Comment by ManlyBread
3 months ago
A lot of of OSS is subpar or even terrible and end users have low tolerance for this kind of stuff.
GIMP is a great example. For decades anyone asking about "open-source Photoshop" would be redirected to GIMP even though GIMP is nowhere near as good as Photoshop. Years pass and some simple things that are a no-brainer in Photoshop are still a nightmare to do in GIMP. Text stroke is one of such examples, there's no easy way to do it with GIMP and the method you can see online looks bad and can't be easily changed afterwards. Why? Or something as simple as picking a size of a brush - why is selecting small sizes such a pain while selecting gigantic brushes that hardly anyone uses is not? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Desktop Linux is an another example. It's always presented as an alternative to Windows (or even better than Windows) and when someone tries it out and it doesn't work for them the end user gets blamed for using the wrong distribution, having wrong hardware, not being able to solve issues right away despite being a beginner or even hit with the legendary "works on my machine". It's always the user who is in the wrong and never the software.
All of this gives OSS a bad name. There are always a bunch of small, annoying problems that affects end users and which often go unfixed for years. Whenever one of these end users brings up these problems they either get told to use a bizarre workaround or get a snarky response about submitting a PR or something. This kind of contempt towards the end user seems to be surprisingly common in OSS circles.
I don't think this is fixable. It would require the OSS community as a whole to change and this will never happen.
> they either get told to use a bizarre workaround or get a snarky response about submitting a PR or something.
Generally, those sort of responses are given to people who didn't pay or contribute in any way, and want something for nothing. OSS developers don't work for you; they're generally solving problems that they're having, and if you happen to be having the same problems, then they may get attention. If you'd like some piece of open source software changed, you are free to change it or to hire someone to change it; that's the deal. Expecting work for nothing is ridiculous.
No wonder that OSS is not taken seriously when the end user is considered a leech and an afterthought.
But that's the thing -- the end user is an afterthought. People write OSS software for two reasons: either it's for themselves or someone is paying them to do it. If you, as an end user, wants to "steer the ship", then you have to contribute in some way.