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In your opinion, which FOSS software is by many considered "old" or "obsolete", but are in fact, in your opinion, in many ways better than the newer alternatives? (feddit.dk)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'll start:

RSS and blogs, news vs. social media
XMPP vs. WhatsApp/FB messenger/Snapchat
IRC vs. Matrix, Teams, Discord etc.
Forums vs. Social media, Reddit, Lemmy(?)

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (35 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Isn't that a type error? The examples given were for protocols, but your specific objection was about clients. There are many amazingly smooth clients for the aforementioned protocols. They may not be popular, you might not like them, but they definitely exist.

We should also briefly take note of the disastrous UI that Microsoft Office has.

[–] Arnaldur 1 points 1 year ago

The category is FLOSS software, I find it more likely that OP could only think of protocols when making the examples.

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