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Don’t forget the popup as soon as you open the app for a “Limited Time Lightning Deal” of 25% off when you subscribe for 3 years with a price lock guarantee.
…and the price will go up, anyway.
AI button pop up should cover about %70 of the screen
See, you’re thinking like a user. You gotta think like a CEO tho. There’s no AI button popup, the AI features are automatically activated when you use the tools. You gotta go into the settings and explicitly disable automatic AI actions. And only THEN do you get the AI popup to pwease use the AI features.
Gotta get that engagement.
I remeber having some bullshit feeds by default on an old Samsung phone’s home screen, and to disable them you had to first get into the app’s settings, which required you to agree to the EULA to allow them to strip-mine all your data forever even if you disabled the software.
And it should be vague enough that it takes you 10 minutes to find it
Recently deleted Adobe PDF because of this nonsense and installed a free tool that is so clean/clutter free
I’m a freelancer and unfortunately rely heavily on Microsoft. Haven’t had that stance for long, to be honest, but the past few months have been eye-opening. I’m trying to go more European in the future, and Open Source where viable.
It is a little scary I have to admit. I’m getting old enough to have worked with MS products for decades now, and am so used to them. It’s also a challenge to myself to move away and try new things, as I believe this will be a selling point in the near future in my business.
I was exactly the same but moved over to linux about a year ago, it took a little bit of time to get used to but overall hasn’t been a massive issue.
If there are additional packages you are used to running that will probably be the hardest part since you might have to find open source equivalents
Corporations have the advantage of being able to allocate lots of resources to the project and have many professionals of various specialties work on it as their day job.
Open Source has the advantage of not being forced by a perverse economic structure to do as much evil as possible for the sake of generation more revenue for shareholders.
AutoCAD installing three million micro services just to get their shit pirated anyways.
FreeCAD works great these days.
It’s pretty decent! Huge learning curve coming from Fusion360 since it does everything so differently, but once I got the basics down I can do simple models at least.
Also why the fuck do they need basically my entire identity just so i can write words on a document?
Might be wrong speak, or a new idea they can steal!
Or to train their shitty ai models?
Usually to make sure your document is synced with the cloud.
And then sell my data to the highest bidder.
To their credit, they do a bit more than just that. They also sync your personal information with their cloud, and often, the clouds of third parties as well.
You could’ve said just Open Source vs Adobe.
The hamburger menu, the account picker and the huge share pill, they all look exactly like that!
Congrats OP this meme actually annoyed me 😭Yesterday describing how to do a thing to my wife over the phone “The menu button” “There is no menu button” “It’s a hamburger icon” “What?” “3 lines” “How is that a menu?”
I often help my parents use their phones.
It is so hard when every app they use has its own garbage bespoke design language and you get such pearls as:- Buttons and tabs can be any combination of Colored Square, White Square with Outline or Grey Text on White Background (and they switch every screen!)
- Modals without a scroll bar so you can’t tell there’s a “Confirm” button at the bottom
- Awfully confusing share dialogs before the Native system share sheet opens
- Inconsistent iconography
- Overflow menus hidden behind 3 dots, 3 lines or neither
I feel like it’s almost second nature for tech savy people to wade thru this crap but for your average granny this shit is practically unparseable.
It’s because tech savvy people see digital products like old people would see a thingamajig out of a woodshop. We have an inherent understanding that the thing we’re looking at had a creator intention behind it, as well as an understanding that they may have done a poor job implementing that intention. We understand more underlying patterns to look for. We have a deeper intuition of what is “right” and that any “wrong” can be infinitely different than any other “wrong.” We know the internet isn’t prod; the internet is like your feature branch on steroids. We understand that the internet often uses fancy tricks to scale, and those tricks can lead to behaviors which seem to contradict causality (e.g., distributed systems, you receive a message before it was sent because of eventual consistency). These are problems we’ve been exposed to over and over, forced ourselves to work our way through them, even built some of the machines that had these issues.
Old people had similar advantages with things like housework, woodwork, automotive work, …
And then we have insanity like Instagram, where the logo opens a separate area
How the hell does the logo ever load anything but the home screen?
Back during covid we sent my wife’s grandparents a smart phone so they could video call. They only had a dumb brick phone.
I forget what model but it was one specifically aimed at easy of use for seniors. We had it delivered so I could set it up. Then delivered it to them ready to go.
