[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?
Which software do you use frequently and are unable to replace
(either at home or your company) despite thoroughly disliking it?
What makes it so bad? Are there alternatives? Why can't you replace
it?
Author : andrecarini
Score : 31 points
Date : 2022-02-05 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You could try Rust or (I think) Zig.
| octobus2021 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What about trying Gnucash, or any of the plain text accounting
| apps?
| doubled112 wrote:
| 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.
| JCWasmx86 wrote:
| 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.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| I came on here to say "Teams", and here it is, right at the
| top.
|
| Try doing a video call with 4 computers. Rather than the oh-so-
| obvious 1/4 of a screen each, one person gets half, two people
| get quarters, and you're in a tiny square in the bottom corner.
|
| Even more comical is when one of the participants in using a
| laptop with two people in front of the camera. Teams will often
| centre the image, clip the sides, chop off both people, and
| show the other participants just the empty space between them.
|
| How on earth did this pass QA, or any kind of design review?
| verandaguy wrote:
| I use Teams on Mac, and frankly while I started off just
| disliking it because of the Electron lagginess, over time
| that's been overshadowed by a bunch of other stuff:
|
| - It's basically a Skype reskin, so it has a lot of visual
| elements and quirks that carry over from that -- most of them
| haven't aged well. The reacts alone are taken straight from
| Skype, and they never seem to sync up if people react to a
| comment in quick succession. It seems like a small complaint,
| but it's really surprising to see in something built by a
| trillion-dollar company.
|
| - Speaking of UI issues, why does Teams insist on using a
| custom notification bubble instead of using the native ones
| that all other electron apps seem to be able to do? They don't
| play well with full-screen apps, and they're generally pretty
| clunky.
|
| - Video calls also fall apart if you have more than 4 people in
| them (even if most people aren't sharing video). This has led
| to screenshare drop outs for seemingly no reason.
|
| - I don't understand why Microsoft thinks Teams needs to do
| _everything_ productivity related; it's a mediocre video chat
| client, a _really_ mediocre text chat client, and possibly the
| worst calendar I've ever had to work with, which is saying
| something, because most other calendars I've had to use are
| pretty awful. The scheduling assistant alone is one of the most
| counter-intuitive pieces of UI I've ever used, and managing
| event ownership is a nightmare. IT had to be called in to
| delete a zombie event that was supplanted by a new event, but
| the owner of the original event had left the company.
|
| Not to put too fine a point on it: I've had to use a lot of
| chat clients over the years, from IRC, to Slack, to Jabber,
| plus some less professional-oriented software like Discord and
| Steam chat (which is itself pretty bad), and I can say honestly
| that my loathing for Teams burns with the passion of a thousand
| suns. That anyone would deliberately choose to pay for it
| baffles me.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I don't think anyone chooses teams - Microsoft uses their
| monopoly power to bundle it in with Office, which people do
| choose. And why pay a bundle for Slack when you've got Teams
| included?
| signal11 wrote:
| > it uses Electron
|
| Teams v2 won't use Electron[1]; but for now you can get a small
| performance boost by just opening Teams using a modern web
| browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox) at https://teams.microsoft.com/
| -- you can even set up a PWA-type app shortcut.
|
| You can uninstall the client after that. I think there's maybe
| one feature (popout chat windows) that the client has which you
| can't get in the browser.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/rishmsft/status/1408085784016539653
| aledue wrote:
| Temas refuses(ed?) to let you hear voice calls if you use
| Firefox. It's the only reason I have Chromium installed too.
| vidanay wrote:
| Lately, my Teams has been popping up a purple bar that says,
| "other people may not be able to hear you". Yeah, duh - I
| wasn't talking!
| misnome wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| Ha, you posted this while I typing the exact same complaint.
| drcongo wrote:
| My kids have been trying to use Teams this last week while
| isolating at home with covid. It's easily the worst software
| I've ever had the misfortune to use. The UI is an absolute mess
| and none of it makes any sense, there's multiple locations
| where we have to try to find files. I have twins, so they're in
| the same year but in different classes - only one of them has a
| working login so both had to log in as her on different laptops
| and then they weren't able to join different meetings. It has
| no redeeming features whatsoever.
