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Ask HN: What is your fav “I can't believe in 2022 this still doesn't work right”
Mine is iPhone as hotspot/'net sharing feature, for other mac products (macbook pro, macbook air, etc.), be it bluetooth or wifi, let alone non-mac clients == ongoing failures/stoppages, regardless of iPhone or macbook models.
- rado 4y agoWindows, the top gaming platform, switching between a few resolutions before starting a game, making the desktop shrink etc
- Seb-C 4y agoPulseAudio I still have to fight with it all the time, and cannot get it to work as expected. And that's with the most standard use cases: - System always getting muted after unlock/reboot (for some reason) - Playing sounds on the speaker despite jack headphones being connected (I have to manually switch the output) - If I unmute the sound (that wrongly got automatically muted) with my earphones connected, it starts loudly playing my music on speakers at maximum volume. - UI not reflecting the actual situation (it shows muted speakers despite playing stuff on it for example)
- ghstcode 4y agoSetting up printers.
- t0bia_s 4y agoGPU passtrough in VM on linux.
- jbanger 4y agoA goole calendar view with 2,3,4 month or even custom view showing events in the day. Its not like there isnt enough screen real estate to fit it all in with modern displays. or maybe im the only one who wants this.
- draw_down 4y ago
- marginalia_nu 4y agoDunno, I'm mostly missing the day when we had the technology to create responsive user interfaces. Like imagine we used to have progress bars that actually reported progress, not just some bogus animation. Good times.
- machinevision 4y agoI just miss responsive desktop applications. I see USD10000+ tools running in the browser and I just wish we went back to how solid applications were built in 1990s or 2000s.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoI've said it before, but I genuinely think Windows 95 is the pinnacle of UX. It is amazingly intuitive. The use of depth and colors is streets ahead of the contemporary flat GUIs. You never have to guess the type or state of a widget, or where it begins or ends. Buttons typically have both icons and text. Icons to make it quicker to navigate, text makes it accessible without being fluent in Linear B ideograms.
- RyanHamilton 4y agoI 100% agree. Windows 95 UI forever.
- drstewart 4y agoIt's amazing how often things break with absolutely no indication of why or what caused it. Load a page, get a completely blank screen or component. Why? No clue. Everything just silently fails and redirects you to a happy path, e.g. back to a home page or a starting screen. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get an "Oops, try again later or contact support for more help!"
- jabroni_salad 4y agoThe fashion industry is so rife with this. It seems like any URL that is more than a day old is going to 404 or silently redirect to the front page of the store.
- belfalas 4y agoCentering text in any technology. :)
- forgotmypw17 4y agoHTML tables still work great, just like they did 20+ years ago.
- andybak 4y agoPlus Grid and Flexbox work reliably now and are pretty simple to use.
- rado 4y agodisplay: grid place-items: center
- sergiotapia 4y agoBluetooth. It sucks in every kind of way possible. It never connects when you want it to. It autoconnects when you DONT want it to. Pairing is a crapshoot and praying. It's basically printers all over again. It sucks!
- dangrie158 4y agoWait, is the printers story over?
- sigspec 4y agoNo and that makes it worse
- sergiotapia 4y agoBought my brother laser printer in 2019. Zero maintenance zero worrying about the INK DRYING OUT (wtf) and my wife can print from the LAN or her phone. I've done zero tech support so that makes it worth every penny. To me it's a solved issue try it!
- epicide 4y agoBought my Brother laser printer in... 2017? The laser printing aspect is great[0], but I can count on one hand the number of times network printing has worked. I've completely changed network hardware a few times since then, so I'm pretty sure it's the printer. [0]: Assuming you don't need color or images. Black and white images look awful.
- wutbrodo 4y agoPrimarily because it's become infinitely easier to avoid. I don't think I've printed much beyond sheet music in the last decade, and even that was trivially replaceable by a small tablet in situations where I didn't have a Kinko's nearby.
- rdtwo 4y agoYeah fucking Bluetooth is the real player of 2022. Even when it works it works poorly
- _chu1 4y agoLinux on the desktop
- Mikeb85 4y agoHas been working just fine for at least a decade...
- fsflover 4y agoThen (GNU/)Linux on the phone.
- mariusor 4y agoSailfish OS wants a word. Been running it since 2013 and before that it was Meego (also a full GNU/Linux distro) running on Nokia N9.
- neoberg 4y agoNo. There are still missing -important- stuff and "works but you have to stand on your hands while singing" kind of things. It's nowhere near being friendly to an end user unless someone picks and sets up the hardware and the software for them.
- fsflover 4y agoLinux is problematic on hardware designed for other operating systems. My Librem 15 works flawlessly, including suspend and WiFi (without even any binary blobs).
- Mizza 4y agoScroll a page. Click a link. Go back. You're back at the top of the thing you were scrolling.
- andybak 4y agoThis usually works for me unless someone has decided to make some SPA monstrosity that breaks things that usually work out of the box.
- solarkraft 4y agoAnd that's what everyone does.
- jasondigitized 4y agoPrinting something from my computer. I can connect to servers all around the world and for whatever reason, I cannot predictably and reliably connect to printers in my home or office.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoHave you tried your phone? It might sound like a joke, but AirPrint on my iPhone has been the most reliable way to connect to my printer by far.
- 1123581321 4y agoWe have trouble keeping Jira and Bitbucket synced. Both cloud products. How can they struggle with integrating themselves?! (Our GitHub repos sync just fine.)
- hanoz 4y agoCopy and paste in Windows.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoNot only does that actually work very well, the windows button + V to bring up clipboard history has been a huge time saver function a few times.
- hanoz 4y agoThat feature is nice, when it works, but like its ctrl+v counterpart, 20% of the time it just doesn't. Same problem with with ctrl-shift+p, which is supposed to paste just the plain text - a lot of the time, seemingly at random, it just gets into a state where it pastes the formatted version regardless, and I'm forced to paste into notepad and recopy to lose the formatting.
