Sam Halliday

> Adding features and settings is fun and often done without much second thought. In the end, it results in a bloated beast that causes a lot of confusion and frustration, especially among the type of users most open-source projects are missing, the average user who just wants to get things done. A few large open source projects have tried to improve usability by removing features and options. Look at the history of Gnome 1 through 3. Professional UI experts were paid to produce usability advice for Gnome[1], and the Gnome developers responded with the wholesale removal of configuration options across dozens of major programs[2]. Mostly I actually liked this, because I prefer clean programs that I don't have to mess with. But a lot of other users were unhappy, because many desktop Linux users prefer knobs. Which is fine! But what about Windows users and open source applications? Here, success may be more of a mixed blessing. I've heard several open source maintainers say that their Windows users are more likely to get angry with volunteer maintainers, and to display the sorts of behaviors mentioned in [3]. So widespread popularity isn't always a goal. Sometimes people just want to make a niche tool for other enthusiasts. So it's worth asking whether any given project is seriously trying appeal to "the average user who just wants to get things done." Some are, some aren't. [1] https://people.gnome.org/~calum/usability/ut1_report/report_main.html [2]…

there's "sharing ideas on forums" and then there's giving all of your source code, public and private, to Microsoft to host, instead of just setting your git remote to user@yourownhost:/path/to/reponame and setting up SSH keys I appreciate the viewpoint of the GP and it's telling that it is downvoted when it is not spam, it is not abusive, and it is fully in-line with the stated and implicit etiquette of this site. It's just unpopular, so people are down-voting it. FOSS is kind of culty and it's very apparent in the reaction to opinions like the OP's. If you don't believe what he said about giving up your agency and your fate when you give away your code online, look into what happened to fommil[0] https://medium.com/@fommil/hide-your-real-name-in-open-source-3d67e74a…

ENSIME was abandoned several years ago because the maintainer felt bullied[1] and LSP/Metals has a ways to go. [1] https://medium.com/@fommil/hide-your-real-name-in-open-source-3d67e74a…