In your opinion, which FOSS software is by many considered "old" or "obsolete", but are in fact, in your opinion, in many ways better than the newer alternatives?
I'll start:
Sadly, oftentimes, Forums are replaced by discord, despite... how different those are.
And, discord is inferior in so many ways. Not only you can't easily search for the content, you also need an account on centralized proprietary software, that also is quite resource heavy. Not to mention the privacy concerns.
Discord servers are also closed communities which makes it impossible to search for info through search engine
Not to mention how crappy the linux client is for linux users (I use one of those "thirdparty" clients myself, since the linux client is unbearable)
It's also very hard, if not impossible in some cases to find old conversations on discord, vs forums where they're mostly preserved for eternity.
trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.
undefined> trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.
I agree wholeheartedly, Discord is great for being a live chatroom, and for chatting over voice chat with friends, for any other purpose it is awful, and I am so baffled by so many product decisions to move to Discord. I feel like its a bunch of younger kids that played with their friends on it, and it has become the Hammer they use for every communication scenario, when most things are not nails.
I'm hoping Discord is passing phase I can largely ignore. I will deal with it if I need to but it seems like world of proprietary crapware.
Software, services come and go, so maybe, soon enough...
Forums and Wikis vs. Discord
Yes I know, they shouldn't serve the same purpose, but oftentimes nowadays people communities use discord when they should use a forum or a wiki.
Discord is not even remotely comparable and whoever think that it is (not saying you OP) don't understand the basics on how internet works.
To put it simply:
You can't search the content of a discord server on the publicly available internet. You need to be on discord and for that, the server need to continue to exists. To top it all, things you might search are written all over the place (channels, threads, etc) and the search is clearly the search is a "chat" search, as it should be, thus terrible to actually find what you need.
Problem is that mostly those communities develop naturally and then there is a point where people join a discord and search years worth of discussion in multiple channels for some info.
This could of course have been a forum with threads all along but then users would have to create an account for all those niche forums.... I get how this happens, but it still sucks.
Yes, often overlooked. And, I hear, almost impossible to selfhost these days without a degree in CS, because "we block all non big tech e-mail providers".
I can’t quite find the blog post but I saw someone do a blog post using AWS' map reduce on multiple servers to process a dataset… and then they redid their pipeline using bash, awk, and maybe grep and a single 8-core machine did it 100 times or so faster.
Edit: found it https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html
I think this is more of a problem of knowing when a specific tool should be used. Probably most people familiar with hadoop are aware of all the overhead it creates. At the same time you hit a point in dataset sizes (I guess even more with "real time" data processing) where it's not even feasible with a single machine. (at the same time I'm not too knowledgeable about hadoop and bigdata, so anyone else feel free to chime in)
Some context though is that this article was written when cloud computing was all the buzz like crypto just was and AI is now. So many people used cloud just for the buzz and without understanding the tool.
I think you can put this under the Linux command line. I.E. the bash shell and the commonly installed Linux command set. Way powerful for certain things.
Agree on RSS.
Don't have enough experience with XMPP.
IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)
Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it's what old school forums lacked.
The real problem with IRC had always been that it didn't really scale. It's fine for a few hundred people, but eventually shit just breaks.
Undernet in its heyday supported tens of thousands of people. But yeah, a system that relays absolutely all messages to absolutely all nodes is going to fall over under the weight of billions of users.
i3wm
It's now more than a decade old and considered feature-complete 2 years back. But the basic usage is still the same since its initial launch. No matter how many versions of Windows or Gnome or KDE come and go, I use i3 in the same as I did when it launched. I don't need "new" features because the existing features are more than enough.
This. After the initial learning for i3wm I never looked back.
And I dread the times where I have to use something else (work environment...)
I fell completely in love by the look and practicality of what i see and listen about i3wm. It all started when exploring unixporn on reddit.
It's one of the things that make me sad for not being linux-savvy and even if I was I couldn't use it for my daily driver because my company/team work is based on the whole Microsoft Office ecosystem.
So I just contemplate the minimalist beauty of it.
sway is the wayland based modern alternative that I use (and prefer). It does not do anything flashy and most i3 config options work just the same.
I've been thinking of switching to sway/hyprland but i3/x11 is not causing enough of a pain to justify the switch.