It was impossible. Even just answering a call being touch and hold the green circle then slide it 2cm in any direction and release took nearly an hour.
My wife does social care now and a client yesterday had managed to enable audio description on his firestick. This is what i was explaining. Hold back and menu on the remote to turn it on/off. He’d probably done it by accident and now his TV is explaining everything on screen after every button press and he has no clue where to even begin to turn it off. It’s utterly incomprehensible. I’m sure they thought it was a good idea to have a way to turn it on that doesn’t need you to see the screen.
We’ve got my 95 old grandma https://enna.care/ and she can use it. Instead of having to use the touch interface it works by placing cards on to an NFC reader.
This is awesome! My Dad has trouble speaking so voice commands are no go. I wonder if the cards can be customized by someone they trust for new/other actions.
I’m working on a mobile app, this commentary is very helpful to me.
I think a great test is grab a 5 year old budget phone with low screen resolution and slow CPU, and hand it to a few people with your app on it for a few minutes. See what they complain about or can’t figure out.
If you want to help the grannies of the world, grab an older budget device with a not so big screen resolution and crank the device scale / text size super high.
Man, you would not believe what havoc that causes on most apps.I know responsive design is hard but damn…
I use my phone like this and it’s annoying how many apps become unusable.
Very Adobe
It kills me that fucking everything is a fucking website these days, even “desktop” applications.
Though not having to download and install a random program from the Internet, with full access to your hard disk, is often nice. When running in the browser, it is automatically sandboxed hard.
And it kills all the performance… And the security, and the privacy, as everything needs to fucking call home to be able to work.
And, why the fuck would you build over Electron or Tauri? That’s just being retarded, desktop apps should be done with actual native graphic toolkits, not that fucking performance, resources, space, security and privacity that “hybrid frameworks” are.
Which is true and all. For many things.
But if I just want to decode some JSON for a computer game, it is nice to just be able to do it on a website, with no need to install anything.
But but gimp is so unusable 🙄
GNOME inheritor, at the end
Sadly most open source software is a usability disaster zone, filled with buttons and menus which have nothing to do with what the user is trying to do.
I don’t find this is often the case nowadays. But there are so many open source programs, it’s not the best to make blanket statements like this.
I’m thinking of Blender, Ardour, Kdenlive, Darktable…
Yet both should learn from each other.
The FOSS world needs more UX/UI specialists.
Donate to your favorite project.
I feel like the GiMP devs must be so fundamentally against good UX that donating towards that goal would be a waste, to be completely honest. They’ve had decades to show at least a small commitment to improving the UX. If there was an “Improve GiMP’s UX” fund I could donate to, which guaranteed the money would go towards just that, I definitely would donate.
@clb92 @daggermoon We have a UX design issue tracker specifically for feedback on the user experience - feel free to share specific concerns, no donation required! https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work/_items
We also now dedicate a section in our release/news post to UX improvements, to further encourage people to contribute in that area: https://www.gimp.org/news/2026/08/16/dev-update-august-2026/#user-experience-and-interface-updates
I have no complaints with GIMP’s UI.
Personally I think a lot of FOSS maintainers are burning out. If you maintain a remotely popular project you basically have a second unpaid job.
The FOSS world needs more UX/UI specialists.
Or even just hobbyists…
For the average user — yes; for me — I don’t care.
Most of my work is in the terminal either way so I tend to care way more about a searchable documentation, reference, manual. Other than that I really like the textual toolbar with dropdowns plus some context menus.
I want my interface to be dense with accessible information.There’s room for flare tho, I still need feedback on my actions: hovers, drags, clicks, etc.
No.
Please expand on your posture. I’m intrigued.
UX and UI specialists is how you get the crap that is foisted on us today.
Famous example when you unleash them on a project: Windows 8.
I will admit it is a knee jerk reaction, and it seems like maybe we are turning a corner to refinement over mass changes.
One of the major issues with paid software and UX and UI designers is that in order to keep a job, they keep making changes. And nothing is worse than making changes to customary patterns.
Perhaps FOSS wouldnt have that problem, as the job is labor of love. Who knows.
This is shockingly ignorant of how design actually works. The enshitification you see today is purely because of executives demanding their designers and devs jump on every new buzzword the shareholders learn this quarter. Lack of design is a choice too and it fucking sucks.
No it is not ignorant. You are ignorant, LOL!
So many people get a bunch of artsy crap ideas and then implement them breaking simple easy to use workflows. You cannot convince me other wise.
