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What software are you using and what were last 10 frustrating bugs you encountered? I find it fascinating because my use of software seems bug free in last 5-1

• RoyalHenOil 3y ago
  I couldn't tell you the last 10 bugs I saw (they are too frequent and varied to memorize), but here are the most common bugs I run into: - Firefox randomly freezes up on Android (Google Pixel 6a), and then sometimes this crashes my phone and causes it to spontaneously restart. This usually happens at least once a day, often more, despite being very widely reported for a very long time. - Assorted Adobe software develops strange behavior after it has been open for a while (selected items stop showing as selected, some tool or editing technique spontaneously stops working, exported images are borked, pressing ctrl+S reports that it has saved the file but it actually has not, etc). I have probably seen 50+ unique failure states over the last couple of years. I am affected at least a couple times a week, and I have learned to restart my software several times a day as a preventative measure. - On desktop (Windows), some website will fail to load something or it may display bizarre behavior (erratic scrolling long after the page has loaded, back button stops working, links stop working, video playback stops working, etc.). Usually reloading the webpage fixes it, but sometimes the tab itself has broken or the browser has to be restarted. Other times, it's a consistent bug in the website and there is nothing to do but wait a couple days for them to fix it. I usually see website/browser issues like these about once a week or two. It's better than the 90s, but it's still pretty bad and could be way better (as proven by all the software/systems/sites out there that don't have so many bugs).
• KronisLV 3y ago
  > What software are you using and what were last 10 frustrating bugs you encountered? I actually tried writing a section of my blog called "Everything is Broken" to cover some of the ways software breaks in (as well as some issues in general): https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken Unfortunately, there are so many bugs out there, that I only write about the things that are annoying enough to push my hand. Some of the last things that happened to me: * Ubuntu LTS updates broke my GPU drivers, preventing the server from starting up (among other things) * Debian updates made some unnecessary piece of software start listening on port 25, thus breaking my mailserver in Docker * OpenProject packaged PostgreSQL inside of a single container, except that didn't bother setting up automatic data migration for new major version * Vector maps are somehow way more laggy than raster tile based maps, horrible user experience on mobile for me (video included) * a trailing comma in Visual Studio Code configuration file made fonts end up being non-monospaced * Kdenlive (probably due to ffmpeg) failed to correctly apply text titles on top of a video at the correct times * containers break due to different file system permission models on Window and Linux, bind mounted files have incorrect line endings * Nginx crashes the entire web server if something like 1 out of 20 reverse proxied domains doesn't have a successful DNS lookup on startup * Grav (blogging software) can have changes be made to the install without admin authorization, my blog got vandalized * Oracle database randomly dropped connections, some relation to a generated column I've also had issues with GRUB, disk management in Linux, Nextcloud, Libre Office, OpenCV, Docker Swarm and pretty much every class of software (desktop, web, CLI tools, GUI stuff, OS components) out there - sometimes in pretty exciting ways of them breaking! I also have a folder on my computer where I collect screenshots of software breaking out in the wild, currently it has 143 images, though perhaps that's a bit too much for blog posts. Currently the last 10 there are: * Mozilla Observatory failing to analyze my site due to their own CSP being broken (script-src) * PHP install failing because the ondrej/ubuntu PPA failing to work like it should * my bank login page having an untranslated text string for one of the options: #xml-dtd.LOGIN-TEXTS.LOGINEPARAKSTS * my mobile service provider telling me that I've used 212166% of my mobile data * me being unable to modify a Visual Studio Build Tools install locally because they want to update their installer but I'm offline * Windows 11 Explorer breaking the file path bar and showing me two overlapping text strings for some reason * Oracle not giving me my OCA cert because my name contains non-ASCII symbols * the War Thunder game telling me that I have 2147483647 crew available for my tank * OpenProject functionality to move multiple issues failing... despite them having a dialog exactly for that * installing a Ruby Gem following official SQLite instructions results in UDS:Trojan-Downloader.Win64.Alien.eg/ef being detected Aside from that, perhaps my favorite bug is this: https://i.imgur.com/97wu8j5.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/97wu8j5.jpeg
  • ozim 3y ago
    I see here bunch of: - not really a bug, just system was not build to support scenario - not really a bug, user does not understand system thinks it should work differently - not really a bug, combination of 2 or more software things that have no way of knowing about each other - not really a bug, because it does not affect me in any meaningful way There are some I can agree are bugs of course. Though I see I am getting older and much more humble and lenient. For humble it is that if I expect some software to work some way and it does not, I step back and really go back to understanding documentation and what it all means. I don't call out things "fail to work like it should" (which of course might be my issue and parent poster might be right calling it out). Then for lenient, I just don't care about labels, text misalignment etc. The same with expecting non-ASCII symbols being supported, yeah we have UTF for quite some time, but it is also not something trivial to switch to and company most likely has loads of other work to be done. In the end world is not about me and there are tons of users who have other issues and my edge cases are not affecting enough people. World is much bigger so to say. If it does not affect me in any meaningful way I just move on.
