[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use e...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
Subversion was created because the authors were frustrated with
problems in CVS[0]. What's a piece of software you find essential
that you wish you could replace or rewrite? [0]:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.intro.whatis.html#svn...
Author : guu
Score : 236 points
Date : 2020-07-11 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago)
| sershe wrote:
| Microsoft Teams, hands down. It is utterly atrocious.
|
| I've never seen an app that uses 40-80% CPU on a modern laptop
| non-stop to do not much more than ICQ/AIM/mIRC used to do in 1999
| on a thing that's probably less powerful that my alarm clock.
| hit8run wrote:
| Citrix
| [deleted]
| nikanj wrote:
| Outlook. How can a flagship product be so useless, after decades
| of work?
| busyant wrote:
| Sorry, but everything listed here is rank amateur stuff when
| compared to Blackboard Learn
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn).
|
| First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were
| incentivized to maximize the number of clicks required to get
| anywhere.
|
| Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift.
|
| Third, editing and formatting text is an exercise in torture.
| When I want to delete text that I am writing, half of the time,
| the delete key won't work (I'm exaggerating, but not joking).
| Formatting of text is quasi-random. Want red-colored text? That
| works about 90% of the time for me. The other 10% will give me
| gray text (This time, not exaggerating). If you are brave, you
| can edit your text as raw HTML, but, my God, you'd better bring
| the anti-hypertension pills, because the HTML will blast you with
| a tsunami of <span> elements. Sometimes the <span> elements
| (unnecessarily) surround individual characters, sometimes they
| surround _parts_ of words.
|
| Third, it is nigh impossible to set useful defaults. Why can't
| the due dates for assignments be defaulted to the end of the day
| instead of the current hour and minute? Do you honestly think
| that I would ever want my assignment to be due at 4:33 PM?
|
| Fourth, it tries to do too many things. I already have email. I
| don't need Blackboard's email functionality getting in the way.
|
| I could go on (for a while), but it's time for those blood
| pressure meds.
| pinky1417 wrote:
| I wonder if Blackboard is any better since 2016 when Bill
| Ballhaus took over as CEO. I met him when I was an intern at
| SRA International and was beyond impressed in my brief time
| there. Besides his obviously impressive technical and
| management credentials, this was a titan of industry who
| remembered my name and always initiated conversation whenever I
| ran into him. We also had the same car (a GMC Yukon), although
| his was older.
|
| I suppose I could just have been subject to his charm and I
| suppose this could be a ridiculous heuristic, but I definitely
| have a lot more confidence in a company (and its software) when
| the CEO drives a practical car and is kind to the interns. Hope
| Blackboard gets better under him just because it's so deeply
| engrained in educational institutions.
| impendia wrote:
| My university has been a Blackboard customer for awhile, and
| so I've used it since 2011. My sense is that the software has
| gotten marginally better in some ways, marginally worse in
| others, and overall still sucks.
|
| They redesigned it, in what is apparently an attempt to make
| the software more usable from a mobile phone. So (on a
| laptop), less stuff appears on the screen at once. This was
| billed, as usual, as an "improvement".
|
| Also -- and quite frankly, this is ridiculous -- when I need
| to merge two sections of my course, I need to ask IT to do it
| for me. (Example: a big calculus lecture, which is broken up
| into multiple TA sections that have different course
| numbers.) It used to be that I could just do it myself, no
| problem. Then the option silently went away. I was informed
| that we used a plug-in (??) made by a third-party vendor
| (????) that enabled individual instructors to merge sections,
| but the third-party vendor went out of business and so this
| is no longer possible.
|
| Makes me speculate that the codebase is a giant pile of
| spaghetti.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| A giant pile of spaghetti, and every institutions spaghetti
| totally different.
| wadkar wrote:
| Ugh, this brings back terrible memories from grad school. It
| was horrible as a student, horrendous as a TA, and that one
| time I filled in for my advisor, it was a nightmare!
| als0 wrote:
| It truly was horrendous.
| impendia wrote:
| > Fourth, it tries to do too many things.
|
| My institution, unfortunately, uses Blackboard. Clicking on
| "Course Tools", I get the following, presented as one long
| list:
|
| Accessibility Report, Achievements, Announcements, Attendance,
| Basic LTI Tools, Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Blogs, Cengage
| Learning Mindlinks (TM), Contacts, Content Market Tools, Course
| Calendar, Course Health Check, Course Messages, Course
| Portfolios, ...
|
| And that's just the first three letters of the alphabet.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Canvas is for sure much better, but has its own issues. It
| marketed itself as the anti Blackboard, but it's begun sagging
| under its own bloat, and feature development slowed way down.
| It doesn't help that Instructure just got bought by a private
| equity firm, and fired a bunch of their employees.
| klancaster wrote:
| I just moved to a new university that uses Canvas, and while it
| is not perfect, it actually does not cause physical pain when
| entering data.
| protomyth wrote:
| We use Moodle since we can not afford the privilege of paying
| a lot of money for such a crappy experience. I notice a lot
| of other schools went with Canvas for the same reason.
| bradtx wrote:
| Gradefinity (https://gradefinity.com) is a kind of Blackboard +
| Scantron LMS alternative that is really targeted in terms of
| what problems it intends to solve (in-person and online tests,
| gradebooks, and communication).
