this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Not the UI, the UX. The UI may be editable, but if I have to make my own UI to be happy with what it looks like or works like, then that's bad UX.
I get that sometimes those terms are used interchangeably, but they're not the same.
Sorry, I misread. What is bad about the UX exactly? You don't need to customize anything if you don't want to; "it just works". And I dont follow you on how having the option to customize things makes it a bad user experience. You're assuming the native UI is bad for some reason.
I've used Plex a lot too back in the day but there's nothing it provides that Jellyfin doesn't do out of the box + self-hosted + for free.
Being given the tools to customize something by hand is not the same as being offered enough option to simply choose what you want. Having a good UX means that there was a UI designer who alread did the customzing for you and you simply have click a button to apply it.
I barely even remember what the specific dealbreaker was, honestly. I was just dabbling, considering expanding my NAS and maybe getting the gear to dump my 4K BluRays. I gave Jellyfin a try first, I went through the setup process and I remember it being a) confusing to set up directly on my NAS, and b) very ugly.
I gave Plex a try to cover my bases and that looked better and got me up and running faster, so I just stuck with it. Easier remote access was a feature for me there, too, but the choice was made purely on the onboarding process, there was nothing activist to it. It's maybe the most user-level, unresearched decision I've taken on software in a while, honestly. I was already trying to figuring out the ripping and encoding at the same time, so I didn't want to put any additional attention on library management.
If anything I gave Jellyfin a bit more of a chance than I otherwise would have because I had heard a lot of angry chatter from people about Plex. I guess I came in after they made the changes that pissed people off and didn't mind the state of the current product without a frame of reference. I would have bailed if there was a subscription, but they do have a one-and-done purchase, so now I'm set up, it's working and I've paid them as much as I'm going to, so I'm fine with it. I do appreciate a free alternative existing, though.
I don't know if it's bad UX or UI, but I do agree there's something really disturbing with jellyfin's options and tweaks... More than once I lost my way and had to click on every option button again to find a specific thing to disable/enable something?
Now It's easier after I have passed some time in the options/user menu, but some tweaks and options are not very intuitive.
Other than that, Jellyfin is awesome and I can't believe something as good as Jellyfin is free and open source. Thanks to all devloppers behind this, I hope they will stay true to open source and jellyfin will last forever !! But I doubt it.