I decided to download Scribus as a FLOSS alternative to InDesign or Publisher.

I opened it and was told I need to download GhostScript and it directed me to a site which redirected me to a GitHub releases page

Which had about ten different release versions with shorthand filenames making it very difficult to find the right version. The documentation for Scribus was outdated and gave no help

First one I tried told me to install using Command Line

didn't work

Took me 3 tries to find the GhostScript EXE which would install on my machine and then finally I had it installed Scribus stopped giving me error messages.

And this was how it took me as someone who used to use Linux and understands stuff like 64-bit versus 32-bit software.

Scribus itself has Documentation which jumps into telling me the command-line functions before how to use the GUI.

If you ask the community where to get more Scribus templates they'll link you to a GitHub repo intended to be a directory of templates except nobody actually uses it and adding things to it is people pushing merges to the repo.

and the program itself just has a lot of flaws such as seemingly no ability to add new pages once you've already set the pagecount, and it doesn't understand page folds

like if I tell it "do a two-sided landscape US Letter" it doesn't cut the page in half like InDesign it gives me two side-by-side full US Letter.

I'm figuring it out and using it fine but it's REALLY difficult to use whereas InDesign and Publisher didn't take me long at all to learn back when I worked on a student publication.

Like, FLOSS developers design software for other developers then the FLOSS community wonders why non-techies don't use it

I can't recommend something to someone where the installation process expects you to run strangely named files on command line.... maybe

I can't fault FLOSS for bad GUI too much since it's rarely done with the resources that for-profit products have

but the installation process at least shouldn't expect me to separately download an obscure dependency off GitHub

to be clear my criticism isn't that the software itself is bad UX due to lack of polish or whatever, but that at every step it expects and assumes a very high level of tech competency that even as someone with a minor in computer science and a background in working tech support professionally, I do not feel like I have. If you want someone who doesn't work in tech for a living to use your software you should never make them use command line or compile from Github

LibreOffice is very good FLOSS. It never directs you to github or makes you use command line. I can direct anyone to try LibreOffice

I can't say that about much other FLOSS that I use.

Linux is basically this experience all the time btw.

"this experience" being "in order for things to work i have to put a semantically opaque bash command in my command line that a stranger posted online; and then figure something out from a github"

Also ALSO software devs and techies don't like things like pop-up tutorials that are helpful to new users and hold your hand; and are very hostile to attempts to add them. My onboarding modal for Mastodon received a LOT of resistance from sysadmin types who said it should be something you go look at like documentation; or a button you opt-into

but like ppl who don't go poking in every nook and cranny aren't gonna find a tutorial unless it presents itself to you

@shel Thinking about it, this experience is much more common on Windows than a Linux distro, right? I wonder if this isn't always on purpose. Like they're trying to frustrate Windows users into switching. "Officially" (I'm talking rms & co.) you shouldn't support Windows because it's proprietary and so making something good for Windows users is helping proprietary software, so it's all bad and stuff. (I think this is their perspective.)