitles that work (not burned in!) with video and audio quality indistinguishable from playing the DVD (don’t scale the video size or mess with the frame rate!), at as small a file size as is practical. I’m prepared for the process to be slow.
I’ve been messing with settings and reading forum posts (probably from similarly qualified neophytes) for a day now and think I’ve got something that works - though I have a nagging suspicion the file size isn’t as small as it could be and the quality isn’t as good as it could be. And despite saving it as a preset, I for some reason have to manually stop the subtitles from being burned in for every new rip.
Surely what I want is what almost everyone wants‽ Is there a simple way to get it? (I think this is a rhetorical question but would love it not to be…)
Someone once told me “every setting you expose to your users is a decision you were too scared to make.”
User: I'd like to be able to change my password
Dev: I'm too brave to let you do that
> I challenge you to make more of it.
Huge amounts of dumbed-down software that won't do interesting things is made. There's no need to present this challenge.
> a person who needs or wants that stuff can use Handbrake.
That's the part that is often ignored: providing the version with the features.
> People benefit from stuff like this
While I agree that people generally feel better by getting something with little effort, I think that there is a longer-term disservice here.
Once upon a time, it used to be understood that repeated use of a tool would gradually make you better at it - while starting with the basics, you would gradually explore, try more features and gradually become a power user. Many applications would have a "tip of the day" mechanism that encouraged users to learn more each time. But then this "Don't Make me Think" book and mentality[0] started catching on, and we stopped expecting people to learn about the stuff that they're using daily.
We have a high percentage of "digital natives" kids, now reaching adulthood without knowing what a file is [1] or how to type on a keyboard [2]. Attention spans are falling rapidly, and even the median time in front of a particular screen before switching tasks is apparently down from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 40 seconds in 2023 [3] (I shudder to think what it is now). We as a civilization have been gradually offloading all of our technical competency and agency onto software.
This is of course leading directly to agentic AI, where we (myself included) convince ourselves that the AI is allowing us to work at a higher level, deciding the 'what', while the computer takes care of the 'how' for us, but of course there's no clear delineation between the 'what' and 'how', there's just a ladder of abstraction, and as we offload more and more into software, the only 'what' we'll have left is "keep me fed and entertained".
We are rapidly rolling towards the world of Wall-E, and at this pace, we might live to see the day of AIs asking themselves "can humans think?".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think
[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30253526
[2] https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/gen-z-typing-computers-keyboar... , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41402434
[3] https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/att...
"I am new to GitHub and I have lots to say I DONT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE FUCKING CODE! i just want to download this stupid fucking application and use it.
WHY IS THERE CODE??? MAKE A FUCKING .EXE FILE AND GIVE IT TO ME. these dumbfucks think that everyone is a developer and understands code. well i am not and i don't understand it. I only know to download and install applications. SO WHY THE FUCK IS THERE CODE? make an EXE file and give it to me. STUPID FUCKING SMELLY NERDS"
I know of one company that explicitly didn't make downloads available to dissuade this kind of hard-to-support user from using their time without materially contributing anything
Wow, it's actually real.
https://old.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to...
But that's another issue: developers make software for themselves vs "digital public goods for everyone".
UI/UX (which the article is about) is part of the broader approach.
Over the years I've gotten really tired of this obsession with "normal people" and not just because I'm one of the so called power users. This is really part of a growing effort to hide the computer away as an implementation detail.
https://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/
That's what "UX" is all about. "Scripting the users", minimizing and channeling their interactions within the system. Providing one button that does exactly what they want. No need to "scare" them with magical computer technology. No need for them to have access to any of it.
It's something that should be resisted, not encouraged. Otherwise you get generations of technologically illiterate people who don't know what a directory is. Most importantly, this is how corporations justify locking us out of our own devices.
> We are giving up our last rights and freedoms for “experiences,” for the questionable comfort of “natural interaction.” But there is no natural interaction, and there are no invisible computers, there only hidden ones.
> Every victory of experience design: a new product “telling the story,” or an interface meeting the “exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother” widens the gap in between a person and a personal computer.