|
| Full disclosure: I built it-- I'm very receptive to feedback
| and feature suggestions though and am looking for pilot schools
| if anyone is interested in shaping the platform/knows someone
| who might be.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Some questions: does Gradefinity have the ability for
| teachers to publish learning modules for collaboration
| purposes? And orchestrate tasks among themselves? For example
| two teachers both writing up 200 vocabulary words to make a
| 400 vocabulary words quiz - can that be merged? Sharing
| content both between teachers and between classes is
| extremely important and seems to be underserved by
| Blackboard. Also do you model classes as being able to span
| terms, i.e. a two-semester class is a single entity?
| paulgb wrote:
| There was an enlightening tweetstorm last year from a Princeton
| prof about the institutional reasons why Blackboard is so
| widely used despite being so bad:
| https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182637292869115904
| joeraut wrote:
| Link to the start of the thread:
| https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776
| DerekRobot wrote:
| I accidentally bought a gaming laptop that can't run Linux, so
| I'm stuck with Windows 10 exclusively. Although it really isn't
| that bad now.
|
| My workplace uses SmartCAM, an ancient CAM package for
| manufacturing. It's probably not that bad, but I couldn't wrap my
| head around it compared to other CAM software. It turns solid
| geometry into low-poly mesh, and nothing is intuitive like
| Autodesk HSM.
| MCRayRay wrote:
| Jira. Its WYSIWYG editor is goddamn awful. Runner-up goes to its
| sibling product, Confluence, for the same reason.
| PhilipA wrote:
| It is amazing how bad Confluence is, and it still seems like
| the best choice for an internal wiki. I have been close to
| building one myself, but for now I have withhold.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Anything that includes WYSIWYG with no opt-out is shit. Slack
| also tried to pull off this crap but thankfully backtracked
| after the complaints.
| xellisx wrote:
| Slack needs a tweak to the message editing. Inline editing
| would be nice, instead of having it the new message area.
| tootie wrote:
| JIRA can do markdown.
| andrekandre wrote:
| its their own strsnge version of markdown though, which
| just adds to the flame of hatred imo
|
| if you were ever so unfortunate to have perfectly marked up
| content and previewed in the visual mode, only to save it
| and loose a ton of formatting (seems in visual mode the
| actual data source isnt the same as markup) upon save...
| ordu wrote:
| Android. Truly horrible platform where I cannot even find a clock
| app that just works. I mean there is one shipped with a phone,
| but it has inconvenient timer and I do not like how time
| selection is done -- a lots of movements to scroll numbers to
| find one I need, -- but I cannot configure it to my convenience
| and I cannot find another clock app that works.
|
| And all this "Google phone wants to have an access to calendar"
| after each call. I do not know why it needs an access to
| calendar, I'm not going to give it one, so just stop pecking me.
| But it will never stop, it seems.
|
| And a lots of useless stuff I cannot delete. I stopped it from
| popping up with stupid messages, but I cannot delete them. It
| seems that I will be forced to replace Android with PostmarketOS.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| The useless stuff, can you uninstall updates and disable?
| greggturkington wrote:
| > I do not like how time selection is done -- a lots of
| movements to scroll numbers to find one I need
|
| One of the worst things about iOS is the time picker. The
| numbers spin like a slot machine. I think Android nailed it in
| this specific app widget.
| johns wrote:
| I believe this has been redesigned in iOS 14.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| They just removed it in favor of the normal numeric keypad.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I zoom with my mom every week.
|
| Her old tablet cannot upgrade to newer android version, which
| prevented zoom from updating, and caused zoom to refuse to
| work.
|
| I bought her a new tablet. A friend set it up and was able to
| do a call. Everything was working. That was last week.
|
| Today, I spent 40 minutes on the phone with her because after
| boot the tablet was showing a black screen.
|
| No possibility for interaction.
|
| Eventually, after many reboots, she noticed some kind of google
| security warning which instructed her to swipe up. I had to
| train her to swipe up over the phone.
|
| We had the call, eventually, and I still have no idea what her
| tablet is asking of her.
| aasasd wrote:
| > _how time selection is done -- a lots of movements to scroll
| numbers to find one I need_
|
| That's the worst way to pick a time that I've seen and used. It
| requires a lot of swiping, combined with looking for the
| precise moment to stop the scrolling and not overshoot.
|
| Thankfully in some Android variants it's replaced with much
| better alternatives. Google Pixel's stock apps in Android 9 and
| 10 use a round watch face for time points--where you pick first
| the hour, then the minute with one tap each. However, this
| still requires rather precise finger work (and has animation in
| the middle). The best interface IMO is what Pixel and Philips'
| phones use in the timer: you just type the minute and the
| second (or the hour and the minute) in four digits, with a huge
| number pad on the screen. Philips did better here because its
| pad occupied most of the screen so the tap targets are larger.
| The benefit of this interface is that you easily develop muscle
| memory for it, practically no aiming is required.
|
| 'Simple Mobile Tools' make pretty good apps which are open-
| source and are present in F-Droid
| (https://www.simplemobiletools.com). Alas their 'Simple Clock'
| uses scroll spinners in the timer, but perhaps you could ask
| them to reconsider. I can help with screens from the better
| interfaces.
| aasasd wrote:
| What really annoys me about the timer is that there's no
| option for it to chime for ten seconds or so instead of
| making me fumble with it and press the button. Because I use
| the timer every day when cooking, and my hands are often busy
| and dirty--while I can hear the timer loud and clear
| (especially if I'm listening to audiobooks).
| djinnandtonic wrote:
| Google Drive.
|
| I have no idea how a company with a search background produced
| software where it is impossible to find something.
