This is extremely light on substance, many words to say very little.

It seems that the main thing that inspired this post was the author didn't like Darktable compared with Lightroom. Why exactly was it badly designed? Some examples by comparison, especially screenshots would have really helped illustrate the point.

And what exactly do they mean by badly designed? Doesn't look pretty enough for their standards as a professional designer, creates usability problems, or just doesn't satisfy the UI expectations one has from only using proprietary OSes/applications? Bad design is subjective, and there's no clarification on what this means beyond the author's personal opinion.

As someone that puts up with the many annoyances of GNOME, to use one example of questionable design (looks pretty and is oversimplified at the expense of usability and functionality) there is a lot of room for discussion to be had on this topic but this does nothing to add to the conversation. They had almost started an interesting discussion about projects aimed at technical and non-technical users, but again, no examples to illustrate the point and changes subjects before anything of substance is mentioned.

This also ignores how many people have gotten non-technical users, including grandmothers (!!) using Linux successfully using just the GUI, without them ever having to touch a commandline. That really speaks to how subjective design can be, and I think is a great counterexample to the point the author may have been trying to make. Personally I find many (but not all) community-driven FOSS apps well-designed, in that GUIs seem much easier to navigate since the design is much simpler and makes it much easier for me to make a mental map to navigate it quickly, and I'd suspect this simplicity is also what might make it appealing for non-technical people too. Though, obviously application design can vary quite a bit depending on the GUI framework used, but it also should be pointed out that Windows 11's design is probably even more fragmented and has at least 10 different UI design languages in different parts of just the OS.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...

The author also wastes a lot of words about making GitHub seem like this impenetrable fortress where the only way that one could have an impact on the design is by being skilled enough to make a pull request, but anyone can file an issue to ask a question or for an enhancement to improve the design of an application without knowing any code. Yes, some projects will be more receptive to this and noob-friendly than others, but people can still have an impact on software without coding skills if they're able to ask politely and show a use-case that's not being met or find a bug that someone might have overlooked. I get the impression that the author's probably not a developer themselves, and that's totally OK, but that's also another wasted opportunity of a fresh outsider perspective being able to highlight blind spots.

There is almost zero discussion here on actual UI/UX design, and rather a lot of bloviating about proprietary/free software history and economics in general without making a point.