> The morning after “experience design:” interface-less, desposible hardware, personal hard disc shredders, primitive customization via mechanical means, rewiring, reassembling, making holes into hard disks, in order to to delete, to logout, to “view offline.”
Most people don't need computer (full feature power, full power of choice) to solve their task, as could be seen with the smartphones, which are designed as appliances more or less.
I don't want most of consumer electronics to act like a computer, it is a deficiency for me. I chose "dumb" Linux-based eBook reader instead of Android-based, because I want it to read books, full stop.
Some people just like to eat food, they don't want to learn how to cook it. You or I may think that's a tragedy, but I don't think e.g a dentist has an obligation to become fluent in the things that I'm competent in.
I'm no dentist, I go to dentists. I let them work, and try not to be too annoying. I learn the minimum that I need to know to follow the directions that they deliberately make very simple for me.
This will result in generations of generally dentistry ignorant people, but I am not troubled by this.
As technologically competent people, one of our desires should be to help people maintain the ignorance level that they prefer, and at every level steer them to a good outcome. Let them manage their own time. If they want privacy and control, let's make sure they can have it, rather than lecturing them about it. My grandmother is in her 90s and she doesn't want people reading her emails, listening to her calls or tracking her face. She is not prepared to deal with more than a couple of buttons, and they should be large and hopefully have pictures on them that explain what they do. It's my job to square that circle.
maybe there just isn't a solution? people don't ask for a hammer that magically assembles every piece of furniture. sometimes the user of the tool needs skills to use it. UI/UX only takes you so far.
Although I wish Linux were easier to use -- and there are distros that aim for this, I do agree that FOSS is mostly by nerds for nerds, but it doesn't prevent other people making changes -- which is exactly what the author did.
So I'd like to welcome the author to make more apps based on FOSS.
> Although I wish Linux were easier to use [ ... ]
We're getting there. I run Linux Mint with an XFCE desktop -- an intentionally minimal setup. The system performs automatic updates and the desktop layout/experience resembles older Windows desktops before Microsoft began "improving" things. No ads, no AI.
I'm by no means an end user, but in Linux I see incremental progress toward meeting the needs of that audience. And just in time too, now that Microsoft is more aggressively enshittifying Windows.
What's really missing are online fora able to help end users adjust to Linux -- helpful without being superior or condescending. Certainly true for Windows, not yet true for Linux.
> What's really missing are online fora able to help end users adjust to Linux -- helpful without being superior or condescending. Certainly true for Windows, not yet true for Linux.
That can be a problem with Linux but in my experience searching for Windows help is usually not good either.
> What's really missing are online fora able to help end users adjust to Linux -- helpful without being superior or condescending. Certainly true for Windows, not yet true for Linux.
claude-code actually does this really well, having used it to set up gnome on my phone, and fix all my problems without having to learn anything
Yeah I agree that the difference of usability between Linux and Windows is getting much smaller, now that MSFT is trashing Windows.
I do have a Linux box, and I only have complaints about small things. Double screen works, VSCode works, Firefox works too. Not much to complaint for a personal dev box. The ability to just `apt install` a bunch of stuffs and then start compiling is pretty nice.
But again, I'm pragmatic, so if I'm doing something Windows related, I'd definitely use my Windows box.
This is useful for everyone not just non-techy types. I can't help but compare this to sites like shadertoy that let you develop with a simple coding interface on one half the screen and the output on the other (as opposed to the regular complexity of setting up and using a dev environment) Code goes here>{} , Press this button>[] , Output here>() , Which I think we need more of if we want to get kids into coding.
The article complains there's too many old school Windows-type power user GUIs in the free software space. Most of which were not actually FOSS, but Freeware, or sometimes Shareware!
My criticism of Free Software is exactly the reverse. There isn't enough of that kind of stuff on Linux!
Though to be sure, the Mac category (It Has One Button) is even more underserved there, and I agree that there should be more! Heck, most of the stuff I've made for myself has one button. Do one thing and do it well! :)
I agree there isn't enough. Some programs are OK (especially command-line programs), some aren't as good as the actual good quality ones.
