It always feels like some form of VR tech comes out with some sort of fanfare and with a promise it will take over the world, but it never does.
It always feels like some form of VR tech comes out with some sort of fanfare and with a promise it will take over the world, but it never does.
I’m going to get downvoted for this
Open source has its place, but the FOSS community needs to wake up to the fact that documentation, UX, ergonomics, and (especially) accessibility aren’t just nice-to-haves. Every year has been “The Year of the Linux Desktop™” but it never takes off, and it never will until more people who aren’t developers get involved.
If you make that argument about the state of software in general, I’d agree to an extent in the sense that it should be more prioritized. But I don’t see how that applies to open source in particular?
In those aspects proprietary software is just as bad, if not even worse. The difference is simply that the default choice of software for most tasks is a proprietary software. They can have a shit ton of unusable and confusing mess, even intentional dark patterns, but users will adapt.
There’s a reason why Apple is the poster child for accessibility. They control the entire stack from hardware to OS, and have an ocean of money to devote to what is effectively a tiny marginalized portion of their user base.
Open source is the exact opposite. Any given open source project (especially any given Linux distro) is standing atop a precarious mound of other open source projects that the distro maintainers themselves have no control over. So when accessibility breaks, the maintainers say “It’s not us, it’s GNOME”. Then GNOME says “It’s not us, it’s Wayland”, and so on.
Imagine I handed you a laptop without a working screen, then when you complain you can’t use it, I said “It’s not my problem” or “We’ll get to it eventually” or “I wouldn’t know how to help you” That’s desktop Linux when you’re blind.
Apologies if this comes across as a rant. I’m just bitter about the fact there’s all this free, privacy-respecting software out there that’s out of my reach, and I’m stuck selling my soul to Microsoft and Apple.