Comment by Arainach
1 day ago
Kernel improvements are interesting to geeks and data centers, but open source is fundamentally incompatible with great user experience.
Great UX requires a lot of work that is hard but not algorithmically challenging. It requires consistency and getting many stakeholders to buy in. It requires spending lots of time on things that will never be used by more than 10-20% of people.
Windows got a proper graphics compositor (DWM) in 2006 and made it mandatory in 2012. macOS had one even earlier. Linux fought against Compiz and while Wayland feels inevitable vocal forces still complain about/argue against it. Linux has a dozen incompatible UI toolkits.
Screen readers on Linux are a mess. High contrast is a mess. Setting font size in a way that most programs respect is a mess. Consistent keyboard shortcuts are a mess.
I could go on, but these are problems that open source is not set up to solve. These are problems that are hard, annoying, not particularly fun. People generally only solve them when they are paid to, and often only when governments or large customers pass laws requiring the work to be done and threaten to not buy your product if you don't do it. But they are crucially important things to building a great, widely adopted experience.
Your comment gives the impression that you think open source software is only developed by unpaid hobbyists. This not true, this is quite an outdated view. Many things are worked on by developers paid full time. And that people are mostly interested in algorithmically challenging stuff, which I don't think is the case.
Accessibility does need improvement. It seems severely lacking. Although your link makes it look like it's not that bad actually, I would have expected worse.
…and you are implying that Microsoft Windows 11 is a better example of ”great user experience”?
If you have anything less than perfect vision and need any accessibility features, yes. If you have a High DPI screen, yes. In many important areas (window management, keyboard shortcuts, etc.), yes.
Here's one top search result that goes into far more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1ed0j10/the_state_of...
For the general user, yes absolutely.
Linux DEs still can't match the accessibility features alone.
yeah, there's layers and layers of progressively older UIs layered around the OS, but most of it makes sense, is laid out sanely, and is relatively consistent with other dialogs.
macOS beats it, but its still better in a lot of ways over the big Linux DEs.
Start menu in the middle of the screen that takes a couple seconds to even load (because it is implemented in React horribly enought to be this slow) only to show adds next to everything is perfect user experience.
Every other button triggering Copilots assures even better UX goodness.
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I prefer it. Linux desktop feels a lot more laggy to me on the same hardware.
Of course that is minus all the recent AI/ad stuff on Windows…