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Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

• oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
  Anything from Red Hat. That includes PolicyKit (basically a backdoored version of "sudo", "su", and other time-honored Unix security tools), SystemD, PulseAudio, DBus, and a bunch of others. They're all 100% garbage, but Red Hat has convinced everyone else to depend on them so getting rid of them means being horribly limited when it comes to what you can run, even on FreeBSD.
• zzo38computer 5y ago
  The web browser, which is a rather old version of Firefox in my case. The other ones aren't better; they are bad, too. I have ideas how to make a better one (one idea is all file formats and protocols are extensions (implemented in native code) and not built-in, and there are other ideas to make it better for advanced users only, and I have ideas about the C API and "document view" format and other features, etc). There are some recent messages on Usenet about "Web considered harmful" and commentary/discussions about such things, including some of my own comments.
• NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Whatsapp. By FAR. First, it doesn't let me create a userID & password. I cannot create an account on my tablet or computer. I cannot start using it anonymously. I cannot have multiple accounts for multiple purposes/groups. It insists on being installed and tied to my phone with my phone number - how ANYbody can talk "blah blah encryption blah blah privacy" when it's tied to my private protected hard-to-change personally-identifiable phone number right at the beginning is beyond me to the level I feel I'm in a twilight zone. Second, it is completely unusable unless I give it full and privileged access to my contact list. WHY? I want to chat with 3 specific people. I want to give you address/userID/token of those 3 specific people. But no - it won't work at all. This is where discussion of "yada yada privacy yada yada encryption" further loses all possible meaning. Third, I cannot easily use it on multiple devices. I have two phones, Galaxy Note 8, and half a dozen laptops and computers and tablets I use daily for various purposes in various locations. I have taken it as granted for the last 30 years that I can check my email/ICQ/AIM/MSN/Hangouts/FB/WHATever on any of those that I choose to. But nooooo... not Whatsapp. Why? Because Privacy & Encryption. L-O-L. It is the most regressive piece of code I've had the privilege to have forced upon my by both techie and non-techie friends and family alike, and it makes me livid every time.
• NikolaNovak 5y ago
  At work we are limited by whatever is in the enterprise catalog offering (very old school traditional public sector environment). So I end up hating a lot of software simply because we are forced to use it beyond its design parameters / intended usage. I.e. We took a quality management / testing scenario tool and repurposed it into a general knowledge management AND ticketing tool. So I can hardly blame it but dislike is there nonetheless. At home, Light room and photoshop. I swear they are getting slower and more bloated all the time and they keep changing UI for no reason. The subscription model is what rises my hate though. There are alternatives of course but I have 15 years of catalogues I have limited faith anything else will read is own catalogues 15 years from now. How do you pick stable software now (and one does need updates as cameras change etc)
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  C programming language for arduino. I could switch to AVR8 assembly but I want a better macro assembly plus the code would not be portable to more capable boards. I guess I could run a soft AVR8 on an fpga board and offload the heavy lifting to the fpga but talk about frying pan to the fire.
  • nicoburns 5y ago
    You could try Rust or (I think) Zig.
  • convolvatron 5y ago
    I do (did) all my AVR work in macro-asm its really not bad. I guess at a certain size I'd regret al the inlining
  • Stevvo 5y ago
    Did you know it's actually C++? You would never guess from the Arduino docs/examples; it's all written for kids so it can feel like you are actually writing some super simplified C like scripting language like PAWN.
  • cweagans 5y ago
    Tinygo? Works great in a lot of places.
  • frompdx 5y ago
    You should give something like FlashForth a try if you want something different.
• meristohm 5y ago
  Hate is too Sterling for these gripes, but this is relatively the best fit: Windows 10, useful for some games with friends, because of the “nudges” to change my behavior, like asking if I really want to keep using that program, the magic-fingers messages on installation (suggesting I just blindly trust), and the difficulty to install without an online account, among other things. I can’t replace it yet, but the day will come, one way or another.
  • Tajnymag 5y ago
    One of the things that keep me from switching to Linux on my gaming machine is Game Pass.
    • fartcannon 5y ago
      With the sheer number of games that exist elsewhere, is it really necessary to fund Microsoft's attempt to monopolize gaming? You can just not have what's on Game Pass. You will survive. It didn't exist a couple years ago, but now you can't do without?
      • tsuujin 5y ago
        This is a silly take. Game Pass is the best value in gaming today by a huge margin and I say that as a general naysayer of MIcrosoft. It is a reasonable take for someone to stay with MS because of the service.
        • fartcannon 5y ago
          Theres no reason to be childish. There's lots of alternatives to game pass that will net you significantly high quality experiences without supporting convicted monopolist Microsofts Disney-ification of the games industry.
          • legobmw99 5y ago
            This take is ignoring the social nature of much of gaming. Changing which set of games I play is one thing, convincing my friend group to go with me is another. Especially for my friends whose primary way of playing games is on an XBox, meaning we rely on cross play as much as we can
• gjvc 5y ago
  atlassian suite
  • 0x2c8 5y ago
    It may be an unpopular opinion, but I really enjoy writing wiki pages in Confluence.
    • gjvc 5y ago
      you must be easily impressed
    • geocrasher 5y ago
      While I detest Jira, I find Confluence to be quite good for writing documentation. It's full featured and mostly just works. For our customer facing documentation at work we use Zendesk and while it's good it's nowhere near as good as Confluence.
      • castillar76 5y ago
        We're having this struggle right now trying to replace Confluence thanks to Atlassian's "no more Server licenses" foot-gun. The other wiki software that's out there just hasn't impressed me so far. This one is painful to set up and keep running, that one is awful to edit anything in (especially if you're non-technical), most of them don't support collaborative editing or inclusion of Office doc content on pages, and that's before the fun places where we've integrated Jira and Confluence to make workflows easier. I keep hoping to find something under a rock that really wows me (or that one of the existing competitors will really step their game up to pick up the people exiting Atlassian).
        • polote 5y ago
          > I keep hoping to find something under a rock that really wows me Send me an email at Paul at dokkument.com and that's exactly what we are working on. Yeah unforturnely you will not see anything interesting on our landing page
• adamleithp 5y ago
  Adobe suite. After effects, illustrator, inDesign etc Adobe in the above fields of design are industry leaders, and have the features & functions we’ve come to rely on. Adobe’s pricing model has become very aggressive, and quite unaffordable for lots.
  • YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
    Don't forget that they basically want to you to install a rootkit (Adobe Genuine Service) now because even with cloud activation they still have a growing pirating problem.
  • smrtinsert 5y ago
    It's so true. I'm using affinity for image editing these days but it's just a shadow of photoshops ease of use and power. Fuck paying for ps though.
    • andrecarini 5y ago
      Which features from Photoshop do you miss on Affinity?
  • kingnothing 5y ago
    Photopea is a decent alternative for light personal / hobby use if anyone is interested.
  • t0bia_s 5y ago
    Adobe is good SW for pro work. It is terrible in pricing and terms of use. Worst is that it is not for Linux.