- nikau 4y agosearch for "puretext", set hotkey, live happily ever after.
- ccleve 4y agoMy inability to connect to a printer over the network reliably. Can't tell you how many times I have to "fix the printer" in my house.
- mattw2121 4y agoI'm at the point that I am about to install a dedicated service that people in my house can just forward a document to via email and it will be printed. Then I have one place to troubleshoot instead of multiple PCs and phones.
- peter-m80 4y agoChange the printer brand. I have a Brother laser printer and once configured the wifi on it, it is zero config. All my computers (linux, mac, windows) detect it over the network. I can also print from my android device.
- pronik 4y agoI've bought an OKI color laser print/scan/copy combo after we last moved some four years ago. Best thing ever in general and I never had any connection problems. But yeah, the mere fact that you have to be choosing your hardware wisely is precisely the problem here.
- sigspec 4y agoMine is automated message handling in iOS. Specifically I volunteer for a group that uses SMS with embedded links for the volunteers to tap to check in and out of a job. Frequently these links are truncated or divided in a way that makes their URL structure invalid. This happens all the time due to the difference in message length and how iOS handles longer messages. I know this boils down to an SMS character limit kludge, but our Android users do not experience this. The message comes as one block or "bubble" but the iOS users see multiple bubbles that are frequently out of order.
- boring_twenties 4y agoWouldn't short URLs work around your problem? (Yes, it's the iPhone's fault, but you don't have any chance of getting that fixed.)
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoWould QR codes work?
- freedomben 4y agoI think Tim Cook would tell you to use an iPhone for sending your automated messages, then it won't be a problem.
- webfork2 4y agoMS Office issues. The whole project back in the 90s as I understand it was that all of these productivity tools would work together. You write something up in Word, move that over into a PowerPoint slide and add in a cool data visual from Excel. I don't know what happened but they do NOT play nice together anymore. Tables don't copy right, I use a totally external program to screenshot the table or pie chart, and maintaining formatting between programs? Fahgettabouttit. Word is also remarkably bad with long (100+ page) documents and lots of different content sources. If you're not pasting as pure text into Microsoft Word, you're playing with fire. Also, I suspect it's cruft inside the program that has made this problem actually worse over time, not just "still a problem". Thank god Markdown is now more widely supported, including on Microsoft-owned Github.
- johnnyballgame 4y agoWhere to even start with this... Ok, how about with Microsoft Outlook? The "undo" after deleting or moving an email works about 10% of the time. Sometimes it recovers the message, but most of the time it either does nothing or even better, brings back a totally different message!! smh
- jonas-w 4y agoPeace
- greenie_beans 4y agothe difficulty an ambulance sometimes has finding you after a wreck
- jacquesc 4y agoTried for hours this weekend trying to share files from my Mac Laptop to a Windows 11 PC over the network. Both had latest versions of operating systems. Could not for the life of me get it working. Had to dig up a usb thumbdrive. I used to have this working fine in 2002.
- manaX 4y agoI find it handy to use python's http.server module in command line for this.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoBluetooth. Especially when paired with the infotainment systems in cars.
- mauvehaus 4y agoShit, I'd be happy if the Mobil stations near me would correctly implement chip cards on their gas pumps. Every friggin' time, they ask for a PIN and refuse to take "no" for an answer. Every. Time. It's a credit card. It doesn't have a damn PIN in the US, and I have to go inside to pay for gas every time. I've quit buying gas at the area Mobil stations because of the hassle. Most of the other chains seem to get it right. How is it that Europe has been doing chip cards (with PIN) for decades, and we can't get this right?
- jabroni_salad 4y agoI have CCs from barclays and capital1 and both of them let you set a PIN. It just isn't a forced workflow like with debit cards.
- mauvehaus 4y agoI inquired with the issuer. I can set a PIN for a cash advance, but not a regular sale. Which is fair, I guess. They are fundamentally different transactions with different interest rules, etc. Nonetheless, it's a very frustrating situation that the solution almost exists, but can't be used.
- fabiomargarido 4y agoPainlessly hibernating to disk on Linux
- janvdberg 4y agoThat my phone can't decide if I'm typing English or Dutch (and set the spellchecking accordingly)
- mynameisvlad 4y agoSwiftKey offers dual language keyboards. It’ll suggest and autocorrect based on which language it thinks you’re using. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.
- vanderZwan 4y agoThis is the first thing I've seen so far that's genuinely surprising to me given all the machine learning breakthroughs of recent years. Lots of other things mentioned piss me off too, but I can usually see (to my dismay) where the perverse incentives lie, or the lack of a market drive, or whatever. This seems like a problem people would like to see solved, where nobody has reason to get in the way of solving it, and that should be solvable by now.
- Mikeb85 4y agoWhat phone? Google's keyboard is great for exactly this (I type in 4 different languages regularly).
- ccleve 4y agoDatabase versioning. Why can't I have version control on a database record just like we do for documents? Why do we have to implement audit trails over and over again?
- forgingahead 4y agoPrinters and bluetooth (separately), easily the two weakest links of any computing chain.
- joezydeco 4y agoSoftware (including web frontends) that can't properly pluralize quantities in English. It goes "0 Days, 1 Day, 2 Days". Not "0 Days, 1 Days, 2 Days". Or, worse, "0 Day(s), 1 Day(s), 2 Day(s)".
- wizzwizz4 4y agoTo be fair, pluralisation is hard. If you want it to work in English, but you want your software to support translations, you have to call a function and give it all the information necessary for all languages you support. That includes: • are there 3 or 4? (Plural isn't just zero/one/many in every language.) • is the quantity small-ish, or large-ish, compared to normal? • what's the grammatical position of the noun you want to pluralise? You'd have to have something a lot more sophisticated than string substitution. And there isn't really a pressing need for it. Day(s) works fine.
