I did click the link, I would never get my 15 minutes back (I switched to 1.75x mid-way)

Can I get at least a link to the original article on Discord?

I agree that overall there's a need to having good UX in the FLOSS community, and I actually think FLOSS punches well above its weight for good UX. Most software tends to have familiar UX due to being first to the solution rather the best. In contrast, FLOSS tends to have scalable UX that also changes with time to become more powerful. Blender is a great example of this.

Specifically though, I think Audacity is not a great case study. Firstly, as Tantacrul and the Audacity crew themselves say: Audacity is not a DAW, and the entire value of Audacity is that it's not a DAW. You can download and "do a thing with audio that you want to do". It's closer in use case to Sound Recorder on steroids than a DAW. Given that and the way the feature set has expanded, it's only a matter of time before the jank & technical debt sets in (which leads, in turn, into design debt). This also affects big companies, and often these companies cannot escape (you can look at the way the new Mac UX has been received, and a huge proportion of that is design debt coming from technical debt).

Secondly, and this is a big one, Tantacrul is not just an amazing designer, he's an amazing designer *for music software*. You could probably count on your hands the number of people on the planet who could fix audacity the way he is doing. Pick even an average to good designer, and Audacity IMO would go from bad to worse. See how cars are being designed today to see what the average designer would do to a UX.

Thirdly, Audacity is specialist software, and this requires a whole different mindset to "regular" design. I just don't think regular designers are capable of it. Expecting an improvement in that sort of software is asking for a lot. Like imagine saying that something like KiCad needs improvement? I dunno.

I think Audacity is the perfect example of why this has not been deemed important. Audacity has been used by countless people over the years despite the UX problems. Instead time and resources have been put into porting to different platforms, keeping up with OS changes and improving features and stability.

If they had tried to so as many UX changes as Windows or Apple then that would have been less resources added to the core functions or need a much bigger team. For me the thing with FOSS is not that it has to be as good as the competition always. I believe it will get there in the end, if we all keep trying.

I see the move to FLOSS, and I do believe we will all eventually be using FLOSS because you can't beat free on price, but I see it as a marathon not a sprint. The UX can be fixed in the start of the race for some and in the last 100m for others.

That said, common UX standards and best practices are of course welcome and will come in time. All we can do is try and help speed up the process and call out anything that set it back.