  • KolenCh 5y ago
    This is something I hate to love and love to hate. I can avoid MS Office, but I can’t avoid Adobe like Lightroom that is my 2nd nature and hard to completely replace (too much is tangled together.)
• JCWasmx86 5y ago
  MS Teams: What makes it bad: First of all, it uses Electron, thus it is laggy and wastes too much resources. Maybe it is just a pet peeve of mine, but I hate, if an application does not look native on my GNOME Desktop and does not follow any HIG. Another factor is the proprietary nature of MS Teams. If it was open, there would probably be some other client/some way to have a real native client. My preferred alternative would either be Jitsi or Matrix, although both have just electron clients they atleast attempt to have a usable GUI. (Except this one thing in Element: The search button is next to the "Start Videocall"-Button) I can't replace it, as my university uses it.
  • misnome 5y ago
    > What makes it bad I mean aside from technology choices, It's just very bad at video calls. I don't want an "artistic" layout of people that is constantly switching around, or comedy "sitting in a theatre" options. If someone doesn't have video on it'll confusingly highlight some random other participant while they are talking, and when nobody is talking it'll choose a random person with the microphone on and boost whatever background noise (or typing) it can up until it matches speaking volume. Despite randomly boosting silence, it'll aggressively gate anyone talking, with an obvious fade-up at the start of their sentence and if you are lucky, aggressively cut off the end of their sentence. If you aren't so lucky, it'll do this in every pause between words. Add to that, random disconnects, chat randomly not working, finding it hard to actually get a list of participants, and that it apparently wants to be slack but makes it hard for people to work out how to actually re-use a channel for the next meeting. But of course it gets bundled in with all the other office stuff the company purchases; making it the "default" that you have to fight against using. We were only saved against moving to Teams for _all_ our telephony by the fact that it's linux support is really, really bad and that's what all our engineers use.
  • PeterisP 5y ago
    Teams is also horrible if you are in multiple organizations, as it simply fails to consider that you might want to easily switch between two different Teams meetings with different authentication, like it's trivial to do with e.g. Slack.
• perryizgr8 5y ago
  Gchat, gdocs, gsheet, gmeet. These are the worst apps of their respective categories, ever to exist. But I am helpless, because I've to use what my company has bought. The number one reason why they're bad is that they are not native apps. They need a tab in the browser, or a fake browser window. The second reason they're bad is because Google does not care about the user experience. Each of these is probably assigned to a random intern every three months and she just does whatever she likes with it. The third reason is that I know how good each of these category of apps can be. I've used slack, zoom, excel and word. Each one of those is lovingly crafted to satisfy the users every need, comparatively. Knowing that such apps exist makes it even more painful to use Google's half baked knock offs.
  • lezojeda 5y ago
    Just curious, why do you find Gmeet so bad? Among the three most common used (in my experience ar least zoom teams and meet) I find it the most usable.
    • perryizgr8 5y ago
      Problems with gmeet: 1. No calling function. Most of the times I want to immediately call a person, like a phone. It should make the other person's computer ring, and they should be able to answer the call with one click. Gmeet doesn't do this. 2. Screen sharing options are extremely limited. Compare the ways zoom allows you to share your screen to what meet does. It's hilarious. 3. No screen annotations. No cursor control. No screen pointers. It's quite annoying to have to use such a limited product. 4. Screen sharing and video quality is atrocious. Again, look at zoom to find out what you're missing. 5. Screen recording is horribly low quality. It's almost impossible to read text on a shared screen recording, even though it was readable in the call itself. 6. Layout options. It seems Google has discovered the worst possible algorithms to lay out videos on the screen during a call. Many times it will even minimize presented content, and then everybody has to manually pin the thumbnail. There is no option to overlay the speakers video over presented content, which should be pretty high up in the list of features. 7. In call chat is lost after the call ends. It just goes straight to /dev/null. Who signed off on this? I can go on, but I'm frustrated now just thinking about it. The problem is people don't even know how good the other stuff is. So it's hard to convey my helplessness.
• digianarchist 5y ago
  Zoom. Sick of this app hijacking the audio channel of my Bose headphones when I'm not in a call.
  • Belphemur 5y ago
    Don't get me started on zoom... How about making an app that actually work on Linux ? That doesn't take 200% CPU when you're in a meeting. The same on windows, it's such a badly optimized application with memory leak all over the place... I hate it with all my guts.
    • marcv81 5y ago
      It's not better on macOS. Bugs I encounter regularly: webcam not working, memory leaks, CPU usage maxed out.
  • slig 5y ago
    I'm studying guitar remotely and my teacher recorded a small bit of the call so that I can review later. He was playing and talking, I was completely quiet and not moving. Zoom decided to record my camera with his sound. He said that it was like that for all his students that day and couldn't figure out why.
  • drcongo 5y ago
    As much as they try to hide the fact, it is actually possible to join a Zoom meeting in your browser. That way you don't have to install a sketchy app with root privileges and directory traversal bugs.
    • Icathian 5y ago
      This is what I do. It's only a couple clicks deep and works as well as the native app. Definitely preferable to having that junk on my machine.
    • majewsky 5y ago
      I initially tried this when my language learning course had to go remote and the teacher insisted on using Zoom. But I ran into a dealbreaker issue with the web view: It does not have the grid view of all participants' cameras, and (to my knowledge) it also does not allow selecting the camera of a single person manually. This is an issue when I need to see a flash card that the teacher is holding up, but someone else is speaking, so the camera switches to them. I'm currently working without this by using a device issued by my employer, where the Zoom app is pre-installed by the IT dept. and therefore using it for the language class does not make things worse.
• jarbus 5y ago
  iOS and Android
  • drclau 5y ago
    You can try Sailfish OS [0], from Jolla. It can be installed on selected devices. [0]: https://sailfishos.org https://sailfishos.org
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• qsort 5y ago
  Whatsapp. It's a garbage app, made by a garbage company running like garbage on a garbage protocol. There is no realistic alternative because friends and family expect you to have it.
  • fartcannon 5y ago
    I quit Facebook in the latter half of the 2000's. Some of my family and friends suddenly stopped inviting me to things. I think anyone you lose because they have to send you a text message or email instead of a facebook invite/whatsapp message isn't really worth having as a friend. Especially if the reason you ditch Whatsapp is for ethical/moral reasons.
    • qsort 5y ago
      I admire your steadfast adherence to your principles, but as far as I'm personally concerned, there's no way it's a +EV play to be somewhat of a PITA to everyone else, on the basis of a position that would be percieved on the other end somewhat like "weird computer man yells at cellphone software".
      • fartcannon 5y ago
        It really wasn't a big deal. I saw Facebook to be a negative influence. I made a decision to abandon it. Some of my acquaintances were jerks about it, some were not. The jerks self selected out of my life. Worked great, to be honest.
  • remus 5y ago
    Out of interest what do you not like about the whatsapp app? The core functionality seems pretty solid to me.
    • qsort 5y ago
      Lack of granular settings for notifications, wonky integration with the desktop client, groups, your id is your phone number. There isn't much that's wrong per se, but when compared to e.g. Telegram it's much worse.
• nodesocket 5y ago
  Anything Google acquires and abandons. See Nest.