- songshu 4y agoCancel next iteration of alarm on iPhone.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- capableweb 4y agoTransferring files between two computers/phones/devices right next to each other, regardless of operating system. Most solutions rely on sending a file to some server in probably a different country, and then downloading said file on the other computer. Or, using a USB stick to pass the file from one to the other.
- tpoacher 4y agoI'm pretty pissed off that infrared got phased out as a technology. Doubly so that this was replaced by bluetooth. Yes it was slow, but it worked straightforwardly and reliably, every, single, time.
- alternatetwo 4y agoOr even just a small piece of text, i.e. a link. I have a samba share on one system for files, but that is certainly not "regardless of operating system", as it's a pain to do that with a phone. So a discord server with just me in it is ... also gives you handy direct links for files up to 8mb.
- jeffbee 4y agoAirDrop? Always works flawlessly in my experience.
- marricks 4y agoIt sure does, but they said "regardless of operating system." Outside of the apple-verse it still sucks.
- jeffbee 4y agoOh I see. I took it to mean there are no platforms where this works, but they make there is no scheme that works across all platforms? The problem with the latter form of the question is there will always be some garbage platform that doesn’t participate.
- dalyons 4y ago
- MrWiffles 4y agoLinux desktop. Equivalent in quality to MacOS.
- cranium 4y agoI've not experienced it but I still find it quite scary: automated account termination with no tangible recourse. Get your account flagged by a black box and you could loose decades of emails, contacts, bookmarks and favorites,... Then it's a Don Quixote fight to get anything back.
- alexb_ 4y agoWhy the hell is it so hard to just send a file to someone? Why must I go through a central service to host my content before I let someone else view it? Why do I have to tell someone else that they must download third party software in order to just... send files? Without having some corporation store it on their servers.
- Ptchd 4y agohttps://file.pizza/ https://file.pizza/
- andybak 4y agoI assume WebRTC or similar could handle this. I just googled it and this showed up: https://www.sharedrop.io/ https://www.sharedrop.io/ But - in many cases people need to transfer files asynchonously - either because they can't guarantee both machines will be online for the duration of the transfer, or the other person wants to receive the file at some other time other than "now".
- alexb_ 4y agoEmail works fine for that case - that's already been solved. It's "transfer the file now" that's annoying. I would love for third party software like Croc to just be included in Windows (like Curl is now) so this isn't made hard. If you can convince someone to download extra software to get your file, you can just use BitTorrent.
- andybak 4y agoI'd really rather people weren't emailing me large files and if I'm the one sending the file I've got no idea what limits the recipient's mail provider imposes. So - email really isn't a solution to my mind.
- v37p 4y agoThere's also https://sendfiles.dev/ https://sendfiles.dev/ for browser to browser transfers. You could also self-host an FTP server (or something more modern like NextCloud) and open a port on your router to let users download (and take it a step further with a dynamic DNS provider in case your IP changes). I agree that it shouldn't be this hard just to transfer a file.
- ClassyJacket 4y agoSelecting and pasting text on Android. It works completely differently in different apps, or different text boxes in the same app, despite being a service provided by the OS and not the app. And even at it's best it's a nightmare. Sometimes double tap will select a word. Sometimes double tap will show the clipboard menu. Sometimes double tap will show the clipboard menu, then quickly dismiss it again. Sometimes to show the menu I have to single tap, but sometimes I have to long press. If it's a single-line text box, I can't tap anywhere within it to get the clipboard menu, I have to tap (or hold, whatever it is today) on the tiny part at the beginning where the cursor is. Then there's the whole nightmare of actually selecting the text you want correctly. Pasted the wrong thing? There's no undo. Just suffer. Horrible.
- kerblang 4y agoProgramming language design as a discipline improves more slowly than anyone admits, and truth be told, we're trading off more than improving. 1. Your new language will die, but not because of the language, but because it's so hard to build out a standard library for it. 2. We still don't agree on the basics and fundamentals. 3. We are arguing from elitism (and its sibling, anti-elitism) more often than "make it easier".
- markles 4y ago- Why is bluetooth so consistently buggy? Unless you're using the exact bluetooth headphones made for that device, I find myself needing to connect/reconnect or debug so often. - Why don't TVs still have physical buttons? Sometimes the remote batteries die or I can't find it. Just let me turn things off or adjust volume. - Why isn't there a sliding toggle "checkbox" in HTML? Why do I have to abuse a checkbox to get one?
- neoberg 4y agoTo your last point; because it should be a touch specific interface but it's abused as a checkbox on desktop by designers. Mobile app platforms have this natively but HTML is supposed to be platform independent.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoThe more you know about the Bluetooth Classic spec and the Bluetooth “Special Interest Group”… the more it all makes sense.
- anotherhue 4y agoI read the v4 spec many moons ago. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that it tries to define everything rather than stop at a sensible place and let others quibble over the standards. The price of embedded systems really.
- cik 4y agoHumans. It doesn't matter what country or culture. We're mostly busy arguing over the colour of a political party, as opposed to working on the root cause of important issues.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoI should be able to programmatically check my bank/brokerage balances, check when bills are due, and in general automate my finances. My judgment on when to pay what bills is entirely automatable and yet every payday I spend 45 boring minutes doing it myself anyway. Basically, I want to pay all bills that are due before the next payday. If I have money left over, I want to reserve $X in my checking account for spending, put some in my savings account if it is below $Y, and transfer the rest to my brokerage account to invest.
- barbazoo 4y agoWhy would you say this? Now I have this idea in my mind of a python script moving my money around for me twice a month and I know damn well that I'll never get to have that.
