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NewsForge: Open Source Usability is a Technical Problem We Can Solve On Our Own

“Poor usability is a huge barrier to wider open source adoption.
Our backends have matured and we consistently achieve technical
excellence. Usability is the one area we have not yet mastered. For
some reason, we treat it as a mystery instead of looking at it as a
problem we can solve the same way we solve all other technical
problems.

“As a participant in the KDE project (but expressing my own
viewpoint here instead of speaking for KDE), the approach I have
seen so far to our usability problems is… noise. Ideas are raised
daily on the KDE usability email list, but they never seem to
generate anything but endless discussions. Developers, users and
reviewers all scream that something needs to be done, but
apparently no one knows how…”

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