RSS was absolutely the shit
Still is.
Part of my rexxit so far has included me dusting off newsreaders and rss feeds again.
Im trying to find a good set up. Newsblur seems to be a front runner. I have nextcloud selfhosted, so I could use that with the $2.99 android app or I could pay for newsblur or feedly a few bucks each month.
Either way, having a self-curated feed of news these last few days has been pretty amazing. There is no algorithm tuned for engagement pumping news in my face. It's just stories, articles, YouTube videos, and podcasts that I want to see (on my terms).
Fresh RSS is what I use, self hosted and the mobile web interface negates the need for an app. Though there is an app, I'm not a fan of it
After getting burned by Google killing Reader I decided to never use a 3rd party service again, and FreshRSS has served me well for years.
The no algorithm parti is pretty neat. Don't know if you are referring to the Nextcloud News app. If that's the case, it's free on the f-droid app store.
You can self-host Newsblur, and the app is available on F-Droid
Do people not use it anymore? I still do. I follow a boatload of different youtube channels, webcomics, blogs, etc. If there's some other way besides RSS to have all of those updates show up on a single page, I don't know it.
That's what I used twitter for tbh. Since everyone is on it it's easy to follow people, get instant updates and maybe even discover something new through the people you follow and their likes. It's really a shame it went to shit, it was the lurkers perfect tool, especially when it comes to artists or content creators.
What's your setup? How do you aggregate different feeds to one page? Where do you find the feeds? I have so many RSS questions - everyone who uses it loves it and I want to understand it.
Reddit kinda replaced that for me. With leaving Reddit, just today I've installed a rss feed reader on my laptop and phone.
IS still absolutely the shit 🙂
It's hard to beat GIMP.
Hard to do anything with GIMP.
Jk
Kinda.
Idk, I only.... Gimp along without Photoshop...
Better than photoshop 1000x times
XMPP is very underappreciated.
Helpful Wikipedia link (for those like me who had no idea what XMPP was): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP
It so is. The only protocol that might beat it once it gets a desktop client is SimpleX
I’m glad you mentioned SimpleX. I think it’s a really cool and promising idea, yet hardly anyone knows about it :(
On paper it was great, but in practice no one implemented it fully and while I don't know why it is probably complicated.
Jabber was the way to go 10+ years ago but than everything stopped since no one managed to make clients for voice and video chat, than we just all dropped it.
I would call it big fail since it didn't manage to materialize in usable form.
On the other hand, it is never too late to make new better protocol based on xmmp for modern times.
audacity. that shit was mature in the 1990s.
What did happen to Audacity? I remember there was some controversy about them years back, but are they good now?
In May 2021, after the project was acquired by Muse Group,[53] there was a draft proposal to add opt-in telemetry to the code to record application usage. Some users responded negatively, with accusations of turning Audacity into spyware.[54] The company reversed course, falling back to error/crash reporting and optional update checking instead. [55] Another controversy in July 2021[56] resulted from a change to the privacy policy which said that although personal data was stored on servers in the European Economic Area, the program would "occasionally [be] required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA".[57] That July, the Audacity team apologized for the changes to the privacy policy and removed mention of the data storage provision which was added "out of an abundance of caution."[56]
There is a great chapter in the book “architecture of open source applications” dedicated to audacity! https://aosabook.org/en/v1/audacity.html
It's still one of the first things I install
Audacity was probably, unknowingly, the first GPL program I directly used as a kid (as in, not a library or software on a server.) We had it on school computers and made silly voice recordings.
It was either that or Tux paint where we made silly drawings :)
I spent two (recent) years editing on Audacity before moving to a DAW.
Audacity still gets used often still because it's just so much easier for tiny/terrible splice jobs
The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I've ever seen.
It's also a great feed reader.
Microsoft Outlook, from what I've seen of it, is horrible compared to Thunderbird. Why anyone would use the former is beyond me. You can't even easily see message headers, so how the hell are you supposed to know whether a message is legit?
Outlook
I switched / had to switch at work. It works. I got used to it for the most part. But I'd much prefer using Thunderbird.
Because I'm using both now in both I never intuitively navigate to the delete button. Because the layout is different between the two.