- wizzwizz4 4y agoDepending on where you live, you might. It's a thing in lots of places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking
- capableweb 4y agoOpen Banking generally mean someone can build 3rd party integrations on top of banking APIs. It is generally not for individuals to get HTTP API access to your own "production" bank account so you can write a Python script to move money around. I was very happy when it first appeared and my own bank made a big noise about supporting it, so went around to dig for the documentation. Had to sign up for a developer account first, that's all fine and dandy. Write some words about my use case, that's also fine I guess, not optimal but whatever. Finally arrived at the "Success" screen that said something like "Congratulations, we'll review your case and give you access to the sandbox if accepted" which was... Fiiiine. Some days later, get sandbox + documentation access, write my ~20 line script to move 5 ImagineDollars from account 1 to account 2 within the same holder and want to see it working live but no, here comes a form with ~20 fields describing again the use case, how many users you expect, what you do in case there is errors and so on. I fill it out from the perspective that I'm just writing it for myself. Wait ~2-3 weeks and receive a rejected email, they don't want individuals to write their own scripts, the service is for products to be built on top of their APIs, nothing more and nothing less. Great.
- johnnyballgame 4y ago"Windows could not reconnect all network drives."
- luckylion 4y agoCompanies still ignoring business. I tried to get a company account at getsby, nothing happens. I email them, silence. I'm pretty sure I'm not blacklisted by MC/Visa because I have both from my bank and my company has way more money than it knows how to spend. Oh, and Paypal's payments not working 50% of the time. Probably something with using firefox or being on linux, or having an adblocker. I have a secure password. I use 2fa. It still fails so often, I now avoid it.
- jeffbee 4y agoiPhone hotspot over wifi has always worked flawlessly for me, with all types of clients from macbooks to imacs to chromebooks and chromecasts and even my car.
- jlengrand 4y agoFor me, it's what's getting worse over time. It's accepted to wait 6 seconds for your TV to start. Washing machine to light up, dishwasher to be responsive, or even apps to take seconds to boot up.... It makes me go crazy.
- sdenton4 4y agoVideo game controllers. Even in the world of steam and unity, controller behavior and configuration is a huge crapshoot and often just doesn't work.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoI’ve never had an issue on a console, ever. You are just describing PC fragmentation.
- falcolas 4y agoNah, just use a 3rd party controller. You lose functionality on a console (for example, NFC reading and HD rumble on switch 3rd party controllers), and they can't even begin to accept that you might have different button labels than their first party controllers.
- QuadrupleA 4y agoWeb search - being able to find anything but half-assed listicles and content farm dreck.
- estebarb 4y agoConnecting a laptop to a videobeam. It is still plug & pray.
- recursive 4y agoWhat's a videobeam?
- classicalcomplx 4y agoBluetooth. I’m fairly vested in the Apple ecosystem with a MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad, and a few AirPods, and never have I seen a feature that creates so much instability across such a wide range of gadgets. I have gotten kernel panics on my MacBook, hard crashes (straight to the Apple logo) on my iPhone and iPad, and had several AirPods refusing to switch devices without a hard reset, all from the Bluetooth dameon. And, don’t get me started on default audio inputs with Zoom calls and whatnot. Rolling dice seems to have better odds than getting the right input to connect from the start.
- sandreas 4y agoThis is my personal opinion. No offense to any developer or project, but: The linux touchpad experience... After shifting around responsibilities for a decade between libinput, compositor, desktop environment, applications and back, not many people seem to really see the importance of the touchpad as input device. Especially precisition, interial/kinetic scrolling + rubberbanding and palm detection do not feel optimal. After digging around with libinput and libinput-config on fedora 36, I have achieved at least an acceptable level of touchpad usability and I'm looking forward to 2023 :-)
- mariusor 4y agoThe only thing you might want to be mindful of is to place the blame where it lies, not "shifting around responsibilities [..] between libinput, compositor, desktop environment, applications and back". Most of the time the true culprits are the hardware vendors that don't provide technical specifications for their devices, not anyone else. Open source devs have reverse-engineered the pointer acceleration curves for countless devices and should be thanked that one can use an off the shelf laptop with a working touchpad instead of thinking they're somehow to blame.
- johnnyballgame 4y agoVersion control of Microsoft Word and Excel documents.
- jrootabega 4y agoBuying a dozen eggs and not having one of them be cracked when you use them. The clear plastic cartons might help you see a fully smashed egg, but it doesn't let you see the small cracks. Especially for brown eggs. The cashier double checks the eggs anyway, but there's always a cracked one once I have paid.
- socialismisok 4y agoI've had this happen maybe once or twice, ever. Interesting to hear that someone out there is getting all my unlucky eggs.
- jrootabega 4y agoI'm probably the guy getting hit with all your CAPTCHAs, too!
- alexb_ 4y agoDo you not check the eggs before you buy them?
- jrootabega 4y agoI'm the weirdo who opens the carton and gently rolls each egg to see if it's stuck to the carton underneath.
- paleotrope 4y agoFunny, I do that as well. Learned my lesson a dozen years ago.
- ar-nelson 4y agoCross-platform user interface libraries, including desktop<->mobile. GTK and QT work for desktop-only apps, but once you include mobile there's no good, solid solution for this except a web view.
- jacknews 4y agoWifi hotspot works fine for me. What doesn't work is just sharing stuff between different people and devices. I want to send a web page to my son on his desktop. I want to play a video on the TV. I want to play some music on the main speakers. I want to collaborate on annotating an image with my wife. The whole family wants access to the e-book collection, movies, music, etc. All these things are possible now to an extent, but each and every one is some degree of difficult to set up, and it's own little thing. And not even mentioning the fractured wasteland that is messaging. All of this should be baked into the very fabric of computing by now IMHO, a seamless landscape of shared data.
- wizzwizz4 4y agoLatency. Back in the day, you flicked your computer's on switch, and it turned on. (And then it took ten minutes or so to load software from the tape drive – much faster from floppy, but still far from instant.) Now, our processors and storage devices are millions of times faster, and computers can take minutes just to start. Software needs to load itself into memory, then initialise the initialisation routines, then actually initialise, then you have to wait for the data to populate, then it's still slow until the cache has warmed up. It's 2022 and if I want to play a rhythm game, I have to calibrate my input device because, since the days of PS/2, keyboard latency has gone up so much that I can hear the delay between the button click and the computer's reaction. It's 2022, and when I draw something on one device, it takes several seconds for the drawing to make its way to the other, even if they're in the same room, because the data's being sent through four layers of format conversion in JavaScript, and the traffic's being sent half-way 'round the world. It's 2022, and "blazing fast" means "slower, and probably more buggy, than Windows 95".