• hprotagonist 5y ago
  fucking jira. because $work decided and so here we are.
  • lawlorino 5y ago
    What's bad about it? I've somehow avoided using it in my professional career so far except to make some trivial support tickets occasionally with other teams. It seems fine to me from this very limited experience, but I would be interested in hearing from someone more experienced with it. A lot of other teams in my company use it and our new TL has expressed interest...
    • hprotagonist 5y ago
      i have one major complaint: it is horribly, groaningly, wretchedly, unbearably slow. So slow that it is a bad tool slow. It has a totally insane smorgasboard of options UX, lots of jargon, a horrible markup syntax, limited interop with git forges, and a host of other problems, but the real showstopper is how goddamn slow it is.
      • Winsaucerer 5y ago
        You’re being too kind. Last I used it it’s actually slower than you describe.
• xzyyyz 5y ago
  Tesla. Tesla provide service through the phone app only. The app is extremely slow, the fonts are small (almost unreadable). It is hardly fun to print on the phone. The app does not work in chromebook with android support.
• samwillis 5y ago
  The software on the Sky Q tv set top boxes, literally can’t replace it. (Sky is a TV service in the UK) It’s clunky to use, particularly with the apps. Things crash all the time and when it decided to do a software update it goes into a spinning loop for hours during which none of the TVs in the house work. Hate it, but the household have decided to keep Sky…
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    Depending how much your time is worth you could probably get the same media on third-party services via a computer or Apple TV, or even go "sailing" if you don't mind breaking the law (if you see what I'm talking about!).
• SNosTrAnDbLe 5y ago
  Lg webos.It forces ads on us
  • haditab 5y ago
    Friend of mine has had great success blocking the ads with pi-hole.
    • agucova 5y ago
      Huh, always wondered why my LG TV never got ads and just remembered my entire house is under NextDNS's blocking.
  • bolzan 5y ago
    Not a replacement, but maybe it helps. https://rootmy.tv/ https://rootmy.tv/
• huhtenberg 5y ago
  Windows
• rchaves 5y ago
  Jira, for sure, and it seems hard to run away from, almost everyone use it It seems like the only alternative is to fund my own startup, with me as a sole shareholder, just to forbid Jira forever
  • marto1 5y ago
    What about gitlab ? Why wouldn't that be an alternative ?
    • sshine 5y ago
      The reason parent poster can’t replace Jira isn’t that there aren’t alternatives, but because a large part of the corporate world has decided that Jira is the best issue tracker because it has the most bells and whistles; it supports the SCRUM / Kanban / whatnot style workflows. Also, it is not that great.
    • castillar76 5y ago
      This is something my team is struggling with at the moment. Gitlab issues (and Github issues, and similar) are fine if what you're doing is only software development. The problem is that Jira works really well for tracking all the things, not just 'bugs in our current software', and having something that keeps track of all the work in one place makes life a lot easier. Right now, my team uses Jira for tracking bugs and features and whatnot in our custom software development. We also use it for tracking issues and work related to our infrastructure, access requests to our various data centers, budget requests from the team, software and change management planning, site audits, and probably a couple other things I'm forgetting off the top of my head. And yes, there are likely better products for each of those things individually, but then you wind up in the hell of "oh wait, audits go over here in Freebly, but software releases are over there in FrobniTZr", and if you run those tools it's suddenly fifty-leven more hosts and apps to support and keep patched. Much like Excel, Jira might not be the best tool for all our use cases, but it's pretty good at several of them and good enough at the rest that having everything in one bucket outweighs the potential benefits of a better tool. On the other hand, if someone would like to fire up a start-up to develop a similarly flexible on-premises work management product to replace it, you'll absolutely find me in line with my wallet open...
• blastonico 5y ago
  Web browsers. But I'm not sure if I hate either the web browser or Javascript.
  • 64bit_xombie 5y ago
    I hate it all. Every web browser is either chrome or firefox, or it's irrelevant and buggy. Java & Javascript are trash. Just having a couple tabs open sucks up more resources than everything else on the system combined. What is that? How is that acceptable? (By extension, this is also a major part of why I hate electron)
• drcongo 5y ago
  1Password. I hate it because Agile Bits are so user-hostile now. I can't replace it because the alternatives, if they meet our requirements, are even worse.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • sshine 5y ago
    Have you considered self-hosting BitWarden?
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    I don't disagree that AgileBits feel like they're going to go user-hostile anytime soon, but so far I haven't noticed a significant downgrade using their hosted service with iOS & macOS clients so I'm curious to know what's your issue. I'm sure it'll come at some point though.
  • andrecarini 5y ago
    Would your use case fit into KeePassXC?
  • gaws 5y ago
    > I hate it because Agile Bits are so user-hostile now. How? I've had zero problems with their desktop and mobile apps.
• porcoda 5y ago
  iTunes/Apple Music. I use it to manage a huge collection, and the Ui is terrible. Examples: some file I can’t find has a bogus header or something, so every time the program opens or if I add something it spends 10 minutes doing some gapless playback analysis. None of the fixes suggested online address it. When it’s doing something like that or ripping/converting music, you can’t scroll around your collection since every time it moves to the next song it snaps the UI back to whatever you had selected before: this can be infuriating. Editing large amounts of metadata is awkward: way more clicking than should be necessary. The metadata editing is song focused, and which makes it awkward when editing albums/multi-disc shows. I admit: my complaints are likely a side effect of being a niche user. I don’t think people curating their own collection of 60,000+ tracks is a use case they worry about. The only reason I use it is I depend on iTunes Match to make my music available on all of my devices. That’s the one thing it does do seamlessly. The collection is too big to copy to all devices, and some devices require streaming anyways. I have searched everywhere and have never found a viable alternative. I can find alternatives for parts of my use case, but not everything. So I’m stuck with this software.. I have this dream that one day I’ll have the patience to figure out how to write my own GUI for it, but I’ve given up every time I wade into the apple developer docs. I’d pay good money to someone to stub out an app for me so I don’t have to figure it out from scratch, and go from there.
  • skydhash 5y ago
    I use Swinsian and it's pretty nice, but no dark mode (don't know why).
    • convolvatron 5y ago
      doesn't really handle the Match aspect. I too would pay for a service/app that did this. not only am I reliant on iCloud to get to my music, that ridiculous program completely trashed my catalog - missing songs, duplicates, songs spread across multiple 'albums', etc.
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    The new "Music" app that replaced iTunes is a complete pile of shit, inline with all the "modern" iOS apps such as Music/TV/Podcasts/News/Home - while their predecessors may have had functional issues, their new incarnation has similar functional issues but has also been gutted of most features, replaced with lots of whitespace. Yes, it turns out you can do worse than iTunes.
• guessbest 5y ago
  This may be too broad, but instant messaging. I only ever use it as a clipboard to share snippets or screenshots with people, but email is so much better to communicate. In person meetings can't be replaced by text, sorry. I use a shared album for pics and video.
  • drcongo 5y ago
    I hold the exact opposite opinion. I hate in-person meetings, or voice call meetings or video call meetings because there's no written record of anything unless you're also transcribing, in which case you're not concentrating or thinking.