> Do one thing and do it well!
This does not necessarily mean that it would have only one button (or any buttons). Depending on what is being done, there may be many options for being done, although there might also be default settings. A command-line program might do it better that you only need to specify the file name, but if there are options (what options and how many options there will be depends what program it is) then you can also specify those options if the default settings are not suitable.
I think you can see this already with websites, like there is dozens of websites like convert video to MP4, ompress this or that. And I think they are just building an UI on top of open source tools
Completely agree with the author. Would love most power tools to start off in "simple mode" so I could recommend them to friends/family, and have a toggle for advanced mode which shows everything to power users.
Free software is an anarchist mindset -- wellbeing for all, take what you need, contribute back where you can.
It's scary for folks who are used to transactional relationships to encounter these different mindsets.
I guess instead of a separate application, maybe some of these programs would benefit from having 'dumb' mode where only basic/most used functionality is available. I.e. when I run gimp, I most often just use it rescale the image, cut a piece and insert into a new image and every time I have to look for the right options in the menu.
> claude --dangerously-skip-permissions -p "convert happy.blarf to a small mp4 file that will work on my ipad and send it to my email"
> I’m the person my friends and family come to for computer-related help. (Maybe you, gentle reader, can relate.)
I proactively stopped that decades ago.
"Oh, you use Windows? Sorry, I haven't used it in over a decade so I can't help. If you have any Linux questions, let me know!"
Are we at the point yet where we can advise people to ask ChatGPT how to install something called "FFmpeg" and have it tell them what to copy-paste into an app called "Terminal"?
A good product manager could make a big difference to many open source projects. Someone who has real knowledge of the problem space, who can define a clear vision of what problem is being solved for which user community and who can be judicious in weighing feature requests and developing roadmaps.
the issue is real, but i'm not sure this solves it; in this case you end up with an overly specific solution that you can't really recommend to most people (and won't become widely known)
using the remote analogy, the taped versions are useful for (many!) specific people, but shipping the remote in that configuration makes no sense
i think normal people don't want to install an app for every specific task either
maybe a solution can look like a simple interface (with good defaults!!) but with an 'advanced mode' that gives you more options... though i can't say i've seen a good example of this, so it might be fundamentally flawed as well
I have tried to use GPG several times but the UX got in the way so much. I feel it did a disservice to privacy. It gatekeeps it behind an arcane UX.
Banks. Won't touch any free software, unless backed by some real humans signing huge contracts for support.
I don't think free software has to aim to be for everyone. It's OK to build software for yourself and people like you.
Most people can't comprehend that. "If it's available publicly online and has a readme, it's DEFINITELY was created for me and for all other users, right?"
This is so common, to the point that it's a FOSS misconception #1 for me. They can't get it that the developer can develop the software to solve only their specific problem and not interested in support, feature contributions, and other improvements or usecases.
Yeah, MS took that lesson to heart with Office, and now it's a disaster to use for everyone, not just power-users.
Would be nice for an inverse article -- which is often harder to achieve -- case in point: I wish iCloud had a power user interface.
Oh, it has one, it's just not available to you.
FOSS's issue isn't that they trust users too much, it's that they aren't taking different types of users into account.
Corporate-built software that's locked down or limited like iCloud is 100% about not trusting the users.
Yeah, MS took this lesson to heart with Office, and now it's a disaster for everyone, not just the power-users.
i don't have a TV at home and hence very rarely "have to" use a remote (or 2 or 3 at once, as it happens), but it's a nightmare everytime
Love the example with the remote! People do need that!
Some TV remotes or air conditioner remotes now have a "boomer flap" which when engaged, hides 90% of all the buttons. The scanner software I use has something similar, novice mode and expert mode.
Ah yes, the infamous “klabing” feature. You open the manual and read “Press Kabling to kabling the whatchanathjng”.
My number one principle of UI design is this:
The things the user does most frequently need to be the easiest things to do.
You expose the stuff the user needs to do quickly without a lot of fuss, and you can bury the edge cases in menus.
Sadly a lot of software has this inverted.