| bribri wrote:
| It's really hard to search by file extension...
| jacekm wrote:
| It took me years to realise that GDrive searches by file
| content by default instead of file name and that I need to
| prefix my search term with 'title:' to be able to find what I
| want. Now I just use their API to list all files in the
| terminal and then I just pipe it to `grep`. This way I can
| search using regular expressions.
| itskwanyall wrote:
| Same for me, I only realised about 5 seconds ago
| vlahmot wrote:
| You probably just saved me a good 15min/week! Never knew you
| could toss "title:" in there.
|
| Thank you!
| remus wrote:
| type: is another handy one if you know you're looking for a
| specific file type.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| TIL. Thank you!
| phenkdo wrote:
| Almost the entire G Suite (sheets, docs, slides) - except
| probably for gmail -sucks.
| tootie wrote:
| Everyone one of these cloud storage services (Dropbox, Box,
| Drive, iCloud, S3, OneDrive) has adopted the same mental model
| of file storage that computer systems from the 80s devised to
| mimic filing cabinets. Namely: folders. I think a folder
| hierarchy has some value but they should really all be using a
| tagging system instead. Orgs tend to have multiple hierarchies
| based or org charts, projects, disciplines, timelines. Being
| able to tag documents across all or multiple would make
| browsing to the right document less of a maze. And make search
| more accurate.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| S3 is a flat object store. It has no concept of folders or
| hierarchy.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Tagging is hard from UX perspective, this is why it does not
| exist yet. Tagging system is at the core of Windows Vista
| failure, the promise on which Microsoft has never delivered.
| thombles wrote:
| > iCloud
|
| Don't forget that Finder has customisable tags which sync
| perfectly across iCloud. They are a top-level browsing option
| on the iOS Files app. Probably you were thinking of something
| more tag-first but it does exist. :)
|
| Personally I really like the file/folder model because I can
| sync the whole caboodle to my hard drive, copy it to a USB
| backup, possibly transfer it to another operating system,
| knowing that I've captured the whole story.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| Except iCloud Drive file sync engine itself is not
| reliable, I lost so many edits and files in iCloud drive
| that I had to stop using it entirely and go back to rsync.
| omosubi wrote:
| I hate the tagging ux in gmail. I would consider it in Google
| drive but I doubt I'd like it there either
| nikisweeting wrote:
| I love tagging in Gmail, I use it extensively along with
| the important/not-important and all the different colored
| stars. It's allowed me to almost completely automate my
| email processing by bucketing everything into colored tags
| with auto-filters.
| techslave wrote:
| google drive isn't hierarchical and the folders are just a
| decoration
| joubert wrote:
| try cloudsearch.google.com
|
| It encompasses Drive, Mail, Calendar, etc.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Curious why?
|
| I rely almost exclusively on search within Drive and it works
| pretty flawlessly. What's the use case for you that's failing?
| wj wrote:
| Between Confluence, Salesforce, Azure portal, and Addepar, I am
| starting to wonder if I am the one that is insane in expecting
| web pages to load in under seven to ten seconds.
|
| Typing in Asana is painful as well.
| twblalock wrote:
| Webex.
| darksaints wrote:
| Airflow. Hard coupling to their own ecosystem, buggy as hell, and
| fully tied into Python's terrible dependency management, ensuring
| you will fail but only after you build an entire ecosystem onto
| it and will face a massive challenge moving away from it.
|
| Running it in a kubernetes cluster is basically like holding a
| marathon in a minefield. You know someone's gonna die, you just
| don't know when.
| billysielu wrote:
| Twitch for not moderating chat.
| martindbp wrote:
| Every tool I use and hold dear, apparently!
| that_girl wrote:
| Workday. Intentionally misleading design, discouraging anything
| any user wants to do in the portal. Absolutely unintuitive.
| rvz wrote:
| Desktop GNU/Linux.
|
| Too much of a cost to test for and to set up CIs for the distros
| I'm targeting. There is little to no paying users there because
| of the fragmentation. But again, "paid support" will have lots of
| choices, versions, combinations and edge cases to cover. So I
| listed it as "unsupported: use at your own risk."
|
| Windows and macOS have a much sainer desktop for GUI apps to test
| against.
| maxk42 wrote:
| You should give Cinnamon a shot next time you're looking at
| Linux GUIs.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| Except I use GNU/Linux precisely because what Windows/macOS
| offer is neither sane nor productive for me.
|
| I don't know why people insist that billions of people on this
| planet have to be satisfied with 3 interfaces but it doesn't
| work that way.
| literallycancer wrote:
| Are you using GNOME? Lots of problems just go away if you
| switch to something else.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I've been using xfce for years and love it. It has basic but
| sufficient tiling and it very scriptable. With autorandr and
| hook across, it recognises different monitor configurations and
| automatically sets up xfce panels, docks and keyboard layouts
| (ie: at work or at home, pc105 gb, and when it's just the Mac
| monitor on it's own, use gb mac layout).
| OliverJones wrote:
| Atlassian's Jira and Confluence. Why?
|
| Their search capability is just bad. To find something requires a
| lot of tries and tricks. I don't want to waste cognition because
| they re-invented the flat tire.
|
| Their inbrowser text editors are also just bad. On the level of
| WordPress three years ago. Markdown? no. Cut and paste from other
| apps? OK, if you remember to "Paste as Plain Text.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| > I don't want to waste cognition because they re-invented the
| flat tire.