Just wish it had native exchange activesync support, since we’re forced to use exchange accounts at work, and Microsoft no longer allows using M365 accounts directly via IMAP (you need to register applications in Azure that can instead use IMAP)
Stuck using BlueMail instead since it’s the only desktop client that mostly supports EAS. Aside from MailSpring but it had no calendar support despite being promised for years.
Can’t use Outlook since I’m on Linux and running a VM for it is a bit heavy. And I can’t stand outlook web.
thunderbird is not old looking though
Is it possible to set custom key-bindings yet? I loved Thunderbird ten years ago, and kept using it until the (kinda-janky, community-maintained) keyboard-binding extension broke. I have too many years of muscle-memory invested in my email flow to change that, but otherwise I'd love to come back to Thunderbird.
IRC is so rad. I learned to touch type by hanging out in IRC channels in the dark on a stolen shell account in 93. I felt like a hacker, really I was a goofball talking about rollerblading on a shell account that no one cared about because they got it for free with their SLIP account.
If I learned nothing from the movie 'Hackers', it's that all hackers need to know how to rollerblade. It's like, if you don't know how to rollerblade, are you really a hacker?
USENET. Replacements aren't distributed, or make discussion group discovery difficult, or don't have decent native desktop clients, or some combination of those.
You know any good guides about how to get started with Usenet?
Because clients can present very different interfaces, it's difficult to point to a single guide, but the basic principles are simple enough: get a client, point it at a server ( https://www.eternal-september.org/ provides a free one if your ISP no longer has its own, but it doesn't carry the alt.binaries subhierarchy), download the list of available groups, subscribe to a few, read, and enjoy.
As for which client, I use Pan, but that's Linux-specific. For other OSs, I haven't a clue. If you happen to use Thunderbird for email, I think it still has the necessary support.
Keep in mind, though: USENET died in part from lack of good moderation options, so all you can do about bad actors and spam floods is block messages from those posters from being visible in your client. Moderated groups did exist, but the system basically amounted to one person having to okay every single message posted, which meant there was a single point of failure. For instance, when the moderator of rec.arts.anime.info died unexpectedly, it became impossible for anyone to post to the group.
90% of the news hierarchy is a wasteland these days anyway—I use it mostly for monitoring some of the mailing lists from my Linux distro, which happen to have a USENET repeater. The only other area doing well is the binaries groups.
If you're interested in running a server, start by making sure you have a good-sized data pipe—I'm not sure what the average size of a feed is now, but ten years ago it was measured in the tens of gigabytes per day (mostly binaries).
Usenet use to be great. Predated forums and Reddit. Frankly the threadiverse is just now going a bit back to that concept.
I miss the days when usenet was a standard part of most ISPs included offerings.
Hopefully the fediverse can get wnought traction to grow some vibrant communities like we used to enjoy in heyday of the old newsgroups.
CompuServe was pretty good too but very expensive. So not somethimg I care to go back to.
Not much. That's the thing about FOSS—it keeps getting better. It is not subject to enshittification like e.g. Windows is.
Emacs. Still the best way to edit any kind of text in any context.
I found it really funny when the "second brain / knowledge base" apps (like Obidian, Joplin, Logseq) started to explode semi-recently. "Organize your thoughts! Tag everything! Elegance through simplicity! Only use markdown!"
Yeah, I get it, orgmode is a really good idea. No need to re-invent it half a dozen more times to celebrate it's 20th birthday...
And one of these days, someone will rediscover the magic of having a uniform editing environment for manipulating text in multiple different contexts.
Spacemacs? What are you five?!?!
Emacs vs. VS Code
Even as a techie myself I found making Emacs just as featureful as VSCode impossible. The debugging you can do in VSCode is unparalleled and using a cli tool is not as easy or quick as using the VSCode debugger. The editing itself is amazing (better than VSCode) but the learning curve is not worth it when I can't just do everything in emacs.
Debugging is pretty much equivalent in all editors that support Language Protocol
Vim. Hands down the best text editor / ide ever created. Come at me, Emacs.
Agree
vi, lynx, mutt, and of course X11 > wayland
though also controversially, I'll take systemD over sysVinit
Is lynx worth using? How does JavaScript work?
