It is by far the ugliest program I run on my Mac. That said, I run it frequently, and don't know what I would do without it, despite its complete lack of design.

Why do you assert it has a 'complete lack of design.' It's composed of standard qt widgets.

That doesn't mean it's well-designed, it just means it's not using custom widgets. Those of us who aren't particularly thrilled with Calibre's UX are mostly annoyed by how it doesn't bother with typical UI conventions when it comes to menus, displays, command keys, etc.

If I were designing a "competitor," for a start:

- have a "File" menu that collects the commands relating to, you know, files: open, delete, rename, add, edit metadata (akin to the "Get Info" command in most other file menus), etc. Converting between file types could be in a submenu here.

- have an "Edit" menu that does Edit Menu Things (tm), most notably copy, cut, and paste . - let me drag and drop files to add them to the library.

- when I connect a Kindle or other device, show me a second pane with its content side-by-side with my library, rather than making me switch between "here is your library with flags to indicate what's on your device" and "here is your device with flags to indicate what's in your library."

- since I have two panes like the gods intended, let me copy files from my library to my device with drag and drop.

Calibre has all of that functionality, but it ignores three decades of UX convention to no particular benefit.

It’s not very well laid out and the iconography is not the best.

I personally have never had an issue with it. There are many buttons but they are all very discoverable with a bit of hovering. I vastly prefer it to "modern minimalist" interfaces where I have to drill through 90 layers of Hamburger menus to disable a goddamn notification.

I could write a long list of small quality of life tweaks to its UI.

But, at the same time, I wonder how many HNers have even built a UI for a product with so many features. It's incredibly hard to find a good place for everything. And experimentation is expensive and time consuming.

They're speaking from their experience of making a toy 'show hn' project they worked on for a weekend, abandoned and haven't updated in 4 years.

I find it bad taste and too fancy. A sense of bloat. So I didn't want to use its numerous features.

It's not like he bundled it with a complete copy of chrome. Now that would be bloat.

Nah bundling chrome would modern UI worthy of a billion dollar company. Supporters will innocently ask who in the world does not have a machine with at least 32GB RAM and octa-core processor to run this wonderful application.

It's a free product that does what you need it to do, and more. Man, some people...