I think that for Lemmy and Linux the problem is actually in the people using it. Without people using it, they won't be many posts/good software support. Without the posts/support there won't be many users. It's not some UI being different, or anything else. It's the main issue. When you see lemmy.world frontpage (All, not Local), there are 15 threads about Reddit and Lemmy, 2 about Twitter limits and the rest is about tech. Meanwhile, on r/popular you have variety of communities, still mostly memes and videos but there are also other posts.

It's more about reddit that reddit is. You can't make it long-term with this type of content. On other instances it's more bearable, but it's still not enough to keep people here.

It's a little different, because people tend to get pissed because of the context of their routines. If I am trying to do work for school or for a corp, I'm going to be extra irritated when my software fails and I have to relearn something on top of doing work I already don't want to do.

Lemmy is just for fun. I think people might be more forgiving.

Complaints can be valuable user feedback. I'm sure the developers can see past the negativity and know that they can't make everyone happy. They can still use it to pick up ideas or prioritize what to do next etc. without taking it personally.

Yeah, they probably get a lot of requests and crazy mails, but that's part of the process even in professional development. At least in open source they're free to do what they want at any time, compared to professional work where they might be required to follow crazy ideas even if they don't want to.

Sometimes though it's major issues that turn people away. I've always loved the idea of Linux, but I've never been able to adopt it fully. I've tried multiple times and this current time is no different then before. It's always some major thing that's broken that no amount of research/troubleshooting that fixes it. At this current moment, my steam install won't download games to my secondary disks. No matter what I change. It's running mostly fine otherwise.

Yeah, its human nature. Things get better and people come around eventually. Kde plasma is way more continuous from windows 10 then windows 11 is anyway.

Lemmy and jerboa are extremely polished compared to a lot of the free software I've used, albeit a lot less complex. FreeCAD is one that comes to mind whose UI and interaction actively fights you just to do simple things