- prego_xo 4y agoWith all of the extra power we have in our components these days, companies feel like they need to utilize all of it, otherwise it's wasted. Thus the suite of horrible programs required to get a USB controller to have deadzones, or for keyboards to have custom functions. The amount of background processes in one Windows 10 instance without having opened a single program manually is mind-boggling.
- glitcher 4y agoYes! My biggest gripe lately is being forced to move more and more of my daily work off of a very fast and beefy local workstation to an AWS Workspace that feels like I'm time traveling backwards 20 years to a laggy remote desktop connection.
- mrob 4y agoLow latency is still available. Get a fast gaming keyboard/mouse/monitor/NVMe SSD. Use a latency-tuned kernel, e.g. with full preemption enabled. Disable swap and run a userspace OOM killer to avoid the problems this would otherwise cause. Run Xorg with compositing disabled and TearFree disabled. Disable vsync everywhere. Don't use software that caps the framerate low (e.g. terminals using libvte[0]). Turn off all UI animations. Most software I use feels more responsive than anything from the Windows 95 era. [0] https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10704 https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10704
- johnnyballgame 4y agoDisconnecting / reconnecting a Windows laptop from a docking station.
- andybak 4y agoClosing the lid on a Windows laptop and being 100% confident it won't decide to wake up either in the middle of the night thus feeling the room with an eerie glow - or in your backpack thus cooking the motherboard.
- falcolas 4y agoWell, you can be 100% confident that it will do one of those two things (if not both), so there's that at least.
- falcolas 4y agoI'm sorry to say this is an issue everywhere. I've had a mac BSOD from unplugging a dock (doing it while the computer's suspended is/was a surefire way to trigger this particular bug), and linux is even more picky since it depends entirely on the hardware underpinning the dock.
- nikau 4y agoMy most reliable dock has been the cheapest one possible - a display port 1.2 adapter that exposes the usb2 port which I've chained to an 8 port hub. No special drivers required, everything I've connected it to has worked flawlessly including macs, windows, my Samsung phone. USB2 only seems bad on the surface, but the combined bandwidth of the webcam/mouse/keyboard/mic doesn't come near saturating it.
- notacoward 4y agoGotta add another vote for printers in general. All of our computers "lose" the printer at least once a month, even though it has a static IP address etc. Only solution is to remove and reinstall. Then it never remembers quality settings, which is important because normal quality is utter crap that nobody would ever want. (TBF that last part is more of an OS problem.) Then there's the "can't print black because you're out of yellow" thing, and so many more. How can everything about printers still be so awful even after decades of that awfulness being so well known that it's the subject of memes and jokes? Special bonus: suspend/resume on even the most vanilla of laptops. The one I'm on now keeps hanging on wakeup because (I'm 90% sure) the fingerprint-reader driver is total trash. I've been hearing lots of reports of suspend/resume problems with 12th gen Intel processors, on multiple platforms. Windows or Linux, same. Again: how is this something that vendors can't even test properly, after all this time?
- t8sr 4y agoI think you have the arrow of time backwards. Technology seems to be getting less reliable, not more so. Every time my laptop manages to connect to a hotspot it's a small miracle.
- tilolebo 4y agoEducation in Western countries. Budget cuts every year, ministers more preoccupied by putting their name on a law or reform than to actually improve things.
- fsiefken 4y agoPerceived sluggishness in the desktop response. Perhaps it's my memory or imagination but I remember that dos/win3.11 had an almost immediate desktop and application response on a pentium. I'm sure with a lightweight linux I can approach the speedyness and MacOS on an M1/M2 has a good enough desktop response.
- nikau 4y agoI turn off animations in win10, makes everything much snappier feeling.
- falcolas 4y agoIt's not just you - we went from "render when ready" to "start an animation of a fixed duration when ready". At least, that's one of the issues I've found.
- yamtaddle 4y agoBeOS was magically snappy and responsive on 7200RPM spinning rust with a single-core 166Mhz Pentium and 128MB of memory. Felt luxuriously powerful. The only widespread current OS that's even close to that level of responsiveness and good-use-of-resources is iOS, and it's been slipping for years such that I now hesitate to make the comparison. And it gets there largely by cheating (suspending backgrounded programs).
- wizzwizz4 4y agoThe USB 2.0 stack has higher latency than the PS/2 stack – but that's no excuse for the sheer lagginess of the OS. Ooh, just learnt that USB 3 fixes this problem! Never mind.
- mrob 4y agoUSB 2.0 has a theoretical minimum latency of 125us. PS/2 has a theoretical minimum latency of 659us, because the maximum serial clock is 16.7kHz, and the smallest scancode is 11 bits. This ignores considerations of matrix scan rate, debouncing, key travel distance, key activation point, the fact that many PS/2 scancodes are bigger than 11 bits, and the fact that USB can transmit more than one key at a time. rtings.com measures the keyboard I'm using at 0.5ms latency[0]. I'm confident this is faster than any PS/2 keyboard. [0] https://www.rtings.com/keyboard/reviews/razer/huntsman-v2 https://www.rtings.com/keyboard/reviews/razer/huntsman-v2
- Scharkenberg 4y agoDigital signatures for the wider public are still very cumbersome. The number of times I have had to print a filled PDF form just to sign it manually, scan it, then upload it back to the issuer's website is too damn high. I am in Germany.
- falcolas 4y agoHome routers doing a good job at Quality of Service - at allowing both big downloads and a responsive video call at the same time. This is a common enough usecase these days that it's crazy how a software update on one computer will obliterate a video call on another, even with "QOS" turned on.