    • guessbest 5y ago
      Oh, I'm always taking notes whether work or business. I have notes that go back to 2005 on my home computer dealing with rental payments, college transcripts, gas payments and bills when calling up 1800 numbers for support, etc. It isn't that I don't trust my memory, it is just that if I am being pressured to do something it is a lot easier when I can look at the outcome/promise from the previous conversation.
      • drcongo 5y ago
        That's what I meant! Having a written conversation about X means the notes are all already there for you. I've worked with so many people, both colleagues and clients, who use phone calls / in-person meetings as a way to essentially pass the buck while hiding any evidence that that happened. An auditable paper trail is preferable to me in every way.
        • guessbest 5y ago
          This can be achieved through email much easier than instant messaging which is usually too vague.
• some-guy 5y ago
  My Windows Vista VM that runs on my homelab, for the sole purpose of keeping my HP LaserJet 3390’s scanner working with modern software. I got this thing for free on Freecycle and it works amazingly well mechanically, and the printer worked out of the box. No matter what I tried though, getting the scanner to show up as a device and be interfaced with any modern hardware required me to set up this virtual machine to be shared with the local network. (Yes I tried CUPS which worked great for the printer but not the scanner.)
  • sinuhe69 5y ago
    The installation software probably just copied some files to the wrong places, especially when it was written for a 32 bit system. It happened to me once with the drivers for my CANON scanner.
• guerrilla 5y ago
  All search engines. They are all horrible and getting worse by the day. All the results are spam, they ignore words and can't do basic things they used to be able to it.
  • throwaway874653 5y ago
    Whats u r reference point
    • nicbou 5y ago
      Those same search engines 5 years ago
• zonovar 5y ago
  Microsoft Visual Studio
  • dhruvmittal 5y ago
    I think working at a .NET shop for a few years gave me Visual Studio Stockholm syndrome or something. I'm past that job now, but I still fire up MSVS over other alternatives just because I know all the shortcuts (& because it'll typically work without any additional configuration on my corporate-issue pc).
• marto1 5y ago
  PowerPoint. Yes, really. It's amazing for prototyping stuff up and is horrid M$ trash at the same time.
• doubled112 5y ago
  Lastpass. I can't replace it because it is the corporate standard at work. The UI seems to work against me. Search? Don't even bother, better off with just your eyeballs. Refresh? No, try logging out and back in. There are better alternatives, both when it was chosen and now, but it wasn't my decision to make.
  • riekus 5y ago
    We use LastPass at work as well, don't understand why they perform search so poorly, the search you can do on the text field is really unusable, in the plugin it works better, but if I select an entry, en then instead of keeping the plugin open, it closes so I have to search it again for the OTP, such poor UX
  • lost_soul 5y ago
    Lastpass has had too many issues to ignore. Time to move on for me.
  • t0bia_s 5y ago
    Bitwarden. It is not perfect, but better than Lastpass.
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Every website with cookie tracking. Which is every website. Anything electron: massive hog of resources and will never be rewritten on a nonbloated platform. Every single package manager and scheme still seems fundamentally broken and are bad compromises. But there's no money in fixing it so it will always be broken. I salute people doing the thankless work of packaging OSS and language libraries. You are fighting the good fight, even if it is a losing war. Any and all OTP (time suck, blocks automation, debatable gain over "good passwords"). IDEs (every IDE becomes an intense love/hate relationship... Intellij is dragging to a halt on a couple "medium sized" projects... but what would I replace it with? Eclipse hahahahahaha?) Javascript: still an awful language, even with a ton of improvements and typed options. May webassembly kill it, although webassembly is probably another google trojan horse to control the web. Java: should stop "improving" itself and just work on the JVM and migrating people to Kotlin/Scala/Groovy/Clojure. G Suite (well, it's better than outlook, but spying and the sword of Damocles with getting locked out with no recourse) Microsoft Windows (still have an iron grip on games, I hate everything else about it since Windows 7), although a glimmer of hope is that it does eventually have a real unix core. Bash: the number of stackoverflow searches per line of code whenever I have to write bash is like 5:1, as in five stackoverflow searches per line of code written. But what options do you have? Perl is dying, fish/zsh isn't ubiquitous, etc. Installing any software written in python will probably fail, or worse, break all my other python apps. Example: AwsCli AwsCli: again, stackoverflow searches to line of code/command ratio is terrible. options aren't well documented, responses aren't documented or well-exampled, error codes change between releases (seriously, HOW MANY DIFFERENT error messages can expired credentials result in?) Aws: please someone start beating these people. Oh, the options are google and microsoft. Oh well. OH! The AWS CONSOLE: What a piece of shit. How much money does AWS make every minute? Basically enough to actually fund a team for this? This is for ec2/secgrps/r53 aka the bread and butter. And they DID rewrite it, and managed to make it FAR WORSE. Performance is awful. Screens refresh and move items as you try to click on things. Do I have a choice for adhoc stuff? Oh the cli? See above.
  • gaws 5y ago
    > Perl is dying It's very much alive and kicking.
  • 5y ago
• EugeneOZ 5y ago
  Async Rust. It separates Rust ecosystem. Can’t be replaced because your code is either async from the beginning, or not. You are using either async libs, or some outdated libs because all modern versions have to support async Rust.
  • k4ch0w 5y ago
    Amen to this one. It’s a shame you have to choose between tokio or async std too. Why hasn’t Rust standardized a single engine?
    • jhugo 5y ago
      Standardisation is a commitment, and rust's stdlib is deliberately lean to allow that commitment to be very strong (long-term stability). If in doubt, just use Tokio. It's much more widely used, has been around longer, has a history of solid engineering, didn't choose to put "std" in its name and race to 1.0 to fool people into thinking it was mature, ...
• bsuvc 5y ago
  For me it’s Azure DevOps. We’re required to use it for the project I’m working on. Some things I hate: * Project backlog is a mess UI-wise. Lots of fields, with little to no explanation of what they drive. Generally a bad UI for working with stories. * Reviewing large pull requests is very laggy performance-wise. * Compare branches is broken - I have to start to create a PR, then cancel it, if I just want to compare two branches. * Release pipeline (not build pipeline) does not allow yaml definition, so you are expected to configure it by point and click, true to form for Microsoft. * Logging in - I have to bookmark it because there doesn’t seem to be a good direct URL to navigate directly to my repo (as opposed to like a GitHub repo for example). Also the confusing branding with “Azure” probably contributes to this as well. There are probably more things, but these are some that come to mind right away.
  • tacostakohashi 5y ago
    All of these things may be true. Still, have you ever used Jira? Jenkins? Fisheye? Bitbucket?
    • nunez 5y ago
      AzDO is worse than Jira, Jenkins, and Bitbucket IMO.
• 4pkjai 5y ago
  OpenRice.com a Hong Kong website where you can find restaurant reviews. I strongly dislike the user interface and dark patterns they use.