Lynx doesn't support Javascript. Links ( http://links.twibright.com/ ) is marginally more usable, but still has no Javascript, and I wouldn't want it as a daily driver either. Text-mode browsers just can't handle Web 2.0 (although, to be honest, I'm not that fond of Web 2.0).
urxvt is also relevant for this combo.
I'll second IRC. I don't need my chat to be e2ee, and encryption has made Matrix a much bigger pain in the ass than it's worth to me.
Forums, too, though I'm a big fan of the distributed social media space. Lemmy has an experimental front-end based on phpBB, and I would love to see someone take that idea and go whole hog on it to create proper federated forums.
I understand why I should care about encryption, in theory. In practice, 90% of the time, I don't. If I'm texting my kids 'hey where are you?' or my husband: what do you want for dinner?' or a friend, 'hey, come hang out!' - I just don't care. And putting up with all the hassles that come with encryption via matrix... It's just, generally, far more hassle than it's worth, IMHO.
Apache. I get why nginx is the new hotness, but apache/modevent still slaps.
Nginx is FLOSS, too so you'd need to compare Apache to IIS and that is just unfair.
I think nginx is the better web server but what do I know, I mostly use python3 -m http.server for my immediate needs.
openscad looks ancient and works awesomely
Agree on both points
I too prefer forums over news aggravators with comment trees.
Can you elaborate?
I personally vastly prefer the comment tree style of conversation - I've been online since the bulletin board era, but I can't find myself going back to it ever again. I find it infinitely easier to follow a conversation when all the responses are in one place.
The communal feeling is indeed missing in news aggregators, though I'm not sure whether it's more about the style of conversation or just me getting older and not being willing to invest time in online communities as much.
I spent a fair portion of my youth on unthreaded forums and I kinda miss the way that discussion could ramble and sidebar conversations would spawn within posts and weave in and out of the main topic. With threaded/tree-format forums, individual conversations are easier to follow, but you get far enough down any one branch of a conversation and it's just two people arguing without any moderating input from the rest of the group.
I also think that comment trees are much easier to follow than forum posts. The way Lemmy is right now is pretty great: communities (sub-topics) with threads (posts) which can be sorted but with comment trees that aren't sorted based on "algo"/votes.
i'd say lack of long term threads is biggest issue with reddit or twitter-like platforms
even popular threads are supposed to stay at top for only few days at most
uMatrix browser extension. It has been marked archived by Gorhill, last release is two years old, you are supposed to just use uBlock [Origin]. However, it still (luckily) works fine and is exactly what I want. (Sure, I won't install this for my parents.) The GUI to simply choose what you want the site to be allowed to do is perfect.
Used it and it was good, as I remember. Later switched to uBlock Origin because it presumably uses less resources and does the job.
Rings a bell. Will check it out. Looks good at first glance.
Instant Messenger was the shit back in the day.
I still get most of my news via RSS. Lemmy is my sole social media usage. I use Matrix every day but see it as very different to IRC for some uses. Forums are useful but much of the tech content you find via search engines is out of date. Also not all forums are created equally. The new KDE forums have a major shortcoming compared to the old version.
KDE 3 over everything else.
I love modern KDE, and use many different desktop environments regularly, but nothing will ever come close to the feeling I had the first time I got to experience KDE. And I really don't think anyone has been able to approach the configurability KDE 3 had
I see you, but man, I am of the exact opposite opinion. Configurability is, for me, a bug that needs to be fixed when it comes to desktop environments. It should be as standard as possible across machines.
A good DM need to strike a balance between configurability and ergonomy/ease of use.
As a novice user I loved to tweak the many configuration options, but it's time consuming and often lead to something worse than the default, leading to further tweaking.
Now I appreciate good defaults because that means there's few settings that needs tweaking.
Some DMs like early Gnome 3 releases went a bit too far removing configuration options, and have been slowly adding them back over several years.
I literally can not think of anything software wise, especially FOSS as I use the command line a lot and those tools and concepts go back decades. Being a retro computer geek I can list a ton of old proprietary systems or software that I consider perfectly usable.
Oh wait, I just thought of one: RiscOS Open. The best OS for ARM besides Linux, all my Pi's run on it and it natively uses BBC BASIC, although not Free as in Freedom BBC BASIC, or even BASIC in general is a programming language that has a lot to offer.
