One of my associates at Open for Business has said far better the same complaint I’ve made for years, proving why he’s the one who actually gets paid to write stuff:
One perennial problem with free software is that, because they give it away, developers have no real reason to pursue a user base. This enables them to develop what they want in the way they want to develop it.
He goes on to discuss how KDE serves as a primary example. The new 4.x series gets lots of hobby user hype, with all the gee-whiz eye candy, but does so at the cost of any usefulness to the vast majority of ordinary computer users, folks for whom a computer could never be a hobby. Dare I say it comes close to a cult of self-congratulatory devotees who castigate anyone daring to suggest things might be a little better? The tight circle of developers and fans get all the attention, but anyone who doesn’t kneel in tearful awe is marginalized, at best. Such is the nature of far too many Open Source projects.
I recall one brief moment when KDE was truly useful within the parameters of things Open Source in general, and that was the 3.1.5 release. Though it benefited from the increasing automation and integration of the software, it still worked quite beautifully on FreeBSD 4, where it simply ran on top of the system. The handy user-friendly features like auto-mounting removable media didn’t work, but there was no real hassle in creating a desktop icon which would try to mount if you clicked it. I wrote for others instructions on how to make that work. Meanwhile, KDE at that staged managed to gather and solve a host of usability issues which had once plagued those of us who actually wanted Linux and BSD to serve as a daily work system.
That was the pinnacle of my experience with KDE, because while many parts of it continued to progress nicely, breakage kept popping up here and there, and too often it was something which simply needed to work or it was not worth the trouble to use it at all. Thus, while SUSE managed to integrate it really nicely into the system, the underlying flaws of SUSE bloat took it all away. Other distros simply didn’t bother to take advantage of that same potential (among distros I was willing to try) and FreeBSD zig-zagged on several issues, so I gave up when the home desktop thing became too low a priority for its developers.
Like Powell, I was thrilled to discover the willingness of Timothy Pearson to carry the fire for the one best hope to keep KDE 3 viable for Ubuntu base. I followed the instructions, added his repository, and installed. It’s functional, but I’m afraid I found a few parts not too well integrated where it really has to be. I won’t take Pearson to task over them, since he managed a monumental task just getting the packages built and functional on any level without much assistance. Rather, I commend him heartily for doing something so very rare among Open Source developers: He wants to serve the user.
That in itself is something to celebrate.
Normally I agree in concept with your FOSS views but this time I think it’s a case of personal attachment.
Walk into Best Buy and try to buy a laptop with W2K? You can’t. Heck MS won’t even allow anyone to buy the OS new. Go out and buy a phone from the Fruit company and try to load what you want on it. You can’t and actually there are laws stopping you from jail breaking it. In both cases I am told over and over that “by buying their products you enter in their world and accept all the limitations.” So why doesn’t FOSS get the same excuse applied?
At least in the FOSS world you have tons of choices for nearly every form of application out there. Don’t like KDE? GNOME, WM, XFCE, etc etc are at the ready.
Speaking from personal experience when I use to volunteer for VectorLinux, people are fickle. They complain, moan and groan when they don’t get what they want but most don’t know what they want. You are the exception and not the norm. If I were a developer I would probably do the same thing by way of ignoring most users. Especially since most users won’t even take the few seconds to fill out a bug report. Now that I’m part of the IT depart at the local school district I see the same thing. Everyone wants help but no one wants to take the extra 2seconds to fill out a ticket. They all want you to come running at your quickest but if the problem goes away no one calls back to alert us of that fact.
My last thought is just an observation. For both MS and Fruit OS products I’ve seen people make tons of excuses for both OS’ short comings. But since they paid for it they stick with it. Maybe if people paid for FOSS (like I did at VL – 23 per release) they wouldn’t be so quick to trash all parts of it. Like I said, no facts, just an idea.
No matter what, these types of posts can only make FOSS better. Thanks for that.
As you note, the intent is to improve. I would be the last to seek any means of coercion. My hope is to win a hearing by showing I take it all very seriously. Seriously enough I want FOSS to gain a bigger market share. But it won’t unless more projects gain people who at least try to understand the user’s experience.
On a related note, I submit the people who whine the loudest are mere hobbyists, people who have no devotion to the software itself, just the latest fix in gee-whiz technology. Those folks are never satisfied. Serious users would probably make more comments if the bug reporting procedure wasn’t so often slanted to fellow developers. With my years of experience and wide reading, there are still several bug lists I can’t use because it demands more than I know how to submit. Secondly, the user gains nothing from using FOSS bug lists, because nobody fixes anything in current use; it all goes for the next release. That is not user support, but hobbyist support. If submitting a bug report ticket meant a solution for what they had on their machine at the time, you’d see a lot more bug reports.