People have been tooting the same horn for decades. And it's true, but if some OSS becomes mainstream, like Blender, all the sudden, the UX gets fixed.
Developers create crappy open source communities that only a certain sort of developer can even bare being involved in, let alone anyone with another skill set (like UX design), and still, in the year 2024, routinely belittle these skill sets, then proceed the crank out the most obviously “designed by engineers” looking interfaces you’ve ever seen, say “but it’s for power users, you just have to learn it!”, and call it a day.
Honestly, so many projects simply reap what they sow here.
Yeah I’m a UX designer (and dev) and the hostility toward UX and UX principles in the open source community is disheartening, for sure. People use things that are easy and pleasant to use. That shouldn’t be controversial.
(As far as this program is concerned, my general thoughts are — give it a few years. It took Figma years to supplant Sketch, it took Sketch years to supplant the Adobe suite. I think that the desire from the community is there, as there are really scummy business practices that the Figma team has put in place, and it’s squeezing departments/seats/licenses, which is stupid obvious artificial scarcity that they’re using to extract as much as they can before something useful and FOSS comes around and eats their lunch.)
I'm not sure how I feel about Blender, the UI in the older versions was notoriously niche if not outright confusing. Here's a video comparing the versions in a simple example task: https://youtu.be/Vz_GxPMActM
Whatever caused it to succeed and catch enough attention to be continuously improved, I'm thankful for that. Same as with game engines like Godot and other similar FOSS projects, maybe even LibreOffice not dying like OpenOffice did, though that's a whole tale in of itself. Actually, I'll similarly celebrate improvements in proprietary software, too.
Then again, I still think that Inkscape and some of the other software that gets touted as good is actually not very usable, so I'm a bit opinionated.
Its just proves that UX can get better. Blender has had particularly bad UX (when it was commercial soft) and 3D is one of the most challenging software.
Its just mostly about focus of the project and agency of people trying to make UX better.
Yea, the question really is will the OSS tool survive long enough to have the UX fixed. In Blender's case, yes, but that's not been true for many other OSS projects. Just look at how many dead electron projects are floating around the internet.
Arguably it's more important to create software that solves a problem first so there is an incentive for people to keep using it. But the less people use it, the longer it will take for the UX to improve organically (see Blender and Inkscape).
