A friend points me to a JWZ rant about unusability in Linux apps. Words of flamish wisdom. Some guy comments:
Whenever a programmer thinks, “Hey, skins, what a cool idea”, their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls.
Spot on. People arrogant enough to think that their own application is so important that it must have its own special graphical user interface toolkit should have their keyboards smashed.
Examples particularly irksome to me include StarOffice/OpenOffice/Openoffice.org, almost every multimedia program, and of course Mozilla/Firebird/Phoenix. Oh, and the worst of all are Windows TWAIN scanner drivers, which all have GUIs so buggy that they're almost unusable. Or at least they were last time I used one about 5 years ago.
Apart from the problems JWZ points out about the video players, the two big ones (OpenOffice and Mozilla) have had all sorts of problems with things like pull-down menus not behaving themselves. Doing that sort of thing right is non-trivial, which is why those nice people who write reusable widget sets spend a lot of time fixing the basics, so that you don't have to worry about them just to write a program with a GUI.