• 64bit_xombie 5y ago
  Signal. I dont like having to tie it to a phone number. I would much rather use email (eg wire) if I need to pick one or the other, but a random session id (eg session, torchat) is much better. I also dont want to be limited to only using it on a mobile device. (Yes I know theres a "desktop client" but it has to be linked to your phone anyway, so it defeats half the point of having a desktop version and it also uses electron, which imo is trash.) I also am put off by the fact that they work so closely with Facebook and other Big Tech companies. Call me paranoid but it raises red flags. The alternatives I've explored include session, and wire. Session probably would be a great alternative, or at least it seems so superficially. But the user base is extremly small, it still uses electron and they dont seem to release updates very often. It's also essentially just a fork of signal, so you might as well just use that for a few reasons that I'll omit for brevity. As for wire, theres a lot to be desired. But the main complaint I have is that theres no way to put a lock on your session the way there is with signal. I emailed them about it, and they told me they had "no plans to implement such a lock out at this time". I also have issues with it not sending and receiving messages properly. And so on, as such...
  • Trias11 5y ago
    Agree. Stop using word "security" or "end to end" encryption and then enforcing me to disclose my phone number to use your "secure" app. This is scam.
    • chickenimprint 5y ago
      The purpose of using phone numbers in many of todays services, is to shift the work of validating the authenticity of the user to carriers. Of course this has given rise to inumerable vendors of accounts or forged prepaid cards, but it raises the barrier just enough to make mass cheating, boosting, spamming unprofitable.
      • 64bit_xombie 5y ago
        But the benefit of curbing spam doesnt outweigh the cost of abatement of privacy. Though more of my issue is being forced to have it on a phone, when I only want to use from my laptop.
• CodeGlitch 5y ago
  Android. When holding my phone up to me ear after answering a call, the screen won't switch off and random buttons will then get pressed because you know, I'm holding it against my ear. Can't find any options in the seeing to fix this issue. My wife has exactly the same problem despite using a different make of phone. How can Android fail at the most fundamental task? The alternative of Apple is too expensive for me... More than I'm willing to spend on a phone at least.
  • MrRiddle 5y ago
    iPhone 11 is 500-550 which is kind of mid range and still is a great phone (They're still selling new ones). I have iPhone Xs and don't plan on upgrading soon.
  • jasonjayr 5y ago
    What phone model? I had a moto z that used pogo pins to connect the top screen proximity sensors, that after the adhesive weakend holding the thing together, lost contact. That was the only time I had an android phone fail to block input when I was on a call...
    • CodeGlitch 5y ago
      Nokia X20, my wife has a Google (not sure which model) that suffers the same. In fact her previous Google also failed with the proximity test... Which is why I'm thinking there's a fundamental problem with Android rather than just poor hardware.
    • ysleepy 5y ago
      Hahahaha, also had a moto z with the same problem. I think the sensor driver got confused when the pins bumped and stopped working until a reboot for me.
  • kyriakos 5y ago
    Sounds like a model specific issue and not a fundamental android issue. I've had quite a few phones and none had this particular issue.
• pengo 5y ago
  Trello. It used to be my preferred project tracker, but the introduction of workspaces and their recent insistence on obfuscating posted URLs has broken our workflow and made me keen to move.
• theduemmer 5y ago
  Rockwell Automation's Factory Talk software. It is used for developing GUIs for screens on industrial machines. Horribly expensive, laggy and broken. Versioning is a nightmare with crappy backwards compatibility (if it even decides to open the old project at all without crashing or locking up). God help you if it decides it doesn't want to deploy the screen programs over the network because then it becomes a song and dance to get it working over a USB key. Don't let windows update either as it seems like updates constantly break it. Sometimes it breaks itself and more often than not their (very expensive) support says to nuke everything and reinstall. There are alternatives, some worse but most better and cheaper. But Rockwell is the industry standard in North America. So their screens get spec'd.
  • daybyday 5y ago
    Hey, I'm a software test engineer in Factory Talk. Let me see if I can act on your feedback, can we chat? You can find my email address in my profile. Cheers
  • vidanay 5y ago
    I'll add "everything B&R" to this.
  • comprev 5y ago
    Siemens software was also notoriously flakey and required patching workstations to involve a shamanistic ritual to improve the success rate.
  • airbreather 5y ago
    Rockwell has been pushing out superflakey software that I have encountered going back 25+ years. Starting with "pyramid integrators" back in the early 90's, daily updates to the software from the US overnight, generally three steps backwards and one forwards, if you were lucky. On the other hand, I did a project with Schneider Unity Pro, similar PLC prog type software and it only crashed once in a whole year, and I blame windows for that crash. Rockwell, if you go a day wihout a crash, then you start to feel like checking your files to check it hasnt corrupted some shit on the down low. In more recent times GE royally screwed the pooch with the prog software for their new PAC range. I don't understand how one or two automation companies can get it so right, and others so wrong.
• b215826 5y ago
  Mathematica. Clunky interface on Linux, requires that you use the Notebook interface for most things, terrible to run headlessly on a server, need to be happy with the defaults that Wolfram provides, etc. However, it's still the best CAS around and open-source alternatives e.g., Sage, have a long way to catch up.
  • KolenCh 5y ago
    It is a horrible language, I think some called it a write-only language. But what it can do is powerful. For something there’s no alternative. They have provided a Python interface and I always want to use the Python interface more to work around the language problem. Also Sympy has a way to read Mathematica expresssion I think.
    • b215826 5y ago
      > It is a horrible language, I think some called it a write-only language. TBH, I don't think that the language is badly designed for a CAS. Most CAS (e.g., Maxima, Maple, etc.) all use a language that's heavily influenced by functional programming languages. But yeah, Mathematica is terrible for numerical work, and doesn't play well with other external libraries or tools.
      • KolenCh 5y ago
        I was referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-only_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-only_language and seems like Mathematica is the only CAS on the list. Actually as a functional language it is not bad. It is not the programming paradigm that it is at fault. I remember someone praised Mathematica as the best language out there because of its functional paradigm. I’m not sure if anyone has called it a read only language too. But in some sense it is. You can look at a notebook and have no way you can write a code like that without working it through interactively. I once got one that basically there’re multi solutions and the next step chose one of the solution, where somehow which solution you pick is deterministic but you wouldn’t know without running it interactively. (There are perhaps better way to do it programmatically but the “best” practice wasn’t well known or encouraged.) Another way to think about it is, it is not a language that one can just write a program on its own. It almost must be developed interactively. And because of that nature, it is easy to lose track when it is getting long. Some of this are more general problem, like Jupyter which starts as something imitating the Mathematica notebook experience. But in those cases, it is much more easy to refactor things in a module and reuse them. (Where lack of namespace separation in Mathematica is a big contributing factor.) I’ve developed a tiny Mathematica package for personal use, so I’m not an experienced Mathematica-ian, but I think what I said is well known problems of it.
• antisthenes 5y ago
  Windows. Straight up hostile to power users since 7. Too much of a pain to migrate to Linux completely and would have to keep a copy of it for work anyway.
  • gaws 5y ago
    > Too much of a pain to migrate to Linux completely How is it a pain?
    • antisthenes 5y ago
      Mostly making sure I have software on hand that does the equivalent of what my software in Windows does. Migrating the OS itself and files/documents is a piece of cake, obviously.
