Why Linux Desktop Software Tends To Suck

Back in 2004, John critiques an open source advocate on Desktop Linux usability

UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step. In my estimation, the difference between:

• software that performs function X; and
• software that performs function X, with an intuitive well-designed user interface

isn’t just a little bit of extra work. It’s not even twice the work. It’s an entire order of magnitude more work. Developing software with a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work

…

Great software developers don’t design for morons. They design for smart, perceptive people — people just like themselves. They have profound respect for their users.

and then turns his attention to open source

The distributed, collaborative nature of open source software works for developer-level software, but works against user-level software. Imagine a motion picture produced like a large open source project. Different scenes written and directed by different people, spread across the world. Editing decisions forged by group consensus on mailing lists. The result would be unfocused, incoherent, and unenjoyable.

Movies are collaborative art, but require strong direction. So it is with end user software.

While reading this old and long essay— but new to Steve — these two parts stood out as key points. Steve has been using Linux on a PC (dual boot) and hadn’t thought about the difference when using Linux software as opposed to Windows.¹ Hey, Steve does whatever to get things working. But it’s as though at times you have to think and work harder for every inch, sometimes unnecessarily so.

In the end, still like working with Linux since it’s a nice change of pace. At least this puts things under perspective and explains why things are the way they are.