Free software scares people until they have to pay for Windows.
> 80% of the people only need 20% of the features
Yes, but those 80% all use a different subset of the 20% of features. So if you want to make them all happy, you need to implement 100% of the features.
I see the pattern so often. There is a "needlessly complicated" product. Someone thinks we can make it simpler, we rewrite it/refactor the UI. Super clean and everything. But user X really needs that one feature! Oh and maybe lets implement Y. A few years down the line you are back to having a "needlessly complicated" product.
If you think it could easily be done better, you don't understand the problem domain well enough yet. Real simplicity looks easy but is hard to achieve.
ffmpeg wrappers be like
i enjoyed your post, those remotes are too funny!!
I feel like the author wants everything to be Apple simplified. That all users should dumb down to on off go and stop. Ask chat got for anything else. I disagree for so many obvious reasons it's pointless to iterate them. We as a society need to get MORE capable, more critical, and improve our cognitive abilities; not the opposite.
I’m not sure I’d describe Apple products as simplified any more, take a look at the settings in iOS for example, it has grown in complexity with each release.
I wanted to scoff at this, but the remote example is pretty on-point.
The majority of users probably want the same small subset of features from a program and the rest are just confusing noise.
When I used to be active on reddit I was following r/graphicdesign (me being a graphic designer) and one day someone asked a question about Inkscape.
Not 5 minutes after that someone else on the comments went on a weird rant about how allegedly Inkscape and all FOSS was "communist" and "sucked" and capitalist propietary stuff was "superior".
You get weird people on social media. best ignored.
IN this particular case someone things more competition is communist...
We been knowing that.
Dunno why people assume that FOSS developers are just dummies lacking insight but otherwise champing at the bit to provide the same refinement and same customer service experience as the "open source" projects that are really just loss leaders of some commercial entity.
>> 80% of the people only need 20% of the features. Hide the rest from them and you’ll make them more productive and happy. That’s really all it takes.
One of the truest things I've read on HN. I've also tried to visit this concept with a small free image app I made (https://gerry7.itch.io/cool-banana). Did it for myself really, but thought others might find it useful too. Fed up with too many options.
I think we need to stop this madness.
The disaster that is "modern UX" is serving no one. Infantilizing computer users needs to stop.
Computer users hate it - everything changes all the time for the worse, everything gets hidden by more and more layers until it just goes away entirely and you're left with just having to suck it up.
"Normal people" don't even have computers anymore, some don't even have laptops, they have tablets and phones, and they don't use computer programs, they use "apps".
What we effectively get is:
- For current computer users: A downward spiral of everything sucking more with each new update.
- For potential new computer users: A decreasing incentive to use computers "Computers don't really seem to offer anything I can't do on my phone, and if I need a bigger screen I'll use my tablet with a BT keyboard"
- For the so-called "normal people" the article references (I believe the article is really both patronizing and infantalizing the average person), there they're effectively people who don't want to use computers, they don't want to know how stuff works, what stuff is, or what stuff can become, they have a problem they cannot put into words and they want to not have the problem because the moving images of the cat should be on the place with the red thing. - They use their phones, their tablets, and their apps, their meager and unmotivated desire to do something beyond what their little black mirror allow them is so week that any obstacle, any, even the "just make it work" button, is going to be more effort than they're willing (not capable of, but willing) to spend.
Thing is, regardless of particular domain, doing something in any domain requires some set of understanding and knowledge of the stuff you're going to be working with. "No, I just want to edit video, I don't want to know what a codec is" well, the medium is a part of the fucking message! NOTHING you do where you work with anything at all allows you to work with your subject without any understanding at all of what makes up that subject. You want to tell stories, but you don't want to learn how to speak, you want to write books, but you don't want to learn how to type, write or spell ? Yes, you can -dictate- it, which is, in effect, getting someone competent to do the thing for you.. You want to be a painter, but you don't care about canvas, brushes, techniques, or the differences between oil, acrylic and aquarelle, or colors or composition, just want to make picture look good? You go hire a fucking painter, you don't go whining about how painting is inherently harder than it ought to be and how it's elitist that they don't just sell a brush that makes a nice painting. (Well, it _IS_ elitist, most people would be perfectly satisfied with just ONE brush, and it should be as wide as the canvas, and it should be pre-soaked in BLUE color, come on, don't be so hard on those poor people, they just want to create something, they shouldn't have to deal with all your elitist artist crap!) yeah, buy a fucking poster!