- cassianoleal 4y agoThis is true. If you have a reliable upstream connection though, you can get quite far with SQM on OpenWRT.
- falcolas 4y agoYou absolutely can... If you forgo trying to run a branded home router out of the box. You have to find a brand you can run OpenWRT on, and then install and configure OpenWRT. AKA, you need a somewhat specialized skillset that most folks won't have (it's always worth remembering that only 35% of people are able to complete tasks using only a computer and the internet).
- cassianoleal 4y agoI agree with you, hence my first sentence in the previous post. In fact, just today a friend made a comment about his Internet that clearly spelled out buffer bloat. I didn't have a good recommendation to make him, and his current router doesn't even seem to have the most basic QoS. This is not an easy problem to solve though, especially since connections fluctuate which means a static SQM configuration will not always be the ideal. There are efforts to adjust the threshold dynamically but they're not quite there yet, and are even more specialised.
- jmnicolas 4y agoFlying cars. We were supposed to have them 22 years ago and now they're saying that I should get a bike to go to work.
- socialismisok 4y agoFlying cars are a nightmare. Ebikes are incredible. They are the most efficient form of transportation there is, they don't pollute, they are speedy, and they are compact!
- prego_xo 4y agoAnd they've been dumped all over city sidewalks in California because it's a legal grey-area.
- yamtaddle 4y agoProblems with those I-can't-believe-they're-not-illegal littering rental services, not the bikes themselves, right? Surely people aren't buying ebikes and leaving them all over the sidewalks.
- socialismisok 4y agoMine lives in my garage. Rental bike programs are... Hmm
- falcolas 4y agoSome downsides bikes have which flying cars would not: - No weather protection - Don't work (well, if at all) in snow, ice, heavy rains. - Limited (or zero) safety features, despite going fast enough to cause injuries and using the same infrastructure as cars - Limited speed and range - 2d congestion limits throughput
- socialismisok 4y agoWe have flying cars today, we call them helicopters, and there's millions of reasons why we don't have them in every house.
- socialismisok 4y agoFirst past the post voting systems. How have we not fixed this yet?
- em-bee 4y agohow would you fix that?
- fsh 4y agoConnecting external screens or projectors to a PC. It never made sense to me that the devices on either end take many seconds to realize that something was plugged in.
- rgoulter 4y agoI can play quake in my browser using webgl compiled from c++ code running as WASM but I still can not scroll though a table of 5,000 items. via https://twitter.com/samccone/status/902542169524772864 https://twitter.com/samccone/status/902542169524772864
- capableweb 4y ago> but I still can not scroll though a table of 5,000 items. Well, something is wrong with your computer then probably. Here is a HTML table with more than 10,000 elements and it works fine for me even on my shitty computers: https://gist.github.com/CapableWeb/5714c672dc433c1963a45625e5fd92f9 https://gist.github.com/CapableWeb/5714c672dc433c1963a45625e... You can even confirm they are all being rendered with `document.querySelectorAll('tr').length` which confirms all rows are in the DOM and it renders smoothly at 60 fps for me.
- mrob 4y agoI recently installed Debian Unstable on a new PC and it came with Pulseaudio installed by default. Just like it did when I first tried Pulseaudio on a different computer many years ago, the audio intermittently desynced from video playback on Firefox. Thankfully, Debian compiles Firefox with the optional ALSA support enabled, so I uninstalled Pulseaudio and everything worked perfectly again.
- _caw 4y agoWindows search. It is so incredibly slow and inept at finding anything, whereas the app Everything by voidtools has no problem and works instantaneously.
- Yoofie 4y agoWindows search is hot garbage. That's why I install Everything Search [1] on every windows PC I use. [1]: https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/
- fsw 4y agoOutlook shows national holidays in the calendar, yet its "Scheduling Assistant" is unable to figure out that people don't work on that day.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoEncrypted email and search. It's no easier to send a confidential message using the most widespread communications protocol than in 1980. Searching for anything serious/interesting I pause and think: Do I have it locally? Else, which specialist databases or sources I might try. Else use a bash script that hits a bunch of "alternative" search engines. Finally, use Google/Bing as last resorts. What happened to search?
- DocTomoe 4y ago1. I still can't seamlessly stream from Spotify/android phone to Google/Nest Home speakers. Takes up to 30 seconds to sync, randomly breaks down. I switched to iPhone two weeks ago. Spotify/iOS connects to Google Home immediately and works well. 2. I keep giving different variants of the same command to my Google Home, which often gets answered with "I have no idea how to do that", or sometimes minute grammatical details change the command for the computer, or sometimes it refuses to remember a task that it did the day before with that exact phrase, or sometimes it randomly does something completely different. Why does "Turn living room off" do something different from "Turn off living room"? I am slowly moving away from Google's ecosystem because nothing ever works seamlessly.
- boring_twenties 4y agoThe Spotify Android app is at a minimum in the top 3 lowest quality pieces of software I've used in my life (been using computers since 1992 or so). Probably #1, I'm just hedging in case I'm forgetting something.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y agowe have only 3 browser vendors left, and they mostly cooperate with each other, and still the default styles are so all over the place that even simple pages often end up with broken features between browsers on the same platform
- _caw 4y agoThe ability to change default Google accounts without signing out of every account. At this point, I'm absolutely convinced I'm doing something wrong. Maybe this is painless in Chrome?
- sys42590 4y agoRecently installed Linux Mint, what baffled me in 2022 is that regularely upon log-on it nags me to install security updates and when I acknowledge the request, it asks me for my password again. I agree that general package manager operations should be a privileged operation... but approving the installation of security updates should not have the user being greeted by just another password prompt.
- dingaling 4y agoThey're exactly the same filesystem operations, it's just the semantics of why they're being installed that changes. What frustrates me about updates is that they nag at log-in when I've already been waiting for the computer to boot and just want to get on with the task at hand.