| aledue wrote:
| To add to what others said, another crap piece of Teams' UI is
| the file manager: it plays very badly with the browser (can't
| middle click a file to open it in another browser, pressing the
| back button is broken) and it has a shitty pdf viewer (why the
| hell does it need an integrated viewer anyway?).
|
| My university pays for Google Meet too, and has a server
| running Moodle, so I have no idea why professors prefer Teams
| over Meet+Moodle. And don't get me started on Google
| Classroom...
| hprotagonist wrote:
| fucking jira. because $work decided and so here we are.
| lawlorino wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| 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.
| xzyyyz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| bsuvc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| All of these things may be true.
|
| Still, have you ever used Jira? Jenkins? Fisheye? Bitbucket?
| SNosTrAnDbLe wrote:
| Lg webos.It forces ads on us
| haditab wrote:
| Friend of mine has had great success blocking the ads with pi-
| hole.
| bolzan wrote:
| Not a replacement, but maybe it helps. https://rootmy.tv/
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Windows
| 4pkjai wrote:
| OpenRice.com a Hong Kong website where you can find restaurant
| reviews. I strongly dislike the user interface and dark patterns
| they use.
| b215826 wrote:
| 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.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| 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.
| vsgzusnex wrote:
| Gdocs doesn't go without it's issues. Switching from GSuite to
| Office365 made me want to rip out my eye balls. The online
| version of word is awful comparatively and depending on always
| having an installation of word doesn't work in all contexts.
|
| Gsuite in general is accessible and works well for Collab.
|
| And of course Teams is on a whole different dimension of pain.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > online version of word is awful
|
| I agree. That's why I believe each of these apps should be a
| native app, built for your os. MS Word on windows 10 is an
| unbeatable word processor. Nothing else on the web comes even
| close. Same with Excel.
| lezojeda wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Agree on Google Chat, which we use at work because it's free
| with our GSuite (workspaces now?), is HIPAA compliant, it keeps
| all chats forever without extra cost, and... That's it. Slack
| is better in basically every way, but we can't justify the
| expense of paying to reach feature parity, especially the HIPAA
| part.
|
| Disagree heavily on docs, sheets, and meet. Meet is a bit wonky
| in Firefox but I wouldn't trade it for any of the other options
| we've tried. I consider docs, sheets, and drive to be best-in-
| class for what we use them for, which is pretty much always
| collaborative.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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)
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| meristohm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| One of the things that keep me from switching to Linux on my
| gaming machine is Game Pass.
| fartcannon wrote:
| 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?
| rchaves wrote:
| 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
| bsuvc wrote:
| I know Jira is difficult to get rid of once it is entrenched,
| but I've found Shortcut to be a great alternative.
|
| https://shortcut.com
| hadrien01 wrote:
| Non-cloud Jira as a workflow manager is pretty good. It's
| intuitive, powerful, quite fast (again, on-premises version
| only). But my current company uses the cloud version as an
| agile project management tool, and it's awful just because it
| is soooo slow. And they keep changing the UI, sometimes with
| good ideas, sometimes not, but because it is so slow nobody
| wants to use it to update their progress. For example I update
| my times once a month because it's an awful experience, and
| just use a spreadsheet the rest of the time.
| marto1 wrote:
| What about gitlab ? Why wouldn't that be an alternative ?
| sshine wrote:
| 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.
| blastonico wrote:
| Web browsers. But I'm not sure if I hate either the web browser
| or Javascript.
| 64bit_xombie wrote:
| 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)
| antisthenes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Too much of a pain to migrate to Linux completely
|
| How is it a pain?
| digianarchist wrote:
| Zoom. Sick of this app hijacking the audio channel of my Bose
| headphones when I'm not in a call.
| Belphemur wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's not better on macOS. Bugs I encounter regularly: webcam
| not working, memory leaks, CPU usage maxed out.
