[RebeccaTheDev]

> Another problem is that programmers specialize at being good at programming, but things like documentation and UI testing are their own disciplines that are separate and distinct in a lot of meaningful ways.

Even having decent UIs is a problem for many Linux apps and many are often deeply unpleasant to use day-to-day. This is one thing that has started to slowly get better in the last decade or so, but I can always tell what applications were designed by programmers and which ones have had at least some UI work done on them.

Also, accepting feedback from users on UI improvements often gets either ignored or de-prioritized in favor of adding new features. It's very frustrating to see an otherwise really fantastic application with a lot of neat functionality hamstrung by a bad UI.

[lotharcable]

The only desktop to have real meaningful large-ish/professional usability testing is Gnome. And that is only a couple times.

The first time was financed by Sun Microsystems in 2001 for Gnome 1.x and the result was Gnome 2.

The second time was financed by Novell around 2005 or so for their attempt to compete with Microsoft with Novell Linux Desktop. Unfortunately for them the real beneficiary of the improvements that results from their work was Canonical's Ubuntu.

Since then there have been numerous smaller/informal/ad-hoc attempts for both KDE and Gnome.

The results of all of this, of course, is that many "Linux users" believe that Gnome is the result of a conspiracy between IBM, Redhat, and maybe even Microsoft to "destroy the Linux desktop".

So that is fun.

The real success story, from what I can tell, is Blender.

They successfully revamped their user interface without a huge budget. Although it was still financed somewhat by some EU initiative, IIRC. They accomplished this by getting developers sat down next in a big room to actual 3D artists working together to produce a animated feature.

By physically placing users next to devs and having them work together, likely with a great deal of humility and openness, they managed to transform their UI into something that was actually decent.

This is probably a model that can be duplicated by other open source developers, although finding the right type of technical users not experienced in using said software willing to participate is going to always be a major challenge.