There's a thing that I feel like programmer-type people do a lot, where they sort of can only think of things from their own immediate perspective of knowing how something works, and having zero if not negative empathy about use cases where people are lost, or are screwed by the technology.

For example, there's jstest-gtk. It shows there being 4 controllers. Uh but right now I really only have 1 wireless xbox 360 controller talking to the usb receiver. So how the hell do I know which of the 4 is actually reporting in? The controller says it is #1 of 4, but when I drill down into the first controller in jstest-gtk and try to move values from the controller, nothing happens. So do I have to manually go into each of the other 3 and see what is happening?

Like, the intelligent design would have been for the list-of-controllers to have even just a little fake light that would flicker and change whenever any of the controllers are generating input. That way I could fiddle on the controller and immediately see if it is being successfully mapped to anything at all.

Instead I apparently have to figure out how to enable debug text logging or god knows what, or dig through each of the entires in the gui in turn.

Of course, being linux type software, there's a kicker to already having to suffer through the bad UX in that when I click on the "close" button in any of the individual joystick dialogs, nothing happens. Well the first time I clicked anyway. So then I go click the ubuntu red x in the sub window title bar... and the entire jstest-gtk app quits, rather than just closing the sub dialog so I can go try another controller. So then I have to laboriously re-launch it. Complete and utter epic usability failure. Just mind bogglingly stunningly insanely bare-faced bad. (Subsequently I have had the 'close' button be more than unresponsive, but when it works it has the same effect of quitting the entire app.)