|
| Fantastic metaphor. It just got fast-tracked into my personal
| lexicon.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Confluence... I was floored when I realized it can't support
| duplicate page names in separate page heirarchies.
|
| eg. You can't have a page called Engineering > Electrical >
| Test Procedure and another page called Engineering > Mechanical
| > Test Procedure, because the two "Test Procedure" pages are
| considered as occupying the same namespace.
| hinkley wrote:
| I worked on a Trac-based project long ago and I thought for
| sure when I moved on it would be to greener pastures. But it
| was simple and if you used it certain ways you could get a hell
| of a lot out of very little.
|
| Its biggest problem was that the parse and display code were
| entangled (same problem I had with AngularJS), and it made
| writing addons an exercise in re-implementing features of the
| parser over and over again. But I heard they fixed that quite a
| while ago.
| Finnucane wrote:
| https://www.virtusales.com/
| thinkingkong wrote:
| There's this software that one of my customers use called SAP
| Fieldglass. Fieldglass was a separate company and sold for $1B
| and it might be - and I'm not exaggerating - the worst software
| I've ever used, pretty much ever. But the reason is interesting.
| It's designed as enterprise compliance software and nobody enjoys
| using it. The enterprise managers hate it. The vendors hate it.
| The contractors hate it. The finance team hates it. I can't
| imagine anyone enjoyed _writing_ it. The UI is unintuitive and
| self-discovery is practically impossible. It 's so bad that
| companies have resorted to making Youtube videos on HOW to take
| repetitive actions inside the tool. The system is so anti-success
| that part of me wonders if this is done on purpose; to delay any
| kind of payments to vendors / etc.
|
| The best part is it doesn't _do_ anything itself. It's just a
| workflow system for dispatching operations to different systems
| and teams. It will create an invoice in an existing finance tool.
| It will issue a ticket to create a physical badge, etc.
|
| Anyway I think that's a massive opportunity, if that's what
| you're looking for.
| gimboland wrote:
| Oh god yeah -- fuck Fieldglass.
| billysielu wrote:
| Windows because of Windows Updates.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| Slack: their web UI is ridiculously slow, and I hate how it
| creates this expectation that I'm online 24/7.
|
| GitHub: we mainly use phabricator now at my day job (which I love
| love love), but I don't really derive any joy from using this
| product anymore. I think great tools are also fun to use, perhaps
| controversially. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I find
| GitHub sort of a drag for some reason.
|
| NodeJS: I absolutely hate dealing with node_modules. My node-
| based docker images are huge, and that's after a lot of hand-held
| optimizations.
|
| Additionally, we definitely avoid a lot of defects from using
| TypeScript, but its compile time is awful for large projects. I
| also don't particularly like the edges: often I'll hit odd typing
| inconsistencies from undocumented limitations of TS.
|
| After years of working in the JS ecosystem I sort of hate the
| complexity in general.
| why-el wrote:
| > and I hate how it creates this expectation that I'm online
| 24/7
|
| Can't you just log off after 5?
| rainyMammoth wrote:
| Sure you can, but that doesn't change the untold expectation.
| It puts the work on us to get away from it, and that is no
| easy!
| regularfry wrote:
| Only if you have your personal device signed in to your
| work slack, surely?
| ScottFree wrote:
| "we mainly use phabricator now at my day job (which I love love
| love)"
|
| What do you love about phabricator? It looks interesting, even
| if it is written in php. (just joking...)
| millimeterman wrote:
| Not OP, but I prefer the paradigm of phabricator diffs over
| GitHub PRs. It papers over git's inability to have unnamed
| branches and makes stacked diffs much easier. It also makes
| it easier to do "no branches, everything is on master"
| development, which I feel is superior whenever it's possible.
| cure wrote:
| > Slack: their web UI is ridiculously slow, and I hate how it
| creates this expectation that I'm online 24/7.
|
| Or 'little' annoyances like it being impossible to mute
| notifications on one device (say, your phone) and not another
| (say, your web browser).
| literallycancer wrote:
| Or having to go into every single room and its settings to
| mute @everyone.
| aasasd wrote:
| Toggl the time tracker somehow went to complete shit in terms of
| performance. Its workflow is great, the Mac app worked splendidly
| until the redesign of a couple years ago. The redesign changed
| nothing drastically, pretty much only polished things, but
| somehow everything became much slower and gets slower still.
| Doing _any single change_ requires you to wait. It feels like
| they do synchronous network requests on every action (which they
| quite possibly do, judging by the interaction with the mobile
| client). Sometimes CPU usage spins up too, for good measure. Even
| completion in text-dropdowns is hella laggy. Just switching to
| the app is often 'app is not responding' territory.
|
| It's productivity software that I need to touch every half-hour
| or so. Productivity software has to be _snappy_. Toggl is the
| opposite of snappy now.
|
| On top of that, the app forcibly updates itself and has no option
| to disable that--while I'm using Homebrew for all other updates.
| The Android app is also half-baked compared to the Mac one, which
| is no surprise by this point.
|
| Toggl's workflow fit me almost like a glove: no automagic
| guesswork, just manual entry and tracking of me being AFK. No
| alternative app has that same model, from what I've seen, and/or
| the interfaces are meh.
|
| Somewhat ironically, Toggl's client apps are open-source and I've
| cloned the desktop one right after seeing the redesign. But
| fiddling with them would likely require coming up with my own
| storage method. I might as well redo the app in Lua with Qt or
| whatnot, as Lua is hella fast--but the state of GUI libs for non-
| native languages fills me with endless dread.