I'm getting so sick and tired of this constant attack on the stuff _I_ use every day, the stuff _I_ live and breathe, and see it degenerated to satisfy people who don't care, and never will.. I'm pissed, because, _I_ like computers, I like computing, and I like to get to know how the stuff works, _ONCE_ and gain a deep knowledge of it, so it fits like an old glove, and I can find my way around, and then they go fuck it over, time and time again, because someone who does not want to, and never will want to, use computers, thinks it's too hard..
Yeah, I really enjoy _LISTENING_ to music, I couldn't produce a melody if my life depended on it (believe me, I've tried, and it's _NOT_ for lack of amazingly good software), it's because I suck at it, and I'm clearly not willing to invest what it takes to achieve that particular goal.. because, I like to listen to music, I am a consumer of it, not a producer, and that's not because guitars are too hard to play, it's because I'm incompetent at playing them, and my desire to play them is vastly less than my desire to listen to them.
Who are most software written for? - People who hate computers and software.
What's common about most software? - It kind of sucks more and more.
There's a reason some of the very best software on the planet is development tools, compilers, text editors, debuggers.. It's because that software is made by people who actually like using computers, and software, _FOR_ people who actually like using computers and software...
Imagine if we made cars for people who HATE to drive, made instruments for people who don't want to learn how to play.. Wrote books for people who don't want to read, and movies for people who hate watching movies. Any reason to think it's a reasonable idea to do that? Any reason to think that's how we get nice cars, beautiful instruments, interesting books and great movies ?
Fuck it. Just go pair your toaster with your "app" whatever seems particularity important.
Couldn't agree with this more. I'm even an advocate for simulating walled gardens with Free Software. Let people who need to feel swaddled in a product or a brand feel swaddled.
It also opens up opportunities for money-making, and employment in Free Software for people who do not program. The kind of hand-holding that some people prefer or need in UX is not easy to design, and the kind of marketing that leads people to the product is really the beginning of that process.
Nobody normal cares that it's a thin layer over the top of a bunch of copyleft that they wouldn't understand anyway (plenty of commercial software is a thin layer over permissively licensed stuff.) Most people I know barely know what files and directories are, and the idea of trying to learn fills them with an anxiety akin to math-phobia. Some (most?) people get a lot of anxiety about being called stupid, and they avoid the things that caused it to happen.
They do want privacy and the ownership of their own devices as much as everyone else however, they just don't know how much they're giving up when they do a particular software thing, or (like all of us) know that it is seriously difficult if not possible to avoid the danger.
Give people mock EULAs to click through, but they will enumerate the software's obligations to them, not their obligations to the software. Help them remain as ignorant as they want about how everything works, other than emphasizing the assurances that the GPL gives them.
> 80% of the people only need 20% of the features. Hide the rest from them and you’ll make them more productive and happy. That’s really all it takes.
For those of you thinking (which 20%) following that article from the other day — this is where a good product sense and knowing which 80% of people you want to use it first. You could either tack on more stuff from there to appeal to the rest of the 20% of people, or you could launch another app/product/brand that appeals to another 80% of people. (e.g. shampoo for men, pens for women /s)
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I like this idea -- a simple interface/frontend for an otherwise complicated topic, for the less skilled among us. It has intriguing possibilities beyond technology ...
Q: Why does God allow so much suffering?
A: What? There is no God. We invented him.
Q: Doesn't this mean life has no purpose?
A: Create your own purpose. Eliminate the middleman.
Q: But doesn't atheism allow evil people free rein?
A: No, it's religion that does that. A religious evil person can always claim God either granted him permission or forgave him after the fact. And he won't be contradicted by God, since ... but we already covered that.
Hmm. If it works for HandBrake, it might work for life.