• octobus2021 5y ago
  Quicken (tracking personal finances). Has all the functionality I need, viewing individual transactions, reports (spending by category/account), tracking investments etc., and is local. When I bought it in 2008 it supported integration with financial institutions (e.g., I could download transactions for my credit card/bank account into Quicken installed on my local). Then they forced customers to pay for this feature every year, I refused and its stopped working. I enter transactions by hand now, once a week or so. Now they force users to buy license annually, otherwise software (installed locally) stops recording transactions (you can still open your data and see historical data though). My old 2008 version still runs for now. I looked into the options (local, I don't want to put my finances in "the cloud") and couldn't find much :(
  • howeyc 5y ago
    What about trying Gnucash, or any of the plain text accounting apps?
    • octobus2021 5y ago
      Tried Gnucash specifically, it's not nearly as intuitive, I'm actually considering it for accounting for my numerous ventures, but for personal finances - not so much...
  • oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
    I wrote an OFX client for this purpose. That's the same protocol that Quicken uses. It pulls transactions from my bank and puts them into MySQL. It runs a couple of queries on that data but doesn't do much more than that.
• EvanKnowles 5y ago
  Gods, Enterprise Architect. Such a generic UML app that tries to do so much that it's impossible to find what you want to do. And then you look for alternatives and find that it's years ahead of the rest.
• reach_tim 5y ago
  QUICKBOOKS. A complete non-integrated poop show. But if you will ever need an accountant, you'll be using it.
  • oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
    Accountants HATE Quickbooks. I wish I remembered which software the last accountant I talked to thought was better. I'd never heard of it, but apparently most accountants thought it was the best. It doesn't come up in search engines anymore.
• bjourne 5y ago
  Latex. The document object model is stupid. The Latex language's syntax and semantics are weird and idiosyncratic. Every Latex package uses its own weird conventions. It's slow. But there are thousands of packages out there for almost any conceivable problem you might have. And that makes Latex very very useful. But it is not well-designed software.
  • KolenCh 5y ago
    I agree. I can never work effectively in LaTeX deal to the global namespace and in general very stateful behavior. LuaLaTeX is quite fast nowadays though. Unless you need special glyph support, it’s better than XeLaTeX speed wise.
  • da39a3ee 5y ago
    Yes, I spent several months lovingly creating an open source LaTeX tool in the last few years. And yet... yes, you're right of course. I hate those stupid PDF "manuals" that each package has -- they have to be one of the least successful media for teaching anyone how to use anything!
    • hanche 5y ago
      I guess it is a case of eat your own dog food. But LaTeX and PDF have existed for longer than any more flexible format suited for the task. And last but not least, if the documentation is to actually show you the typeset result using the package, it is hard to get around the PDF format. (Though you can always embed images of typeset excerpts in documents of a different format.)
      • da39a3ee 5y ago
        I think my problem is that they never seem to contain an introduction to how to use the package; they seem to be a mixture of API reference and jumping-immediately-into-obscure-details.
  • giomasce 5y ago
    There's not DOM outright: each command is just a macro that is designed to expand to "the right thing". More or less. More in general, I tend to hate all macro languages, like LaTeX, M4 and the C/C++ preprocessor (fortunately in the latter case the impact is usually more limited, because the C/C++ preprocessor layer is thinner than, e.g., a LaTeX document). They tend to require a lot of shenanigans even to make easy things, so the source quickly become a tangled unmaintainable mess, when each time you touch something, you make seemingly unrelated errors appear. For a trivial example, consider in C: #define IDENTITY(x) x In any reasonable language you would expect that if you see `IDENTITY(y)` you could replace it with `y`. Of course not with macro languages.
• singularity2001 5y ago
  Apple App Store. Bad search, bad filters, bad discoverability and as developer: bad hurdles.
• riidom 5y ago
  Discord. I basically don't use it, avery few months I'd say, but I still hate it, because it drains all the good Q&A's from the internet and puts it into its chatlogs, with a mediocre search ontop. Discord for gaming ramblings and chitchat may be okay, but I hate when software projects misuse it as a support channel. Give me some forum instead, I know many ppl here on HN dislike discourse, I don't get it though, for me it's a great way to do a forum in a modern way. Can't perceive any UX issues with it (I do know the arguments, I just think they are not true, or much less of a hassle than claimed). Maybe we need something like discord, but it should have a way to group a question and the following conversation including asking back and answers, and send that to a website where it appears like a forum thread. Basically just select it with mouse, right-click, pick some option, select some keywords for taxonomy and good to go. Should be 5 seconds of work after the person with the problem is satisfied. Yea that is something I would not hate I guess.
  • _zllx 5y ago
    I recall this is the exact purpose of Spectrum.chat, though it can't interoperate with Discord, it's a new chat network. It allows making conversation threads available publicly and indexed on search engines. I've seen it in Google results a couple of times, but it doesn't look like it has caught on much, likely because of the network effect required to make a closed chat software popular. Oops... looks like it's been shut down.
  • rg111 5y ago
    > Give me some forum instead That's exactly why Discourse [0] exists. Try it. [0]: https://discourse.org https://discourse.org
    • prometheon1 5y ago
      The post you are replying to specifically talks about Discourse ~9 words after your quote
  • muzani 5y ago
    I actually prefer IRC over Discord. I'm not sure why. Discord feels a bit excessive in its features. I don't like the bots. It doesn't handle multiple channels well, not as well as Slack, and yet something about it makes people do so many, unlike IRC. There's the mess of roles/self roles. There's just something about it that encourages overcommunication. You have announcement channels that people just tell you to mute if you don't like announcements but, well, you miss out on all the announcements. The logging means that too much documentation goes on in a server, alongside memes and motivational posts. I've actually been playing a game where all spoiler related chat goes in channels that get cleared every 3 days. 90% of the conversation is spoiler related. This is a lot more pleasant - things get documented off discord, and yet there's plenty of chatter and banter.
• captainmuon 5y ago
  Outlook - Slow, buggy, cluttered UI. It loses mail, especially with shared mailboxes. The search function is slow and fails to find some mails. There seems to be no real alternative though. All I want is a fast, native email client that supports conversation view and has a good search function. For work, I also require the calendar function, but I don't think implementing that is the hardest part. I know IMAP (or MS Exchange protocol) is a mess, but talking to the server is not the part that is broken for me in Outlook and most other clients. It is search and responsiveness of the UI. But isn't (instant) search basically a solved problem?
  • teetertater 5y ago
    Have you tried outlook.com? I migrated from the desktop app and enabled a bunch of ublock filters to get rid of the ad pane, works pretty well for me. Haven't used shared mailboxes though so can't speak to that.
    • thrower123 5y ago
      The biggest problem with the web version of Outlook is that it doesn't have a global Unread Messages filter like the desktop version does. I have a plethora of folders and rules set up for each customer, and it is impossible to keep up with incoming items without that Unread filter.
    • afarviral 5y ago
      You cant edit email subject of mail items or group by category. 2 dealbreakers for OWA.
