So true. I don't miss the "subscribe to be able to write a page of text" lifestyle.

To be fair the left part also once was "Software, by corporation" (i.e. Photoshop CS and prior)

That's inevitable enshittification.

"Make the best software we can" vs "Make the most money we can"

It has gone the same way as physical goods. My parents still have appliances (food mixers things like that) that still work and they bought them in the 1980s. Good luck getting anything to last that long these days.

I'm sorry to say this, but this is survivorship bias. We produced plenty of crap that broke a few months after use even 50 years ago, it's just that you don't notice the crap because it was thrown away after it broke and all you see now is the stuff that surprisingly made it for decades. That's not to say that enshittification and planned obsolescence is not a thing, it's just not as extreme and "we used to build things that lasted" as people would like to believe.

Yet both should learn from each other.

The FOSS world needs more UX/UI specialists.

But the icons are so much prettier on the right!

/s

If you say so

It is true that merely from the observation of old things, you cannot conclude that all things lasted long.

But as a matter of fact, from different observations by many people and areas, mid- to high- end stuff really lasted much, much longer. It was as an average rule more simple, less compact, and it lasted and still lasts really long without degradation.

It depends on several things which is preferable, at the end it's depends on the intentions and ethics of the author respect the user, on the other hand questionable in case of products (often also FOSS) from big corps where ethics respect the user are too often secundary. To say "OpenSource is always good and Proprietary crap" is a big mistake

A good article

https://nebius.com/blog/posts/open-source-vs-proprietary

Donate to your favorite project.

The FOSS world needs more UX/UI specialists.

Or even just hobbyists…

And would you look at all that beautiful whitespace!

Word

The hamburger menu, the account picker and the huge share pill, they all look exactly like that!
Congrats OP this meme actually annoyed me 😭

Needs more indiscernible buttons on the left with a bunch of nested menus

I've been seeing more and more open source disclosed source software that fits the category on the right...

Yeah, they needed to capture a user base first and only then start enshittifying. This is what they always do - in software, hardware and other products & services

Apple Incorporated’s software looks more like the one on the left, but with a way more refined user interface…
If we want OSS to be as good as possible then we need to compare our favorite software with other good software, not with Microslop. UI design matters and we should discuss it with less of a bias.

Valid on both side, honest soft and services vs which are not, the worst malware is mostly FOSS which you can find in the onion. Also nowadays the biggest FOSS catalogue is by Google Labs and Microsoft, FOSS to make money.
There are others, like the famose Irfanview, free proprietary soft and absolute trustworth and definitively the best which you can find, there don't exist a real OpenSource alternative.

Fuck this is quintessential enshittificaction of modern interface

We tend to forget that the design on the left was the corporate ux language for a long time. Open source is just slower to fall for the trends, but they fall eventually.

Absolutely - anything can have more than one objective. But when money is an objective, the one constant is that it changes what it affects. Sometimes better in some ways, sometimes worse.

Sport is a good analogy here, I think. Amateur sport has little impact beyond those directly involved. Adding money increases exposure of those sports, better facilities, lots of scope for good - and yet big money sports are also very often mired in corruption and greed. (FIFA being a timely example) Those base human behaviours never go away.

Yesterday describing how to do a thing to my wife over the phone
"The menu button"
"There is no menu button"
"It's a hamburger icon"
"What?"
"3 lines"
"How is that a menu?"

There's also maintenance blindness. It is easy to see how something lasted forever, when you weren't the one doing the maintenance and repair work everyday. Also, many "good ol' immortal appliances" neglect to mention how most of the parts are actually brand new or it wouldn't be functional otherwise.

FIFA is simply a money wash engine, nothing to do with sport.

Personally I think a lot of FOSS maintainers are burning out. If you maintain a remotely popular project you basically have a second unpaid job.

Tre ability to replace parts is part of why they last so long

No.

Very Adobe

I often help my parents use their phones.
It is so hard when every app they use has its own garbage bespoke design language and you get such pearls as:

• Buttons and tabs can be any combination of Colored Square, White Square with Outline or Grey Text on White Background (and they switch every screen!)
• Modals without a scroll bar so you can't tell there's a "Confirm" button at the bottom
• Awfully confusing share dialogs before the Native system share sheet opens
• Inconsistent iconography
• Overflow menus hidden behind 3 dots, 3 lines or neither

I feel like it's almost second nature for tech savy people to wade thru this crap but for your average granny this shit is practically unparseable.

I’m working on a mobile app, this commentary is very helpful to me.

Cool pic.
Not sure where it originated, but originally saw it here
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/47101580

If you want to help the grannies of the world, grab an older budget device with a not so big screen resolution and crank the device scale / text size super high.
Man, you would not believe what havoc that causes on most apps.

I know responsive design is hard but damn...

For the average user — yes; for me — I don't care.

Most of my work is in the terminal either way so I tend to care way more about a searchable documentation, reference, manual. Other than that I really like the textual toolbar with dropdowns plus some context menus.
I want my interface to be dense with accessible information.

There's room for flare tho, I still need feedback on my actions: hovers, drags, clicks, etc.

how it feels going from using a 2003 software for work to a newer version

It kills me that fucking everything is a fucking website these days, even "desktop" applications.

This is about more than design. The right is pretty much just what flavor of the week looks like in CSS. This is about web devs infecting desktop software

Back during covid we sent my wife's grandparents a smart phone so they could video call. They only had a dumb brick phone.

I forget what model but it was one specifically aimed at easy of use for seniors. We had it delivered so I could set it up. Then delivered it to them ready to go.

It was impossible. Even just answering a call being touch and hold the green circle then slide it 2cm in any direction and release took nearly an hour.

My wife does social care now and a client yesterday had managed to enable audio description on his firestick. This is what i was explaining. Hold back and menu on the remote to turn it on/off. He'd probably done it by accident and now his TV is explaining everything on screen after every button press and he has no clue where to even begin to turn it off. It's utterly incomprehensible. I'm sure they thought it was a good idea to have a way to turn it on that doesn't need you to see the screen.

Please expand on your posture. I'm intrigued.

Also why the fuck do they need basically my entire identity just so i can write words on a document?

Don't think that open source is immune to this, OnlyOffice has an AI button and many OSS devs are integrating Claude into their dev nowadays. It's getting annoying.

Might be wrong speak, or a new idea they can steal!

But but gimp is so unusable 🙄

And then we have insanity like Instagram, where the logo opens a separate area

How the hell does the logo ever load anything but the home screen?

Or to train their shitty ai models?

AutoCAD installing three million micro services just to get their shit pirated anyways.

Usually to make sure your document is synced with the cloud.

We've got my 95 old grandma https://enna.care/ and she can use it. Instead of having to use the touch interface it works by placing cards on to an NFC reader.