- Ptchd 4y agoI once had ubuntu change that behavior but for some reason they reverted quickly...
- sam_lowry_ 4y agoMessage quoting in Outlook.
- ryandvm 4y agoTrying to find a setting in Windows' 3 or 4 generations of control panels. Honestly, it's amazing to me that Windows is such an unpolished turd after 30 years of development.
- ggaughan 4y agoTwo brand new Bosch ovens side by side, both showing different times on their digital clocks. Why don't they auto-adjust with daylight saving or at least synchronise with each other. I'd rather have no clock than two wrong ones.
- _caw 4y agoWe've flown a helicopter on Mars. We've crashed a vehicle into an asteroid. I have to type 25 character random passwords into AppleTV with no mistakes 5-10 times from a remote. On that note, it's 2022 and I cannot set up an AppleTV in the Home app on a Mac. It's apparently impossible.
- joshka 4y agoThis has two solutions: 1. Devs incorporate an OAuth code based flow. Many apps do this. Passwords should rarely need to exist on a TV device. 2. Paste using the remote app if you have an iPhone. The first is caused by dev laziness (and possibly better for rare scenarios where there isn't a second device) and the second is perhaps a cost thing (do you have an iphone?)
- _caw 4y agoI do wish the first was more widely adopted. The typing experience on AppleTV is actively user hostile - the password is masked (you cannot reveal it) so if you even think you've made a mistake in one of your 25 characters, you need to start over. The second doesn't work for me: we only have Android devices. It's unclear why our 3 MacBooks aren't sufficient for this purpose; I didn't have any suspicion that this would be the case.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoMy MacBook Pro 128 GB has "Pro" in its name but it takes a whole night to upgrade Xcode to a newer version on this model if I just pick Upgrade in the App Store (I no longer do it and download it manually instead, and then delete the old version manually before installing the new one).
- BeetleB 4y agoCharging cell phones is more of a pain than charging my cordless home phone. Even 30+ years ago, it was simple. The phone has a docking station, and you simply place your phone into it. Why do I have to fiddle with a cable to charge my smartphone? Some phones support wireless charging, but they're rare, and some manufacturers have dropped support for it.
- capableweb 4y ago> Even 30+ years ago, it was simple. The phone has a docking station, and you simply place your phone into it. I don't remember it being so simple. Every mobile phone I had in the 90s/early 2000 had a different charger, even within the same brand. They all had little holes with one pin in them, but all had different sizes, or completely different "couplers". I still have a assorted box with probably 10+ mobile chargers from the same amount of phones. At least now all Android phones are mostly using the same kind of charger, and Apple being forced to support it as well. Hopefully we'll all be using USB-C for quite some time now.
- BeetleB 4y ago> Every mobile phone I had in the 90s/early 2000 had a different charger, even within the same brand. I'm referring to cordless phones, not cell phones: https://www.google.com/search?q=cordless+phone https://www.google.com/search?q=cordless+phone No fiddling with any wires needed. Why can't we get docking stations like these for cell phones?
- nikau 4y agoblackberries used to have docks that used a gold plated power connector on either side of the phone. Nowadays qi wireless charging is a good alternative.
- capableweb 4y agoAh sorry, misunderstood. Not that I have seen them myself anywhere in real-life, but seems there is bunch of charging stations for various mobile phones (at least the ~three different models I've had last years (both Android and iPhones)). Maybe try one of those :)
- domador 4y agoThe display of sender emails on various email clients and services. It is discouraging to see how blindly clients trust the name provided by a message's sender and display it as-is (and without the actual email address) to the user. The client will naively display "Amazon Customer Service" as a message's sender when the full name and email that come in the message are something like "Amazon Customer Service" <contact@amazonfakedomain.com> So many technically-sophisticated verification processes are currently run on incoming email to throw out spam and scam messages, yet this particular, rather clumsy form of attack remains unaddressed. Email clients will warn you about everything else but this! I can think of a few simple ways in which clients could detect suspicious sender emails and/or names and help users know that there's something seemingly fishy about a particular sender. Yet I'm surprised that so little attention is paid to this attack vector.
- glitcher 4y agoDefault crapware installed on non-tech savvy family computers.
- fetus8 4y agoWhile not the most "mission critical" application, making basic Siri requests via a HomePod has never improved since the HomePods came out in 2018. Asking to do simple things like turning on a specific light via HomeKit, or asking for the weather, and having the request fail for some strange, unreported issue makes for a frustrating experience. HomeKit accessories in general have been extremely hit or miss, I had two Logitech Circle View cameras that constantly lost their network connection and had to be power cycled to get back online. I tried many things over the almost 2 years I had them set up in my house and nothing seemed to improve their connectivity. I replaced the indoor one with an Ecobee camera, and the outdoor one with an Eve camera, and haven't had any network issues since. I've seen similar behavior with "cheaper" HomeKit enabled light bulbs too. Certain brands seem to have major issues with connectivity, while others are 100% reliable. Maybe Thread will address this?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- giantg2 4y agoJest's memory leak
- DemocracyFTW2 4y agoBluetooth is still every bit as horrible as it was on day one.
- barbazoo 4y agoEven worse than printing I find scanning. It's like we're stuck with some ancient technology that works maybe 20% of the time. When it works, the scanned page of text is 8MB. Open in Acrobat Reader, export with "reduce file size", 6MB. What the hell?!?
- Shadowed_ 4y agoThings that could help: -Scan as black&white (grayscale) and save as such (8bit instead of color which is 24bit) -Increase contrast so background is pure(r) white instead of varying grays -OCR and save as docx/pdf/txt with actual text instead of image of text.
- gadders 4y agoEasy Windows or web programming in the style of Visual Basic (original VB, not VB.net).
- Balgair 4y agoSearch in Windows. I have a term I know I used in some set of documents. I can't remember where I put those documents in some file structure. I use the search function. Friggin' 10 minutes later it finally stops searching, returning a gazillion files which have nothing to do with the term I was searching for. Yeah, yeah, search is hard on local systems. Turn indexing on. Blah blah blah. Like, I have endless Halo and ads in the home menu, but I don't have the ability to actually use the computer in any productive way.