• fortysixdegrees 5y ago
  GIMP. If it didn't exist someone would probably have started a fresh effort for an OSS Photoshop alternative which doesn't suck. I've tried soooo hard for decades to become comfortable in GIMP but I can never get close.
  • andrecarini 5y ago
    Have you taken Photopea for a spin?
    • gaws 5y ago
      > Photopea Gimp, with all features, is free. Photopea charges a subscription.
  • yesenadam 5y ago
    I like GIMP, but started using krita recently because I needed its CMYK features. It's pretty awesome! More painting- than photo-oriented, but seems it can do most of what PS does. This link talks about what krita does that PS doesn't, then what PS does that krita can't. https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/introduction_from_other_software/introduction_from_photoshop.html#what-krita-has-over-photoshop https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/introduction_from_othe...
• mikewarot 5y ago
  Windows, Linux, Android - I hate them all. None give me capability based security. All are the equivalent of a fortification build out of crates of nitroglycerine. Any inbound inject of control that works turns them into a devastating resource for the enemy.
  • polishdude20 5y ago
    What do you recommend?
    • mikewarot 5y ago
      As stated by the original poster... "hate but can't replace"
• thrower123 5y ago
  The Azure Portal. Every tab I have open eventually uses upwards of 500 mb of memory, and the crazy blade interface makes navigation treacherous.
• mikewarot 5y ago
  HTML - The language that lets you do everything except markup hypertext documents. Seriously, why can't you add a markup layer to a hypertext document without copying it and embedding said markup? This exposes you to the dangers of copyright law, and the trolls that exploit it. Talk about false advertising.
  • smcnally 5y ago
    HTML specs say you can do what you’re saying. The tools and most publishers haven’t focused on implementing annotations and edits well.
• closeparen 5y ago
  Grafana. Most of our dashboards are parameterized and half the time, using the dropdown to select a different value for a variable doesn’t work. The menu just closes and the variable doesn’t update. The “stacked” option when displaying multiple series is a super dangerous footgun; it will show you numbers that aren’t actually occurring. If you accidentally make a too-heavy metrics query the entire page becomes sluggish and crashes, and you have to refresh and start from scratch. There’s no way to simply abort the last mistaken change. If you accidentally make in invalid metrics query (like wrong combination of variables) then the entire dashboard gets into a corrupted state where even if you return to a valid combination of variables, all you get is red. Again, refresh and start over. I don’t think there’s anything better out there. Perhaps we are a few versions behind, but the last major upgrade we did only made it buggier.
  • adrianmsmith 5y ago
    And: scrolling in Grafana. The scrollbars are tiny so you can't really grab on to them and drag. OK, so you use the mouse wheel or trackpad instead. If you've got lots of lines on a graph the key area itself has a little mini-scrollbar. So as you're scrolling down, all of a sudden your mouse is over that little area and it starts scrolling instead. It probably doesn't have much content to scroll but it doesn't matter, the page won't scroll while you're over that area so you have to move your mouse to some other part of the screen and try again. OK, so you think you'll put your mouse in the navigation area on the left or something and use the trackpad there, as there won't be any little scrollable areas going by there. But if you place your mouse on the left-hand navigation pane, that doesn't scroll the window. So you really have to place your mouse in the actual content area to scroll using the trackpad, and just deal with the above "sticking" effect. Infuriating. (Using macOS Chrome with a mouse with a scroll wheel and trackpad)
  • seedless-sensat 5y ago
    I have found Datadog pretty nice
• Trias11 5y ago
  Slack. It's idiotic handling of direct messages history with its enforced uneditable limit of number of conversations shown, previous conversations disappear and become unsearchable cost me waste time, wasted nerves and wasted communications.
• BooneJS 5y ago
  Adobe Lightroom. It's stagnant but I keep paying.
  • t0bia_s 5y ago
    Capture One is even worse on terms of pricing.
• twalichiewicz 5y ago
  I noticed most of the replies in this thread refer to mobile / desktop software, but nothing compares to the hell that is car infotainment system for me. Using the Audi MMI is painfully clunky, inconsistent, and riddled with subscription-locked features. At this point I just immediately wait for CarPlay and avoid touching anything in the car’s native OS. Honestly they could probably just save a lot of development time by just having a dumb monitor / audio setup that you’re plugging into. EDIT: Oh, and the Messages.app on macOS makes me pine for the days of iChat.
  • nunez 5y ago
    VAG has THE WORST infotainment systems out there, right below Nissan and Toyota
  • nicbou 5y ago
    I never had a car with an LCD. However after having tried a few, I decided that a phone on the dashboard does a better job. Tacking ephemeral technology to a long-lasting appliance is a weird idea.
  • oz 5y ago
    For some reason, I can't get wireless CarPlay to work on my '21 Q5. Only wired.
    • twalichiewicz 5y ago
      I’ve had pretty serious connectivity issues with the ‘21 A4 as well: having to turn on and off the MMI, Airplane Mode the phone to try and reset, and even when it DOES work, there’s a noticeable delay between car on and CarPlay being available. Let’s not forget the fun prompt of whether you want to use the car’s data plan, which if you haven’t subscribed will make your phone unable to stream music.
  • stonewareslord 5y ago
    I just recently did this. The radio was $89 and had the fewest features I could find: CD, USB, aux, am/FM and NO Bluetooth or touch screen which exactly fit my requirements. It's replaced my terrible touchscreen system and given me 2 single din slots of storage space. Replacement was relatively easy and as long as you have a headphone jack on your phone, there are no issues. Just need a soldering iron, removal kit, car-specific mounting kit, and model-specific wiring harness. Of course, it's much easier to find one with Bluetooth; there are tons of other ones with "smart" features that are the same price.
• kortex 5y ago
  Awscli. It's not just the complexity or inconsistency; that kinda comes with the territory. It's just not discoverable. Constantly have to be googling stuff. Boto is in a similar vein. Stupid capital letter arguments. No type information, no autocomplete.
  • nunez 5y ago
    use azure cli or gcloud if you ever want to fall in love with awscli again! want to, say, log in? i hope you like OAuth and/or dealing with JSON want to configure a less popular service? enjoy downloading plugins with documentation that’s one or two minors behind stable. (for azure specifically, enjoy like 75% of anything you’d actually want to do being “in preview”)
  • oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
    The underlying API is similarly inconsistent and undiscoverable. I thought I could write a simple client for it but I was defeated by the sheer complexity that 100,000 code monkeys can generate.
• Stevvo 5y ago
  3DS Max. It has bugs that have been unfixed for 20 years... I make models for Microsoft Flight Simulator where it is the only software that can export models correctly; there is an unsupported Blender exporter, but I'm not enthusiastic about learning that product from scratch; it has many of its own idiosyncrasies.
  • polishdude20 5y ago
    What format do the models need to be exported correctly?
    • Stevvo 5y ago
      It's GLTF but with custom extensions.
• nunez 5y ago
  expensify i don’t hate it per se. it’s actually quite good at what it does. but i don’t like paying for something i can implement myself but can’t because making time to do so and justifying it is challenging
• jeffybefffy519 5y ago
  Apple and the App Store and generally the walled garden that Apple has is complete anti competitive bullshit. Hope every government tears them to shreds this year.
