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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Free and Open Source Software
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Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.
The general public isn't interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.
Say what you want about that, I'm not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn't the world we live in right now.
The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.
Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don't know what is the correct approach. All I know is I've heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.
Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.
Sad truth. I'm super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I'm also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.
OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.
You bring up a good point with utilities like Bitwarden and Proton Mail; things that look nice and have good functionality attract the average user much more easily.
Last I checked, Bitwarden doesn't have any way to hit a hotkey and insert login credentials in the current app? It also can't be unlocked with biometrics?
Those aren't "nice" features, they're baseline features that every password manager needs to have. I don't just type passwords into a browser, so a browser extension alone isn't enough. And I'm not typing my umpteen character long password fifty times a day, there needs to be biometrics.
I will always choose open source software over closed source software - but not if it means choosing mediocre software over good software.
At least with android 13, you can choose the bitwarden app as your default autofill option, and it will fill login info in apps/websites/etc. That being said, I've noticed sometimes it won't pop up immediately, but it's by far the minority of situations where it does that.
This has been a feature for years - Android 10 at least, if not earlier.