@cmhe
@lemmy.worldYes they are, UX designers are not asked to make more efficient or usable designs, they are asked to make designs that "look good" in marketing, support ad integration, hook people into others services provided by that same company, make it more difficult to incorporate with workflows that include third-party applications, etc.
This is deliberate UX design, which is part of the enshittification process.
People spend lots of money to buy big screens, only for apps/websites to use a fraction of it.
I cannot control how every application or website I have to use looks, but where I can, I try to find solutions.
When I am occasionally on reddit, I use old.reddit. I use addons for youtube, to remove unecessary stuff, or open videos directly in mpv.
I use reader mode to make many sites easier to navigate.
Mastodon and Lemmy have a much better design than Twitter or new Reddit.
On the one windows machine I still have, I use the classic shell, to replace the start menu with something more usable.
I use Libreoffice, and many other Software with sane functional UI.
I don't want to use old software, because the older software gets, the more hostile the environment becomes for it.
A lot of UI decisions on the Internet seem driven by the need to create empty spaces to put advertising into, and with adblocker it looks just bad.
I am not sure how much credit I want to give Larian here yet, because the editor for DOS2, under their IP, also had a somewhat locked down editor.
I really hope that it wasn't just an accident on their side, but malicious compliance on how they 'locked down' their editor, and they will offer similar open mod tool in their future games.
We might see if they continue to release patches for the mod tools, while not patching that 'mod'.
"Jailbroken" is a bit of an exaggeration. It is just a mod for the editor.
They didn't put any technical hurdles in place to break out of in order to remove the restrictions. They used .NET which is easy to decompile and patch, as seen with all the unity mods out there. They could have used obfuscation, which would hinder the effort a bit, but didn't.
"Jailbroken" is also the wrong word, their is no jail, when we already have full permissions to change whatever file we want.
There are two kinds of freedom, negative and positive liberty. US has a lot of negative liberties, they dictate little in what you can or cannot do, but is lacking in positive liberty, they don't support you very well to do what you want to do.
While Europe might have less negative liberty, their generally better social welfare system grants people more positive freedom.
What a strange selection of censored words... "fail to comply", "The billionaire owner...", "would strenghten the Australian", "has yet to be passed"
Nix on non-NixOS distributions would be great, if it would support installing apps into the users home directory instead of a global directory (without recompiling everything).
(When I looked into it, it wasn't possible, but if you made it work, please share.)
I used to use Ubuntu in the past, and it wasn't Unity, Upstart, Bazaar, Mir, Launchpad, Snap, Amazon ads integration etc. that convinced me to look elsewhere, it was that I found out how other, not commercial distributions, integrated and instrumented its user base into their development.
Instead of having to sign a CLAs when contributing and signing your right away to some corporation, you become part of the community. (Update: It seems they have switched from their Copyright assignment, so something not as invasive in 2011, which is good. But they still require you to sign a CLA.)
So always look who is developing the distribution first, are they individuals or is it one company. And don't let yourself be bated into the dependency of one company, because then you will be the victim of enshittyfication eventually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism
But I also suspect that there are poisons which are deadly when injected and more mildly toxic when ingested. But I am not a chemist.