Although not software I think the biggest thing I have in mind would be Optical Media. Most consider it obsolete, even against data tape, but I use it extensively precisely because it has features no other media possesses (ignoring LTO tape). Featurea such as many decades of longevity, cheapness (even today it's cheaper than equivalent sized flash media) and above all it's the only media that has read only properties.
SSD's, HDD's are not close to archival grade, only optical and tape (ignoring film and the ultimate archival media, vellum) are.
All my data that must be recovered at all costs is archived to BD-R, which in turn is backed up to LTO tape, which in turn is backed up into the cloud. Both the bd-r and LTO tape are written and finished days before the data has been uploaded to the cloud! Because my upload speed is 20Mb/s maximum the old SCSI LTO 4 drive writing to tape at 60MB/s wipes the floor with it, the bd-r records much slower than that but still is done in a fraction of the time.
Maybe if I'm ever able to get 1Gb upload bandwidth I'll use the cloud more, but at the moment it's running at a slower speed than my first 486 with it's 210MB HDD!
Edit: Ah! Wait, I forgot to mention Window Maker. I use Window Maker as my window manager. Works like a charm and hasn't changed in looks one bit since the 90's
Amarok 1.4. Loved that thing. Everything that came afterwards in both terms of version and other similar apps even the mainstream ones do not get close to how good Amarok used to be.
Audacious seems pretty nice. It's not obsolete per se—it's still actively developed—but it is a fork of the old XMMS1 code and inherits a lot of functionality from that venerable player.
I still use Usenet BBS boards.
The other day I was able to delete 80gigs of dupicated files cause by copying and pasting on a GUI
Sftp. At work we are switching to api and it sucks in comparison. Even it works its great but when it doesn't its harder to fix than sftp.
I've tried replacing closed-source feed reader apps, but it's hard when most of the focus is in self-hosted webapps, paid services or the UI is very uncomfortable. Also, mobile apps for this are counted and I just can't with their UIs.
In light of recent IBM/RH activity those keeping the old ways, and user choice, alive are more important than ever.
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:NeddySeagoon/YeOldeGentoo_2021_Edition
Alsa may be a bit awkward but the other stuff is just more chaos on top of it, it's not an alternative.
I try wayland once a year or so, maybe one year I will manage more than a few hours or days.
lvm/luks/ext4 is still better than btrfs which still hasn't gotten round to addressing encryption, big hopes for bcachefs.
One more: Network shares vs. clowd storage fx M365 and Google drive. Often the ekstra functionality isn't needed and just adds complexity. Plus the bandwidth is rarely the same. But It IS wHAt EvERyOne IS dOIng
Those are protocols, not software.
Yeah you're right. But I thought it would make sense, instead of specific RSS clients.
Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.
The general public isn't interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.
Say what you want about that, I'm not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn't the world we live in right now.
The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.
Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don't know what is the correct approach. All I know is I've heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.
Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.
Sad truth. I'm super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I'm also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.
OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.
@Skooshjones @privsecfoss @foss Also, another reason why big tech catches on, every time, is not so much that the UX is glossy but that Zoom, Apple, etc, all know that #Accessibility is needed to, 1, be dominant. As people look for stuff and tools that are accessible to Disabled users, Apple and Zoom come up a lot because they knew that capturing accessible design was a great way to capture a huge portion of users and otherwise. 2. Accessible design works for everybody. Seriously, having a far cleaner UI is better for everybody, including developers when they need to change code later.
That's a fair point, I've been happy to see that issue addressed more seriously in the last few years by many apps, including color schemes for folks with diminished sight or color blindness.
It would be interesting to create an open standard for app accessibility. Maybe that already exists, idk. But devs and organizations could submit their software to be evaluated and if passed, would be able to include a certification that it meets said accessibility standards.
I saw somewhere recently (don't remember if it was on Lemmy, reddit, or elsewhere), where a couple of folks were getting into it because a FOSS contributor didn't recognize the importance of accounting for accessibility in design. They thought that projects as whole did not have a responsibility to account for those design considerations, and that anyone who wants to see those implemented have to do it themselves. While technically the truth in that this is all effectively volunteer work and developers work on what they want to work on, it's something that could be alleviated by making it a core value of FOSS development. Asking questions like:
It's tough because the disability community in aggregate face steeper financial hurdles for a number of reasons, and could perhaps benefit the most from freely available, accessible tech.