| overcast wrote:
| Sysaid, Jira, the entire oracle software sphere of influence.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Office 365.
|
| Word processors and spreadsheets shouldn't be rocket science, but
| the updater seems to have been designed by Satan's "I wrote some
| Python in school once" nephew [1], and many versions [2] seem to
| have rather obvious UI bugs.
|
| Word still doesn't do some very basic things it should, and it
| probably never will now.
|
| [1] Updated recently. Still bad, but not quite as bad. The really
| hilarious part is that I also have updaters for various music
| packages from Arturia, NI, and so on, and _all_ of them are far
| more streamlined and professional.
|
| [2] The number does seem to be decreasing. But it's still higher
| than it should be.
| CM30 wrote:
| Either Adobe Target or VWO. Both have their upsides sure, but
| both are also an absolute quagmire of terrible design decisions
| that aren't consistent in the slightest, and that are prone to
| break an A/B test if you even look at them wrong.
|
| In Target's case, this means stuff like 'install a browser
| extension when our software doesn't work, so it can load the code
| that browser security settings will often block', and 'log in via
| an Incognito window if the editor doesn't work properly, since
| some setting is now incompatible with your current API version
| and the interface to disable said setting breaks along with the
| entire editor'.
| atq2119 wrote:
| The GitHub web UI. It's. So. Damn. Slow.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| Strange, I find it to be significantly faster & lighter than
| most other webapps I interact with daily. I think historically
| they've had a huge culture of using as little Javascript as
| possible, which I really appreciate.
| okasaki wrote:
| Firefox
| agustif wrote:
| Mac OS Big S __ _
| anonymoushn wrote:
| At a previous company, I used Google Hangouts Chat daily. This is
| a business-focussed chat app that takes seconds to load any
| change to the UI (e.g. changing the channel you are viewing). If
| you are atmentioned in a channel, there's no way to find out what
| message thread you were atmentioned in except by scrolling up
| until you see the highlighted text. Every message sent to a
| channel other than a reply to a thread creates a new thread, and
| threads are displayed sorted by most recently bumped, except that
| your messages do not bump threads on your UI. If you wanted to
| avoid all these things, you could use the API to make your own
| client, except that you can't, because there's no API.
| (Technically there is an API, but because it is designed only for
| making bots it is not allowed to do things like read messages
| from a channel you are in that do not atmention you)
|
| If I recall correctly, one of the company's public incident
| reports explicitly mentioned Google Hangouts Chat as a reason
| that the incident was not fixed much more quickly. I could not
| find this incident report when searching just now though.
|
| Edit: This product is apparently now called "Google Chat"
| js2 wrote:
| Slack. I've got two or three people DM'ing me, threads going in
| more than one channel, and four other channel's @here'ing me. So
| I mute all the channels except for when I'm directly @'d, but why
| isn't that the damn default. I can't view more than one
| conversation at a time because the stupid client is a single
| window that doesn't even have tabs.
|
| When I paste a link, I don't want it to attach what's at the link
| because that takes up like half the window.
|
| Lately the client has tried to auto-format things. Bulleted
| lists. Code. When I type ''' to start a code block, sometimes
| Slack automatically terminates the code block for me and sends my
| message before I'm done and sometimes not. I think you continue
| bulleted lists with the return key but code blocks with ctrl-
| return, I can't remember, it seems inconsistent though.
|
| Somehow the Slack client doesn't register for links to my
| company's slack domain so links to channels end up opening in my
| default browser then bouncing back to the client.
|
| God I hate Slack so fucking much.
|
| I want my IRC client back.
|
| Jira's not great either but I've never used a bug tracker that
| didn't suck in one way or another and it doesn't suck any better
| or worse than others. At least I can open issues in more than one
| browser window/tab.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Why can't I parallel multiple workspaces on one of many cheap
| monitors.
| eatmygodetia wrote:
| Emacs.
|
| It's such a mess, but nothing else comes close.
| klausjensen wrote:
| Slack - for being unstable (crashes frequently). We have very
| little noise, so it is only an interruption when somebody
| actively needs to interrupt me.
|
| Skype - an absolute trainwreck of instability and messages not
| syncing between devices. Always needs to update - and never
| improves. I only use it because it is still the de-factor
| standard for a lot of poeple.
| znpy wrote:
| Thank God I don't use lastpass anymore.
|
| It was ugly, confusing and slow as hell.
| gru wrote:
| Android OS on my Philips smart TV.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| Unless your answer is "ERP", you haven't actually seen how bad
| software UX can be.
| teddyc wrote:
| So true! They are either old and full of entrenched technical
| debt, or new and lacking functionality.
| jhot wrote:
| I work in "document capture" (OCR, data extraction, and process
| automation) and every ERP I've had to integrate with has been a
| terrible experience. I was on a screen share with a consultant
| for one trying to get my service about the correct permissions
| and he was scrolling through a list of, what seemed like, two
| hundred possible roles. Let's not even talk about the atrocity
| that is their rest API, but at least they have an API as many
| don't and require RPA (ewww) or similar to input data.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| ERP software is painful to use, I 100% agree with you there.
| But my bigger problem with it is that it encourages a culture
| of saying things like "streamline knowledge control
| documentation end-to-end conversion". Fuck that.
| [deleted]
| simantel wrote:
| Concur, ADP, and Workday are all really bad.
| tomashertus wrote:
| ADP is unbelievably bad. That's 2k software. I'm genuinely
| scared about their security and hate it that my most personal
| information are in a system like that.
