I’ll start: while looking at app theming I came across WallRizz, renamed from WallWiz. I haven’t tried it, and looking at it documentation it seems well made, but I cringe at the name and the AI-generated penguin logo. It shares the art style of all the other AI slop, its basically italian brainrot but 2D. WallWiz sounds way better, rizz sounds like it was specially designed for gen alpha (little kids). If there are apps of even similar quality, why would I use this one?
Oh my, YES. Before I entered the world of free software, I was turned off by it. Reason is, I thought to myself, hold on: “If it’s gratis, then it’s going to be at the level of quality of all of these malware-ridden, barely functional, shareware programs.” Luckily I’m smarter now, but free software has a branding problem. It results from these programs often being developed by incredibly competent turbo nerds, the result of this is the advertisement reads like a technical manual or a spec sheet.
Proper advertising is helpful. It informs users about what they can do with the programme. They don’t care about it being programmed in hyper-efficient C, optimised with hardware acceleration or the underlying mathematical principles of how something is being processed. They care about getting the results they want. Instead of darktable, for example, talking about “4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers”, instead, they should talk about what users can use Darktable for. Sell the fantasy of belonging to the best, only thanks to Darktable and getting superior results from the programme. Show people the stunning results that real pros got by using Darktable. Show that there is a real community around the programme, and not just a GitHub repo. These things matter.
Darktable, in my opinion, is the best raw editor out there, and yes, the “4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers” and other incredibly well thought out features are the reason why that is. But 99% of users wouldn’t know why these things listed as their features are so massively useful and make Darktable so ridiculously superior compared to the competition.
I genuinely think that if more free software projects would invest in proper advertising and branding, that GNU/Linux and free software on it wouldn’t have 3% market share, but would be the monopoly in the computing market.
Edit: GIMP is another perfect example. It has another problem, and not just the name. The website is completely barren. “High Quality Photo Manipulation: GIMP provides the tools needed for high quality image manipulation.”
Gimp has not only more features than Adobe Photoshop, but most of them are significantly better. IMO, they need to communicate this and just bundle the extensions. Gimmic is basically tripling the amount of things you can do with it and resynthesiser is a massively useful function to have. “Normies” don’t want to fiddle around with plugins. IMHO: The extensions are very good, highly stable and should just be integrated.
See, with nice marketing comes wide recognition, with recognition come normies, and with normies comes the mental burden of dealing with “this doesn’t work, the program is shit, fix it immediately!!!” kinds of issues. Not everyone wants to do it in their spare time.
Also, I have a rudimentary idea how to fix this. So if anyone who’s more competent than me would like to have a go at it, please do so.
Basically found a non-profit ad agency for free software. Basically the agency would create turnkey ad and branding concepts for certain free software projects that would like to have it and in return they get 5% of their donations, for example. All of the money gets reinvested back into the advertising for the member software projects. Also, it could be very easy, the ad agency would, in broad strokes, just have a competition parity strategy where they essentially do whatever the competition does, in broad strokes, for their advertising and “just” adapt it to what the free software project needs.
Yes, it’s some random “idea guy” on the internet coming up with something that’s coherent and smart sounding. So take it for what you will.
Some projects that kind of do that come to mind:
Beeper, which is a hosted Matrix server (probably Synapse) with bridges to other messengers, and a client (probably derived from Element?). But it’s all called Beeper to be more “normal”.
Snikket is a “rebranded” prosody XMPP server, Conversations client for Android and Siskin IM client for iOS. Also, all are Snikket, no scary abbreviations and different app names.