- IshKebab 4y agoI feel the same way about Chrome's browsing history. I was definitely looking at this site 5 minutes ago, why can't I find it in the history?? Plus it only stores like 30 days of history. What's the point of that? I have to install a third party extension to make history usable. My theory is they deliberately sabotage it so you have to use Google instead to try to re-find what you were looking at.
- dole 4y agoWindows Search has almost always been useless IMHO. I've used an old copy of Funduc Search and Replace forever for this and when I can't on another machine, it's FINDSTR from the commandline. If you're looking for just filenames, voidtools Everything is awesome.
- rasz 4y agovoidtools Everything
- Markoff 4y agoPull down to refresh in mobile Firefox. RCS as standard/API available to use in any app.
- soderfoo 4y agoFWIW pull down refresh is a feature in Firefox nightly, not sure what is taking so long getting it in to regular FF.
- easywood 4y agoYou mean printers, right? Everything about them?
- johnnyballgame 4y agoStating the obvious... There are billion$ to be made in this thread.
- 1970-01-01 4y agoCtrl+Alt+Del on a Windows system waiting on a hung process during shutdown.
- oliwarner 4y agoHome automation and security. Why isn't there a single model for sharing video and alerts to a local PVR? Why do so many crappy cameras require internet access and 1st party apps? I want cameras, I want alarms, I want heating and lighting automation, and I don't want to share access with some kid in China, or have nine different apps. HomeKit? Sure, but on my terms, not Apple's.
- Euphorbium 4y agoClicking 2 devices together does not pair them, or at least initiate pairing. Have to scroll through a list of 100 cryptically named devices without any indication which I should connect to.
- Protostome 4y agoBluetooth.
- rado 4y agoAirDrop – how is a 50% success rate remotely acceptable? And my personal favourite – macOS carries over the input language from an app to another, which makes no sense at all and is frustrating me for 17 years now
- rado 4y agoOS becoming unresponsive because of a network/IO error
- NautilusWave 4y agoSharing WiFi connection details via a QR code in iOS. On Android it's intuitive; but last I checked a few months ago on my spouse's iPhone, it was a weirdly complex process that didn't leverage the information the phone already had to connect to WiFi.
- yndoendo 4y agoControl desktop monitor settings still requires using the display's built in controls. This should be directly accessible to the OS so one can quickly lower or raise the screen's brightness like on a laptop. Manually turn off bluetooth once disconnect from paired device, such as a car or headphones. Save battery and reduced in-store tracking. Interactions with smart phones still requires multiple attempts to properly format text, fix corrects on unknown words or industry jargon, and copy and paste text. Android 12+, Google camera no longer follows the standard of allowing to select the photo gallery application and requires open it manually. Older versions allowed for it. Now Google forces you to use their application and break standard. Another Do as I say, not as I do.
- orev 4y agoYou might be interested in Monitorian https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian
- karmakaze 4y agoGoogle sheets not having a duplicate row that inserts a row, or basic copy and paste inserting rows/columns in general in spreadsheets.
- orev 4y agoAutomatic faucet/dryers/soap dispensers in public toilets. Always delays before they start. Or don’t start at all. Or start/stop before you’re done. They seem to work as (un)reliably as they did 20 years ago.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoThey say vampires can't see themselves in a mirror. Well, it always bugs me when those dispensers can't see my hand...
- noxer 4y ago"Instant edit" on most website. Similar to a wiki but it should go to the user/admin that made the content and he can publish or discard it. Ofc it would have to be without login/captcha etc. Every blog post would have every reader be able to correct small mistakes, fix broken links etc. etc. Basically a distributed maintenance system for the web where stuff that is actually used by people is keep up-to-date.
- pentagrama 4y agoBad ping when playing online videogames with people around the world.
- anotherevan 4y agoRT @reverentgeek: We should have flying cars by now. Instead we're fighting to convince the automatic faucets that our hands are really in the sink.
- lee101 4y agoSpeech to text is still really bad, Cloud costs are real bad too, checkout https://text-generation.io https://text-generation.io or OpenAI whisper which will fix that fairly soon I think. Over 8x cheaper than Google. There's lots of other cloud cost stories like CloudFlare R2 egress saving people millions on large file storage. I'm surprised decentralization hasn't hit cloud providers as hard yet either. With that hotspot example my Telco in NZ (spark) blocks me from using a Wi-Fi hotspot on one of my android mobiles, which is ridiculous that they can turn off an Android feature on my phone for profit.
- joshka 4y agoLong term support for legacy hardware.
- joshka 4y agoPhone / TV / Computer integration that is not just handoff, but treats the 3 things as part of a whole UX. Why am I streaming from a website to my phone to the TV?
- joshka 4y agoBuy once, use everywhere media - we regressed from owning the vhs/dvd/bluray to finding which service will allow you to rent / license the media. While I'm there, the path from media rental to "ownership". If I watch a movie for $4.99 and it's good, why not take the $4.99 off the price to own it rather than making me pay full price?
- joshka 4y agoMultipath mesh networking in ubiquitous devices. We all walk around with a super computer more powerful than the original devices hooked up to ARPANET. Assuming that we believe that E2E encryption is secure, making these talk to each other shouldn't be forefront rather rather than them having to communicate only to centralized hardware (cellular base stations etc.)
- joshka 4y agoThere's so much software written these days that is duplicated. We focus on the large framework style pieces (and in JavaScript land rewrite them every year ;)), but ignore the long-tail pieces that are common but domain specific. This would mean standardized software development building blocks for domain models. E.g. a standard model of money/bank account/user/address/company/shopping cart/food product/ingredients/calendar/... for every programming language. I've seen a a database-centric version of this (I don't recall the name of the site though), but not a domain model version.