| pnutjam wrote:
| I haven't supported ADP in at least a decade, but I figured
| it wasn't any better. I was astounded by how many SOP
| assumptions I had to throw out the window when setting it up.
|
| No, ADP does it this (incredibly stupid) way.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| IBM Clearcase
| eqtn wrote:
| Atlassian Jira. Its Slow.
| dilatedmind wrote:
| Gerrit
| arbuge wrote:
| I use a free desktop edition of Quickbooks from 2007 or so to
| keep my businesses' books. It's clunky but it works and there's
| no subscription fee.
| SamWhited wrote:
| I agree with the person that says "everything Atlassian", overall
| it's probably not the worst, but the Confluence WYSIWYG editor
| has to be one of the most irritating pieces of junk I've ever
| used. Literally nothing it does is predictable.
|
| Similarly, whomever said Signal has a good point... it never
| manages to download MMSs for me (which isn't its fault, signal is
| bad in my house), but it alerts me anyways so I get a stupid
| "this couldn't be downloaded message" that I have to be
| distracted by instead of only notifying me when I move into a
| place where I have good enough signal to download it. It also
| then says "tap here to retry" but does nothing when I do so (not
| even an indication that it's working or that I tapped it). Aside
| from the annoying notifications about messages I can't even read,
| it tries to make you spread it to your friends and you have to
| manually close the stupid "Tell this person about signal" thing
| for _every_ _single_ _person_ you open a chat with. I had to just
| go back to another SMS app and lose the ability to use their
| protocol.
|
| The worst though for me is probably pulseaudio (still, after all
| these years, even though it's gotten a ton better). People
| knowledgeable about it love to tell me that it's obviously a
| configuration problem on my part, but every time I start my
| computer something else is wrong. Every time I plug in my midi
| controller and start up a synth I have no idea if it will work or
| not, but it also fails in a different way almost every time. If I
| turn on a bluetooth device, the device itself mostly connects
| fine, but then how the audio is routed just seems random. That
| one works most of the time, but not always, and if I turn the
| device off my audio settings sometimes go back to whatever they
| were before, but sometimes I randomly find I no longer have a
| microphone, etc. everything about it just feels bad.
| hvass wrote:
| I do not use it every day, but I've found the most difficult to
| be hands down DocuSign.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| All calendar and todo list applications, on desktop, on mobile
| and in cloud.
| mike50 wrote:
| Java browser based document management system.
| ceronman wrote:
| Workplace from Facebook.
|
| The company I work for uses this for internal communication.
| Workplace is basically the same Facebook and Messenger, but
| tweaked for a private group of people.
|
| The problem is that, because this is basically the same Facebook,
| it is designed to keep you "engaged". It uses all kinds of
| patterns to keep you addicted to your timeline and search for
| attention. Rather keeping you informed with the important topics,
| it distracts you with a lot of irrelevant stuff. The algorithm
| will always show you something that keeps you scrolling. Huge
| time waste.
|
| The motto of this software is "Bring your company together". And
| it works exactly as Facebook's motto, "Bring the world closer
| together", in the sense that it does exactly the opposite. The
| software has all sorts of mechanisms to generate controversy.
| Because controversy is what ultimately drives more engagement.
| Reactions, memes, notifications. It makes you fight with your
| colleagues about silly things, and it makes it really easy to
| derail any sort of constructive conversation.
|
| Imagine having to try a technical conversation in this platform
| and then people are allowed to "react" with an angry face or a
| silly animated GIF. No argumentation required. And those
| reactions will bring more reactions. And in those rare cases when
| some meaningful discussion actually happens, then the thread is
| quickly buried by the constant stream of new things.
|
| If your company is considering this, avoid it like the plague.
| sawyerjhood wrote:
| +1 to this. I worked at FB for a few years and Workplace is
| just Facebook re-skinned. My big gripe with Workplace is
| similar to what ceronman says, it is essentially engineered to
| create meta-work. People end up using it to self-promote every
| little thing that they do to get visibility and this leads to
| it being incredibly noisy and really filled with information
| that isn't relevant and important things get buried under all
| of the filler. The only real upside to workplace is that I
| think it is better for Q/A groups than something like Slack is,
| at least for larger companies.
| antipaul wrote:
| The new google chat
|
| No new user, and rarely an experienced one, starts a new thread.
| Every reply just builds on the original.
|
| All this even when the new thread button is _right in front of
| you_. But the design is so terrible I don't blame people for
| missing it.
|
| (On a separate note, I see no Apple products in main threads. I
| see a few google ones, Microsoft, Amazon (AWS) and Facebook
| (workplace))
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Docker.
|
| I use it and love it every day in both dev and prod, but I also
| really kind of hate it.
|
| I'll keep my complaints short.
|
| There should not be a system-wide daemon. (Or any daemon).
|
| It should not require root at all (no setuid either).
|
| From outside the container, the container and its processes
| should be a single process (with threads). (Like glueing a bunch
| of processes together.)
|
| The containers should be nest-able to arbitrary depth without
| performance loss (at least to say, hundreds of nestings deep.)
|
| Docker-compose should not exist, instead it should be replaced by
| nesting of containers.
|
| Basically, I think it needs to follow the UNIX philosophy better
| by providing simple abstractions that can be combined easily. The
| containers would visually look a bit more like an old virtual
| machine (single process) than our current containers.
|
| These changes probably require a bunch of kernel hacking, but I
| think it would be worth it long-term for a cleaner architecture.