  • voakbasda 5y ago
    Apple will not hesitate to spend millions to ensure this never happens. I would not bet against their war chest, but I completely agree that the have been anticompetitive for decades and deserve everything they get that can be made to stick.
• Johnythree 5y ago
  My pet hate is M/S Excel. It's ancient now, but still essential for some users. The problem with Excel is that it was written before the M/S GUI became standard, and so nearly all of the keystrokes are count-intuitive. I use it rarely these days, but when I do, I spend hours swearing at its clumsy non standard GUI interface.
  • nicbou 5y ago
    The worst part is that many shortcuts in the office suite are localized.
    • anthk 5y ago
      And functions. And maybe, VBA. A turd.
• alblue 5y ago
  iOS auto incorrect. It’s just ducking awful.
• t0bia_s 5y ago
  Windows 10. Can't be replaced because of Adobe.
• rickstanley 5y ago
  Teams. It's an abomination. Slow, clunky, polluted UI, consumes memory like it's breakfast, terrible ignominious Linux support, useless "user voice". Can't change because I trapped myself in a company that is MS partner, and have all the Microsoft's suite. I can expand on some points: - useless user voice: just go to feedback hub and see it for yourself, years old (now "renewed" because of the migration from User Voice) requests, with default response from the developers "hey! We hear you..." No, you don't; - terrible Linux support: the current version of Teams for Linux is months old, from October 2021, and I think it's just a wrapper for the web version, but worse, because it uses an electron version that doesn't support screen share on Wayland; - it's slow, every action you try, hover, focus, text,etc just feels slow and unfinished; There's still some fight internally between people that like teams (those who has an RTX 3090, that can run teams without sweating) and people that don't, the latter created a channel/group/whatever is called, to change from Teams ("Teams alternatives"), but I think it's a lost cause.
• throwaway874653 5y ago
  Jira Outlook Windows Whatsapp
• realusername 5y ago
  Xcode without a doubt, it's mandatory to build my flutter apps for apple devices. It's slow as hell, takes 12GB to download, has a 50% failure rate at uploading apps... Nothing is up to modern standards with it. I'm so fed up with it I'm almost close of building some open source replacement.
  • utucuro 5y ago
    A 12GB Download? The mind boggles - just what do they include, HD tutorial videos?
    • realusername 5y ago
      Not sure... It's really on another level
• pjmlp 5y ago
  Given that programming languages are also software products, C and JavaScript, I am unable to replace UNIX and Web platforms, which are the reason they exist at all, so there you go. As for other software, anything Electron based that could be a plain Web application or a background process using the user's already installed Web browser or system Web widgets. On that note anything that takes ages to start on Android or iOS, which are clearly not native, and I can replace them because they are key apps without alternative from the companies, like e.g. banks.
• fuero 5y ago
  Any Atlassian product. They long stopped giving a f*ck about customers.
• Wilem82 5y ago
  MacOS. Project scripts and software are hardcoded for Mac. The alternative is Windows, but making the project dev environment cross-platform takes time. I dislike non-standard keyboard shortcuts for everything, lack of FAR Manager (using Midnight Commander has the same problem as all the different keyboard shortcuts), its constant annoying notification popups that covert part of my windows, its problem with handling non-Apple mice (have to jump through many hoops to make mouse movements sensible, put mouse wheel in the proper direction etc), its windows rounded corners that cut at the application's view area (run Alacritty without status bar, the rounded corners at the left bottom corner will obscure part of the shell prompt), its support for Linux that is significantly worse than in Windows and probably more that I cba to remember. The other thing that I dislike but can't get rid of is JVM. Mind you, Python, Go, Javascript and so on is worse, but JVM is what I have to work with, unlike the rest of them.
• someacctimadeup 5y ago
  Great to see all the stuff I have problems with causes problems for others too. Sometimes I think I’m just being incompetent.
• billconan 5y ago
  Android Studio (I have a recent macbook pro), I still have trouble running it fluently. it's so slow. Confluence (slow and the awkward editor. I often need to directly modify the raw html to get the page rendered correctly. for example when needing to add long paragraphs under one bullet point.) Jira, so slow and complex. Gimp, its usability is the worst. but no other alternatives under linux.
• more_corn 5y ago
  Confluence is absolute garbage. Atlassian uses the interrupt early and often design philosophy. It’s next to impossible to just write in flow with confluence. Formatting never works, it’s actively worse than simply composing in notepad. Also discovery is laughable. Confluence is where documentation goes to die. I’ve often found myself knowing that a document exists, some key words and what team owns it and I’m still utterly unable to find it. Documentation discovery is like thing two after “get out of my way and let me write” Confluence is a perfect example of failure 100% in implementation. What they do is exactly right, how they do it is wrong in every way. I’ve used a dozen documentation tools and I tell you confluence is worse than nothing. I’d you have nothing at least you didn’t waste time writing something nobody can ever find. It’s bundled with jira though and jira is how most companies do scrum or agile or whatever planning work in sprints is called these days. Jira isn’t so bad but it brings brother confluence to the party so don’t let it in. I use Notion these days. At least it gets out of my way and lets me write. The todo template is mostly sufficient for sprint planning.
  • hateconfluence 5y ago
    I used https://github.com/kovetskiy/mark https://github.com/kovetskiy/mark at my last job where I had to use Confluence. It wasn't perfect and some touchup was generally needed after a sync but it definitely helped me stay sane.
• amai 5y ago
  Everything from Microsoft. I don't use anything from them myself, but I cannot avoid dealing with it because relatives and working colleagues still use MS stuff. Recently our school introduced MS Teams and it is terrible. ICQ was a better messenger than this abomination.
• upstill 5y ago
  Not just the app but the whole user experience: Amazon. Specifically, they should have figured out search by now, but no: the mapping from search terms to results is just a stab in the dark.
• Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
  Zoom, Chrome. Zoom is a resource hog and has a terrible UX, but I struggle to find anything better that works well on all OSes. Chrome breaks privacy in many ways, but I can't find a decent alternative, similarly secure, blink based and with Chrome extensions support that doesn't have similar problems (Brave, Vivaldi).
  • oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
    If it breaks privacy then it is NOT secure.
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
      Privacy means my data is private. I don't know if security implies privacy, in my mind I'm referring specifically to protection from direct threats to my device that aim to access resources that my browser doesn't expose (filesystem, elevated privileges and that kind of things). That being said, my statement still stands. In that case, I can just summarize it as "I can't find a browser as secure as Chrome" (implying that yes, Brave and Vivaldi do the same, they are just less open about that)
      • oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
        If people can access resources you don't think your browser exposes, then in fact your browser does expose those things. You just didn't realize it. Security does imply privacy, because one of the most important things in warfare is keeping information away from your adversary. If your browser is freely giving away information without a care in the world about who gets that information, then of course that information will end up in the hands of your enemies, and from there it can be used to do something you'd more readily recognize as a "security breach."
      • Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
        That is working around my intended meaning, it is not trying to build on top of it. The browser doesn't expose and allow writing to my filesystem indiscriminately, an exploit will allow that, but it's definitely not intended and that's what I'm referring to.