Free software scares normal people

Why Free/OSS Software Often Feels “Scary”

• Many projects are built “by power users for power users”: devs scratch their own itch, so they expose every option they’d ever want.
• Adding options is cheap for a dev and feels high‑value; pruning and coherently organizing them is expensive, ongoing work.
• Typical FOSS distribution and installation paths already filter for technically inclined users, reinforcing a power‑user bias in feedback.
• There’s little budget for UX research, user testing, or telemetry; when telemetry is proposed, the backlash is strong. So UIs are based on intuition and complaints from existing (already-skilled) users.
• Several comments stress this isn’t unique to FOSS: Microsoft Office, CAD tools, DAWs, GPG, etc., are also intimidating.

Simplicity Is Hard and Fragile

• Making a focused “one‑click” flow is easy; discovering the right flow for the right audience is hard.
• Maintaining simplicity is an unstable equilibrium: users and contributors constantly ask for “just one more option,” leading to feature creep.
• Everyone’s “20% of features” is slightly different; trimming too far can leave many users missing their one critical feature.
• A strong product owner or “benevolent dictator” is often needed to defend simplicity.

Proposed Strategies: Wrappers & Progressive Disclosure

• The Magicbrake idea (simple wrapper over Handbrake) is widely praised: keep the powerful backend, offer a trivial “drop file, press go” UI for common cases.
• Others point to “basic vs advanced” modes, or multi‑level settings (focused/simple/expert) with progressive disclosure, as a good compromise.
• Counterpoint: dual modes are hard to design well and often disappoint both novices and experts.

Power Users vs “Normal People”

• One camp argues tools should prioritize the thousands of hours experts spend with them, not the first five minutes of a novice.
• Another camp notes that if novices fail in the first five minutes, those thousands of hours never happen at all.
• Several comments criticize the “normal people are dumb” tone; many non‑technical users are time‑limited, not incapable.

Design, Culture, and Incentives

• Persistent theme: FOSS has far more volunteer coders than volunteer designers; artists and UX people are under‑represented and often undervalued.
• Good UI/UX demands research, iteration, and saying “no” – hard to do in volunteer, consensus‑driven projects.
• Some accept that many FOSS tools will remain “for nerds,” and that’s okay; others see a big opportunity in building polished, simple front‑ends on top.