|
| It appears there are some movements into this direction thanks to
| podman, but it's really not there yet, especially with nesting.
|
| Also, it wouldn't really be a product at all but just a built-in
| tool on Linux systems.
| GordonS wrote:
| I agree about the daemon. Podman is a daemonless alternative,
| though I've never used it myself.
|
| Strongly disagree about Docker Compose though - I actually
| really like the ability to compose a stack of different
| containers together with some simple yaml.
| mceachen wrote:
| I enjoyed docker compose as well (enough to use it for
| PhotoStructure), but was bit by breaking changes even when I
| had specified a version in my docker-compose.yml.
|
| It meant that a bunch of my beta users suddenly had broken
| PhotoStructure configurations because their docker-compose
| implementation had received a minor update. Why require a
| version to your configuration file and not increment it on
| breaking changes?
|
| I ended up tearing out the script that helped people create
| their own docker-compose.yml file, and replaced the
| installation instructions with an annotated call to `docker
| run`.
|
| And don't get me started on how janky it is to update
| existing containers to new images without docker-compose:
| there seems to only be one third-party tool to assist with
| this automatically (lighthouse), but is essentially
| abandoned. I'd love to be wrong about this, please point me
| to other solutions if they exist!
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I use watchtower with docker compose and the update is
| seamless.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| You'd still be able to compose a bunch of containers
| together, but it would result in a new, single container due
| to nesting.
|
| It could even be compatible with docker-compose and it's
| yaml.
| fsociety wrote:
| Haven't used Podman in production but at home it's a huge
| improvement over Docker and enjoyable to use
| pbar wrote:
| The reality is that containers via `runc` really _are_ just
| bundles of processes with some sugar to control Linux
| namespaces. Using another runtime (kata, etc) would get closer
| to the tighter abstraction you mention, but it would truly be a
| VM, just a small one.
| baddox wrote:
| Docker is also essentially completely broken on MacOS and has
| been for years. The performance penalty on anything doing I/O
| is like 5x, and it tends to completely hammer my CPU. There are
| tons of internet discussions, so it appears to not be just me.
| wadkar wrote:
| I thought those were (partially?) addressed (or still
| ongoing?) with the use of bhyve/xhvye?
| znpy wrote:
| That's MacOS' fault, in fairness. MacOS does not support
| containers or the Linux abi in general so you're forced to
| run docker containers in a Linux VM, with all the CPU and I/O
| penalties.
| the8472 wrote:
| If it's a docker problem maybe you're running it with the vfs
| storage driver which copies every layer every time instead of
| using overlayfs? If not then it may be a problem with the
| virtualization solution, not docker itself. VM overhead
| shouldn't be 5x, not even for IO. Unless you're trying to
| mount parts of the host filesystem, that's slow with pretty
| much any virtualization solution, perhaps barring virtio-fs,
| but that's probably not supports on osx
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Isn't that inherent because Docker _needs_ a Linux kernel, so
| running it on Darwin has a hard requirement on virtualization
| and running an entire guest operating system?
| jlokier wrote:
| Virtualization and even running a guest kernel and OS isn't
| 5x expensive on the CPU, so the problem is not
| virtualization _per se_.
|
| Perhaps the problem is Darwin.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I know it's not bad on CPU, but I thought it took more of
| a hit on I/O? Granted, I suspect that some of this is
| indeed some issue with Darwin itself, or at least poor
| integration with it.
| jlokier wrote:
| I agree, I/O can be pretty expensive.
|
| It depends quite a lot on the kind of I/O and how it's
| implemented, so design choices matter.
|
| If there's a full Linux kernel inside the VM, then you
| may as well do I/O inside the VM as well, using something
| like virtio and a ringbuffer of async block device
| commands to the host, or at least batching them. That
| will be quicker than relaying every POSIX file operation
| synchronously to the host, because the number of VM exits
| is much lower in the former case.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| I like docker-compose so much that I'd use it even if the
| underlying containerization technology didn't exist. I think
| it's one of the things they got most right, and I wish there
| was a bigger ecosystem around managing compose-based projects.
| heliosfire wrote:
| Some good stuff here, however... Strong disagree on compose. I
| think it's amazing.
| hinkley wrote:
| I feel like the Dockerfile format was very tight and simple to
| use, and the tools somewhat usable, but over time they keep
| bolting things onto it by committee. It is better than git, but
| that's pretty faint praise.
|
| When I'm staring at the worst of it (unsticking myself or
| worse, trying to explain why it's like this to a coworker who
| is stuck), I keep thinking that there's a standard for making
| these containers, won't someone get around to rewriting the
| user-facing bits with the modern requirements designed in from
| the start?
|
| But it's good enough, so we are probably stuck with it until
| someone comes up with a better idea to base application
| compartmentalization upon. Like an OS that actually does what I
| was promised 25 years ago and am still waiting for.
| alhirzel wrote:
| Give Singularity a look
| walleeee wrote:
| Yep. Doesn't have a daemon or require root.
| kuiro5 wrote:
| Strongly agree about this. Docker is conceptually on the right
| track, but it's fundamentally the wrong abstraction.
| still_grokking wrote:
| Even I would like to tune in to Docker bashing (in this case
| one can actually say with confidence: "Hitler was right"[1])
| the fundamental architectural problem is on the OS side.
