From my experience, most FOSS software is very user friendly user-centric / user-focused, while proprietary stuff is shit. What is the most notable exception to this rule that comes to your mind?
Edit: With user friendliness, I don’t mean UI design, but things like how the software is handling user privacy, whether it sees its users as users or as money-making cattle, how it handles user feedback, compatibility with other software the user uses (vs. vendor lock-in), configurability, and similar issues.
Edit2: I was made aware that user friendliness is a defined term: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Userfriendliness
My experience is the opposite - FOSS is often obtuse, with an assumption that you see things the same was as the dev, which is usually a single person or at most a very small group. Add to that, documentation is nominal, or non-existent, and quite often lacking even a high-level description of what an app does, let alone where to find features in an app. FOSS devs often don’t even follow menu layout that’s been pretty well established at this point. For example, I’ve found the Settings menu under File, Help, Tools, View, etc, in different apps.
Proprietary apps are usually developed by a team, one that’s studied the market segment (or another group has), and usually understands how that segment operates. They then develop the app based on design goals established by a team other than the developers, with UAT (user acceptance testing) performed at given stages (this is even more frequent today with Agile project management). It’s not uncommon for a UI to be mocked up and given to end users to validate UI design/layout choices long before anything is even developed.
These devs usually follow a company standard process, with code reviews by other people. Their changes must be approved by management, and those changes are often requested and reviewed by other teams before being submitted to the dev team.
Most FOSS simply doesn’t have the time or staffing to do what most proprietary software dev does.
And I use both proprietary and FOSS all day long.
There seems to be some confusion. With user friendliness I wasn’t referring to the UI. See Edit in updated post.
The confusion is because user friendly has a clear definition but you’re using it to mean something else.
You could consider editing to say user-centric, user-first, user-focused. Or re-wording to specifically state prioritising the user over profit
It seems you’re right. I wasn’t aware that it has a definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Userfriendliness As a result, I was so naive to just use it as being friendly to users. I’m kinda surprised that this seems to be a well established term (as can be seen by so many here interpreting it with this definition).
Will re-word post.