On the other hand, I did mention that to keep their jobs there is churn, and you just mentioned one of the reasons for it, execs are a problem. Buzzwords are a problem. Trends are a problem.
But I can point to lots of projects that were given a team and time. Particularly worse if they asked users what they wanted because they are some of the biggest morons to ask in the first place.
Removed by mod
The other person did ask me. Then you come in and start swearing and swinging insults.
You might very well be the type of person I do not want an opinion from. You contributed nothing to this conversation and had nothing to say, but boy you wanted to be loud about it.
Edit: And I have to say, look at my comments. I am open to the fact that UI and UX is maturing, that the pressures are different in FOSS projects, and I am somewhat hopeful. You have to admit there have been some rough decisions when leaving well enough alone was just fine.
As for the users: did you forget this?
ok I understand now, thanks for clarifying. My interpretation is that you had very bad past experiences, so now you now want something that just gets the job done and doesn’t ever change. Fair enough, that is absolutely a very valid posture. It just comes down to personal preference and as such, respectable.
You seem well versed in what you understand as bad design with dark patterns. However, I must ask you: do you aknowledge that there is good design in this world, capable of making people of all kind (technical and casuals) understand and enjoy more the software they chose ?
However, I must ask you: do you acknowledge that there is good design in this world, capable of making people of all kind (technical and casuals) understand and enjoy more the software they chose?
Sure. And lots of times we already have it. Then someone comes along and decides to do something like this common practice: dumb things down to the lowest common denominator and make a desktop interface that would appear to appease people who are used to mobile, which ends up alienating both desktop and mobile and is not good for either group. So many examples of this.
Of course not everyone is easy to please, which is why I like FOSS. People say “clean, modern, or dated”, and half the time it just looks like wasted space, more effort, and hidden features to me. Sometimes even removing them for the sake of “clean”.
But I can’t argue that there were people who really put in the effort to polish and make consistent (mostly) the desktop environs like Gnome and KDE, or even applications that are not easy to learn, like Blender.
And I could never argue against patterns that are necessary for accessibility.
You know what is kind of nice? The fact that I have multiple ways to view lemmy with a variety of interfaces, but the back end is the same. There is something to be said for: logic in the backend, presentation in the front end. Typical of good FOSS applications.
Don’t think that open source is immune to this, OnlyOffice has an AI button and many OSS devs are integrating Claude into their dev nowadays. It’s getting annoying.
Tbf, OnlyOffice is a bit sketchy, hence the EuroOffice fork. But I do agree with the sentiment.
Not integrating the tools that the users want to use is how you end up in a situation 10 years down the road where people say “oh, oss-version-of-my-favourite-tool doesn’t have A, B, and C so I can’t use it” and lose another gen of users.
“The users want to use slop” isn’t the flex you think it is
I’m getting so tired of running, Windows ruined itself because of it, I don’t know wtf to do.
I’m not flexing, I’m acknowledging the reality of the people we share the world with.
Well the original meme implied ai features weren’t being added to open source projects
So its a wee bit strange when I see AI added to OSS projects as well, and a LOT of Claude commits on git repos.
I was responding to your comment “it’s getting annoying” in response to AI features being added to oss tools. Either way, we’ve lost the plot in this thread lol. No hard feelings man. Have a good day! :)
Yeah it is getting annoying because I left to get away from enshittification yet it feels like it’s following us everywhere we go.
tbf ai can be useful, and will be even more useful once we optimize it enough that you can just run good models locally, without being a slave to the llm coorps. even if they will technically always have the “frontier”, most of these applications don’t really need the best of the best
we should strive to achieve that since it won’t go away, and you can’t really fight it long term
No, AI just can be harmful.
Read this
TL;DR: AI is just a works-stealing machine that makes code less secure and displaces people of their works (or removes their opportunities to get a job).
and displaces people of their works (or removes their opportunities to get a job).
We’re talking about open source software here, where the devs usually work for free, as a hobby.
Yes, but the fact is that FLOSS projects are supposed to have, or should have, strong moral codes that favor the emancipation of people who are below everything, freedom and the improvement of everyone’s conditions through a philosophy of sharing and, especially, respecting people’s autonomy, freedom of choice and personal fulfillment. And those same people who work on open source projects, often for free, also need to figure out how to put food on their tables so they don’t starve, and AI is constantly making that basic need impossible to achieve.
how it feels going from using a 2003 software for work to a newer version