    • KronisLV 3y ago
      That's a very fair point, that's why I had to mention the whole "(as well as some issues in general)" thing as well. For example, if software works in a configuration that was setup correctly (according to their own instructions) in version #1 and after update the version #2 makes the setup no longer work, is that a bug? I'd probably say it is, unless the patch notes clearly instruct that something needs to be done, though even that can be debatable. What about the case where you don't even consent to install some package that will take up a port on your OS and break something else, but it silently gets pulled in through some update? There's probably nuance to it all. At the end of the day, as a user, I might subjectively not even care about the internal workings behind some abstraction and the many reasons behind it, but rather about how it should work in a reasonable configuration - if a web server refuses to start if it cannot resolve a domain that it's supposed to reverse proxy when starting up, even though the other 19 out of 20 could be proxied, is that a bug? Probably not, but it sure seems pretty darn broken, since those 19 could be served and the faulty domain simply checked later. Of course, the software itself doesn't care about the user either, so at the end of the day it is the user who needs to learn patience and to trudge through the docs, posts online and other sources to hopefully resolve the issues, even if it's a bunch of weird workarounds or concessions, no matter how frustrating they might be. But hey, there's nothing wrong with documenting said frustrations or issues. I am glad that you've embraced a more neutral mindset, though!
• 59nadir 3y ago
  Some things I could come up with off the top of my head. I wrote down every bug I found in programs for a week or so at one point and the list was way, way longer than I thought it would be. It highlighted that despite my fairly pessimistic view on software there's a lot that went unnoticed because I just don't even expect it to work very well anymore. I would encourage you to write down bugs when you see/experience them but in all honesty I don't know that it will give you much; it will probably only completely destroy your positive outlook on things that you seem to have retained. - On YouTube sometimes the interactive elements of a video (quality settings, etc.) will also scroll my page down about 15% when I interact with them. If I click on the settings wheel to change the speed of the video that's 3 clicks and I'll end up ~50% scrolled down from the video I'm watching. - YouTube randomly resets my settings for inline playback when I disable it. With inline playback "Add to watch later" is not available as a thumbnail hover option. - When I was running Windows it would randomly set my bluetooth headset volume to close to zero out of nowhere without any changes made on my end, but only on a reconnect, so I would always have to check every time I connected whether it had done it. - Sometimes when my bluetooth headset connects on Linux I'll just plain have no sound at all despite it saying it's connected. The workaround is to just reconnect. - During a routine package upgrade for some reason something installed `xdg-desktop-portal-gnome` and this made every application that uses GTK (I think) start about 10 seconds slower. Uninstalling this package solved it. - Thunderbird will leave an empty e-mail subject line sometimes when I delete an e-mail I've received, but the body it shows when I click it is another e-mail I deleted. - World of Warcraft will randomly lose connection despite there being zero connection issues and rejoining will immediately work. This happened maybe 3-4 times per week in the 3 week period I played recently. - Discord sometimes just removes my key binding for toggling push-to-talk. - Elixir (via `mix`) refuses to compile dependencies sometimes and solutions range from having to remove folders, update deps and all manner of things. There's usually no real rhyme or reason to it and we all just nuke a folder or two and move on. - Same as above but with `node_modules`. - We had a package from `npm` that would sporadically not type check with our usage and we could never figure out what it was caused by. Every 20th or so build `tsc` would report a type error where none had existed before. This was with pinned versions. - When I used VSCode I would regularly end up in a situation where VSCode suddenly started saving files super slowly and took forever to auto-format code. This happened with at least 3 different languages so it was not language or extension-specific. I've also seen it happen live to at least 3 other people. - Plex will die when playing video files of a certain quality on my TV despite playing them fine for ~15-20 minutes.
• PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  > I find it fascinating because my use of software seems bug free in last 5-10 years. It doesn't have to have an explicit bug in order to be shit. There's too many instances where something is doable, but only painfully so. copy/paste over the last 10-15 years is a perfect example of something that isn't bugged but is complete shit in most software nowadays. search is another one, how often have you been on a website where ctrl+f doesn't work right because subsequent data only loads after you scroll below the fold? no bugs, but still shit software.