this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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From my experience, most FOSS software is very ~~user friendly~~ user-centric / user-focused, while proprietary stuff is shit. What is the most notable exception to this rule that comes to your mind?

Edit: With user friendliness, I don't mean UI design, but things like how the software is handling user privacy, whether it sees its users as users or as money-making cattle, how it handles user feedback, compatibility with other software the user uses (vs. vendor lock-in), configurability, and similar issues.

Edit2: I was made aware that user friendliness is a defined term: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Userfriendliness

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[–] moon@lemmy.ml 19 points 5 days ago (2 children)

As someone else pointed out, the premise of this question is extremely faulty. Being user-friendly is one of the main advantages of proprietary software because they have teams of researchers and designers making sure that things are as frictionless as possible for the user. This isn't to say they don't use dark-patterns or engage in anti-consumer practices, but I'm certain that if you did a random sampling of F-Droid and the Play Store, you would find a lot more polished and user-friendly software on the Play Store than the FOSS apps on F-Droid

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You’ve clearly not used B2B software. It’s shit.

[–] philpo@feddit.org 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It depends - if you got the money,it can be good. I actually worked with really really good software systems. Especially for the time.

But....they are rare, they were all custom made/fit and the whole company using them had the right "humans first" culture behind it. And they spend huge amount of money on them.

But as they were not shareholder value run,it didn't matter.

B2G software? That is hell. Pure hell. Never saw a single good one. They even managed to fuck up Linux here.

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How the heck can they fuck to Linux? Are they making you use Hanna Montana Linux??

[–] philpo@feddit.org 2 points 4 days ago

They started their own distribution. Which....ended badly. Especially as the company they contracted to do so was staffed mainly with former oracle and SAP staff.

[–] trolololol@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Disagree strong. Every turn and chance, revenue is given preference over ease of use. Cookies, tracking, free trials where you need to either log in or add your credit card are trends that are very annoying for users. And from there we can get into specifics of what the app does.

It also doesn't explain why every software made in Microsoft, either from scratch or bought after being successful, is the absolute lesson in UI anti patterns.

[–] moon@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago

So OP edited his post to be about being 'user-centric' and not 'user friendly.' There's a huge difference between being easy to use, even for the technologically illiterate, and being good for users so I wouldn't disagree with a lot of what's been said in this thread