| drcongo wrote:
| 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.
| majewsky wrote:
| 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| It definitely lets you pin a single feed, not sure about
| the grid view though.
| Icathian wrote:
| 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.
| slig wrote:
| 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.
| gjvc wrote:
| atlassian suite
| 0x2c8 wrote:
| It may be an unpopular opinion, but I really enjoy writing wiki
| pages in Confluence.
| geocrasher wrote:
| 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.
| gjvc wrote:
| you must be easily impressed
| drcongo wrote:
| 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]
| sshine wrote:
| Have you considered self-hosting BitWarden?
| reach_tim wrote:
| QUICKBOOKS. A complete non-integrated poop show. But if you will
| ever need an accountant, you'll be using it.
| 64bit_xombie wrote:
| 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...
| porcoda wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I use Swinsian and it's pretty nice, but no dark mode (don't
| know why).
| pengo wrote:
| 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.
| guessbest wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This can be achieved through email much easier than
| instant messaging which is usually too vague.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Perl is dying
|
| It's very much alive and kicking.
| some-guy wrote:
| 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.)
| qsort wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Out of interest what do you not like about the whatsapp app?
| The core functionality seems pretty solid to me.
| qsort wrote:
| 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.
| aledue wrote:
| > when compared to e.g. Telegram it's much worse
|
| To be fair Telegram, privacy and security concerns aside,
| is a pretty high bar. Surely Facebook has the resources to
| make an exceptional app, but apparently they don't think
| it'd be worth it for them. I really wish something like
| Matrix had clients as good as Telegram's!
| tmitchel2 wrote:
| There are very good reasons why your I'd is your phone
| number
| Youden wrote:
| There may be good reasons why your ID _can be_ your phone
| number but I 've never heard a good reason why your ID
| _must_ be your phone number. Do you have any?
| 64bit_xombie wrote:
| It majorly cuts down on spam, by a huge amount.
| slantyyz wrote:
| Is that a thing?
|
| Outside of SMS, I only use Skype, Slack and Whatsapp for
| instant messaging, and in terms of spam, SMS, which is
| bound to my number, gets the most spam, which is already
| quite rare.
| majewsky wrote:
| If you refuse to upload your entire phonebook to Meta, the
| app will HATE you for it. You will not be able to initiate
| any chats, the other party needs to start chatting you first.
| Also, instead of names, only phone numbers will be shown. (I
| cope by looking at avatars and inferring identity from the
| previous few messages.)
|
| This would all be easily fixable. You could be able to start
| a chat by entering (or, more realistically, copy-pasting) a
| phone number. And instead of a phone number, you could be
| shown the other person's profile name (like in Telegram).
| slantyyz wrote:
| That it binds to your cell phone number, and that I can't run
| the web client on an Android tablet (at least the last time I
| tried).
| caaqil wrote:
| Huh. What do you specifically not like about it? I personally
| think it's one of the good ones: it's simple, it works and the
| developers are careful about feature bloat. It sucks less than
| anything managed by their parent company.
| gaws wrote:
| > There is no realistic alternative because friends and family
| expect you to have it.
|
| Didn't we learn in school not to fall for peer pressure? You
| have a choice here.
| jarbus wrote:
| iOS and Android
| drclau wrote:
| You can try Sailfish OS [0], from Jolla. It can be installed on
| selected devices.
|
| [0]: https://sailfishos.org
| [deleted]
| guerrilla wrote:
| 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.
| zonovar wrote:
| Microsoft Visual Studio
| dhruvmittal wrote:
| 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).
| adamleithp wrote:
| 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.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Which features from Photoshop do you miss on Affinity?
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| 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.
| marto1 wrote:
| PowerPoint. Yes, really. It's amazing for prototyping stuff up
| and is horrid M$ trash at the same time.
| EvanKnowles wrote:
| 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.
| nodesocket wrote:
| Anything Google acquires and abandons. See Nest.
| theduemmer wrote:
| 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.
| vidanay wrote:
| I'll add "everything B&R" to this.
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