I think part of the problem is that “good” UX isn’t a single thing but a continuum. It’s very dependent on the skill level of the user. Often what makes a good UX for a newbie is a bad UX for a power user and vice versa. OSS tends to attract power users and particularly the ones working on some software in a particular area tend to be domain experts. That in turn can lead to designs optimized for very advanced use cases that end up being frustratingly opaque to an “average” user or even worse a newbie.

Blender is an excellent example of this. It’s regarded as one of the best 3D programs out there but it’s far from a simple piece of software to pick up. What saves it is that all the commercial alternatives are just as obtuse as it is and so the ground level expectation is that it’s going to be complicated.

Likewise many OSS and Linux tools expect or even require CLI usage which while great for power users putting together scripts and pipelines are often opaque and unintuitive to someone who is still learning the domain.

This focus on power users leads to turning newbies away and funneling them towards the commercial offerings where they then get used to their quirks and limitations of those apps so that when they do eventually become power users the quirks and limitations of the OSS alternatives feel strange and off-putting to them.

File format standards certainly, and OSS generally embraces those (at least if they’re non-proprietary), but UI doesn’t have to be standardized. On the other hand though not everything needs to be a unique snowflake. UIs should take the things that work well and experiment with what doesn’t.

Lets also not pretend that proprietary apps don’t screw around with UI design just as much. I can’t count how many times now Microsoft has redesigned the UI of something that was perfectly fine and didn’t need redesigning only to end up making it worse.

What about Krita? Not sure exactly what Adobe product it would be an alternative for though. I know a lot of what people use it for used to be done with Photoshop, but I think Photoshops core demographic is a slightly different use case. Also Inkscape as an Illustrator alternative?

Today it looks like the answer is technically none of them. The FAQ on bookshop.org claims they’re working with Kobo to add support “later this year”.

This is interesting in a “how far can you launch a pumpkin using an air canon” way, not a “you only need to cool this down to -40C to make it super conduct” way. It’s a fun experiment with nearly zero practical purpose outside of some very niche edge cases. Wearable computing is probably the only realistic one at the moment for a CPU that you can stretch a little and runs incredibly slow.

Ah, so homegrown scum. I kind of lump them under the mega corporation header though as the goal for them is to eliminate regulations and oversight so they can pillage to their hearts content. Really trying to speed run that late stage capitalism dystopia.

Going to be real interesting to see where that money is coming from. My bet is some combination of the worst of the US political “thinktanks” like the federalist society, Russian assets, and mega corporations like Amazon.

Is it still passing the Turing test if you don’t think either one is human?

Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?

Get ready for a bunch more 1 and 2 day outages because someone forgot/missed the deadline to renew some crusty server somewhere. This is such massive overkill for most servers. End users should start getting used to that expired certificate warning in their browser of choice and the process to tell it to continue to the site anyway.

Yeah, the article is right, but for all the wrong reasons. China is taking the lead globally less because of anything it’s doing but more because of what everyone else is. In many ways the US was doomed from the moment one of our two political parties decided its future was best served by appealing to the ignorant and uneducated.

The GOP has spent decades attacking our education system and painting experts and the educated as the enemy all because they had the temerity to say the emperor had no clothes and point out the many ways in which conservative dogma fails. China got incredibly lucky to have just the right economy and connections in the 80s to become everybody’s outsourced manufacturing hub and has further benefited by the US attacking its own educational and research institutions.

China hasn’t so much sprinted past the US as they have maintained their steady pace while the US shot itself in the head because the right hand wanted to be the one in charge of everything.

Trump and the MAGA idiots are just the natural progression of the policies the GOP embraced starting all the way back with Nixon and his southern strategy and accelerated by Reagan and his economic policies.

It turns out it’s hard to be a leader in a technological society when you put the dumbest people you can find in charge of things.

Teams meetings aren’t really that much worse than Zoom, it’s mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that’s significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.

An organization , “team”, channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can’t I completely silence or ignore a “team”, channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren’t there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow “reply to” option? Why can’t anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic “teams” that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.

They killed me with an IPO. How weird is that?

Can’t stop the signal.

South east here and yeah same. The overwhelming majority of my coworkers couldn’t be farther from the techbro stereotypes and most of them tend towards the progressive side of the spectrum.

Microsoft’s requirements for Windows 11 include a 1GHz or faster CPU with at least two cores, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage,

All of this is no problem and essentially any computer manufactured in the last couple decades can meet these requirements. They’re effectively irrelevant for this discussion.

Secure Boot capability, and TPM 2.0 compatibility.

This is the problem right here. Pretty much every last computer you hear about that isn’t compatible it’s one or both of these, almost always the TPM 2.0 module.

That of course is if the reason you aren’t “upgrading” is because the hardware isn’t supported. For a great many of us our hardware is supported, we just don’t want all the bullshit anti-features Microsoft has crammed into Windows 11. Windows 10 was already bad enough with it’s constant telemetry spyware, that annoying Cortana garbage shoehorned in anywhere they could manage, the absolute atrocity that they turned the start menu search function into, and the annoying Teams and OneDrive integrations that randomly reinstalled and re-enabled themselves after updates.

Then MS went and had to cram in even more spyware by way of their horrible copilot garbage. All for what? What are we getting with 11 that’s better than 10? What feature justifies that upgrade? Nothing, that’s the answer. There’s no reason at all that 11 needed to be made.

In other words it was the sales department doing what they always do, pulling complete bullshit out of their ass and then expecting the engineering team to deliver it.

The “and at least one AI model seems to agree” on the end has got to be peak irony.

In my experience dealing with my deeply Republican parents it’s something like:

• Chinese/China -> Communism
• Socialism/Socialist -> Communism
• Government Program -> Communism
• Anything that helps people who aren’t rich -> Communism and/or Woke
• Anything the Democrats do -> Communism and/or Woke
• Any company that does something that isn’t the most evil/amoral thing it could possibly have done (rarely happens) -> Communism and/or Woke

In some cases very, but in others not so much. Some of them have Patreon accounts or other ways to accept payment, but in many cases you’ll be doing good just to find a working email address for them. Ideally though I’d prefer to just pay for the books outright rather than trying to do some kind of grey area thing where I’d pirate the book and then donate the cost to them (if for no other reason than it causes tax headaches for everyone involved).