Linux will never be main stream popular unless it becomes pre-loaded on major brand laptops and computers, however good the desktop enviroments and apps are. This is the thing that doesn't get much talk, but however seemless and easy to install most modern Linux distros people just aren't installing their OS' in the first place. Most people either get their OS pre-installed or ask their local Geek Squad to do it for them.
Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it's pretty great.
But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.
I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.
There might be some traction if those laptops and desktops were a little cheaper than those preloaded with Windows.
Yeah. When a Chromebook can satisfy the needs of a lot of users, I feel some distros were ready even a decade ago.
The installation step is a huge hurdle. I don't know anyone, except techies, who has done it and even some techies haven't. You can make it pretty (and some installers are both pretty and dead simple) but getting it on a thumb drive and booting from external media are just not user-friendly steps.
UI/UX has always been a massive problem in F/OSS. The biggest issue is that you need one person, or a team, with a coherent design vision, actual UI/UX understanding, and who will make sure that not every random pull request related to UX is accepted and ensure those contributions align with the design vision.
That rarely happens
Yeah makes sense. I wish there was a FOSS UX design philosophy that had caught on. For app design, the Unix philosophy has driven development even to this day, although not as popular now as it once was.
We sort of have bits of it, with the GTK framework and KDE styling. But those ecosystems don't extend outwards enough, and still allow far too much leeway to the UX design to ensure nice looks/function.
Maybe the nature of the widely distributed development makes it overall impossible. The goal of FOSS makes that kind of universal look and feel largely impossible. Heck, even Microsoft can't get that to happen in their own OS. There are many applications/utilities that look pretty much the same now as they did on Windows XP or even earlier.
The general attitude of function over form in our community also makes it hard, and I get that. Especially with limited dev resources as you pointed out. Would you rather have better functionality, or a prettier interface? Tough choice sometimes.
You bring up a good point with utilities like Bitwarden and Proton Mail; things that look nice and have good functionality attract the average user much more easily.
Last I checked, Bitwarden doesn't have any way to hit a hotkey and insert login credentials in the current app? It also can't be unlocked with biometrics?
Those aren't "nice" features, they're baseline features that every password manager needs to have. I don't just type passwords into a browser, so a browser extension alone isn't enough. And I'm not typing my umpteen character long password fifty times a day, there needs to be biometrics.
I will always choose open source software over closed source software - but not if it means choosing mediocre software over good software.
Fair point, but I'll push back a little on your second point. RSS for instance. I really want to like it, but I just cannot get it to work smoothly.
I've tried like 8+ FOSS RSS clients, mobile, desktop, web-based. Not one of them has worked seamlessly. I get all kinds of weird problems. The RSS link doesn't work, thumbnails don't load, feed headlines are garbled, articles are badly out of order, sync doesn't work, etc.
I know that if I can't get them to work right, there's no way a random person on the street is gunna be willing to tinker and mess around with them.
You bring up a really good point about MS Office UI. Very cluttered and clunky, but so many people are used to it that it doesn't matter to them. I actually think that Only Office and Libre Office are easily good enough to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for 90% of users out there.
I hope that this comes off as encouraging more than discouraging, but this lack of design and accessibility comes from the fact that it's all volunteer work, and volunteers are going to prioritize what they need. The big companies don't have smarter people working for them. They have money to spend on full-time developers (and designers, and writers, and...you get the idea) and someone at the top who wants to turn that investment into significantly more money by selling the software to people.
That's a huge problem, because it puts up a wall between the people who do the work and people who just want to use the results of the work as the workers offered. And I don't know how to fix that, other than to start making a bigger deal about the cultural aspects of Free Software. Like, a particular user may not care about how programmers develop the software, but by showing up and getting to know people, their one-off bug reports become something that people take seriously, because they know that person.
...But that obviously drifts further off topic.
FOSS is going to struggle to have good UX forever becuase you usually need one coherent vision for good UX and that's the antithesis to FOSS projects, the only exceptions being ones run exclusively by one company.