|
| UNIX, and especially Linux, is a monolithic design. Even such
| an OS is able to separate user processes form each other all
| _system parts_ run by concept in the form of a "big ball of
| mud", with "god-like" capabilities available to them by
| default. Sure, some internal "barriers" have been added, and
| per process capability dropping has been retrofitted, but
| this is backwards form the architectural point of view.
| Cutting things in peaces after the fact is almost always way
| more complicated and awkward compared to designing things in
| a modular way form the get go.
|
| This is related as virtualizing a modular OS is almost a no-
| brainer (conceptually). You just need to start additional
| instances of the required system servers / modules /
| whatever-you-call-that-parts. Compared to that virtualizing a
| monolith is like trying to construct a kind of Ouroboros: It
| needs to run itself (with an altered, usually constrained
| view on the 'outside' world) _from inside_ of itself; and it
| can 't just globally drop the "god-like capabilities" its
| execution context provides--like it would be possible with an
| external process. It needs to "hide or manipulate things in
| front of its own eyes" even "it" has the "all seeing eye". Or
| to put it even more metaphorical: "A God tries to use his
| divine powers to constrain his omnipotence so he can lie to
| himself about the things he sees, without himself ever being
| able to look through this jugglery". Formulated like that the
| architectural issue is obvious, I guess.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PivpCKEiQOQ , and I just
| learned it seems he was also a Kubernetes fan. :-)
| regularfry wrote:
| I was thinking through how you might do this, and my brain
| dredged up User-Mode Linux. A UML wrapper around those docker
| containers would behave almost exactly like you describe. You
| should (if I remember correctly) be able to nest them, too.
|
| I'm pretty sure this is doable today. It's a monstrous hack,
| and I've got no idea what the performance overheads would look
| like, but as a way of hiding a mess behind a clean facade, I'm
| not aware of any reason it shouldn't work.
| ypcx wrote:
| For me one of the worst were Docker for Desktop on both Mac and
| Windows, especially when used for local Kubernetes. I fixed
| this with a project running Kubernetes directly on a local
| virtual machine(s) and local Docker (without polluting the
| machine with Docker for Desktop) is a bonus that comes with
| that[1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/youurayy/hyperctl
| rikroots wrote:
| When Docker for Desktop came out, I refused to move from
| Docker Toolbox. My reasoning was probably illogical but my
| view was that if you're maintaining a number of projects,
| each of which runs in their own Docker environment and some
| of which had duplicate container names, then having the power
| to start/stop different Docker engines for each just made a
| lot more sense to me.
|
| I don't miss Docker.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| I agree except for compose. I actually like compose and how
| simple it is, but am curious about container nesting. Could you
| elaborate? How would dependencies work there for example?
| the8472 wrote:
| > It should not require root at all (no setuid either).
|
| The only thing that really needs setuid are network namespaces
| to setup the bridges. Userspace workarounds are clunky and
| slow. If you can do without network isolation then this would
| be possible.
|
| > The containers should be nest-able to arbitrary depth without
| performance loss (at least to say, hundreds of nestings deep.)
|
| Multiple levels of nesting are ppossible if you disable
| seccomp. I don't know if it scales to hundreds though.
| Overlayfs has hard limits and btrfs snapeshots don't scale
| infinitely either.
|
| > Also, it wouldn't really be a product at all but just a
| built-in tool on Linux systems.
|
| Well, there's systemd-nspawn and machinectl
| btilly wrote:
| If you want more complaints, and well informed ones at that,
| read https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/containers-future-ian-
| eyberg/.
|
| I particularly love the quote, _The kernel developers view of
| the docker community is that in the rare case they can actually
| formulate the question correctly they usually don 't understand
| the answer._
|
| There is only so much that you can say to clarify things to
| someone who is thinking about everything wrong and doesn't
| realize it. :-(
| aloer wrote:
| That article seems overly critical about young developers
| _that don 't know it any better_ because they grew up on
| containers.
|
| I guess I am one of those so I got to ask, is the proposed
| solution of unikernels something we had before but lost in
| favor of containers, or is it something completely new
| anyways?
|
| It does look like it might be the latter so why blame
| developers for using containers due to lack of choice? If
| unikernels are better and just as easy to use then I am sure
| people will convert.
|
| He blames a lot on marketing and marketing lies but his
| company (https://nanovms.com/) seems to make it just as hard
| to figure out what's going on with the apparently only option
| being a _schedule a demo_ button.
|
| Come on, I remember Docker being that fancy new thing that
| people at university taught themselves and to each other
| around ~2014/2015. That hype was well deserved and if you
| want to compete with that you can't just decide to brush it
| off as wrong and misguided.
|
| At the risk of pointing out that I also might be one of those
| that the quote above is referring to, I gotta ask:
|
| Is there a technical reason why I shouldn't be able to
| eventually just replace Docker with a micro or unikernel?
| Same or similar style of image definition, completely
| different runtime technology?
|
| Isn't it up to the kernel and platform developers to build
| the tools to make that happen comfortably for all of us naive
| container users?
| breatheoften wrote:
| Interesting thread.
|
| Is there a microvm that can run chromium with puppeteer?
|
| I've been thinking that server side chromium might actually
| turn into a pretty badass application server platform ...
| security, async, remote debug, webasm for cross platform
| secure binaries ...
|
| Some efficient infrastructure for deploying is needed -- but
| should be far easier to create a fast server runtime for
| puppeteer+chromium than it is to create a generic container
| execution environment ... -- so the microvm approach seems
| like the right one for what i want ...
| reichardt wrote:
| Something like https://workers.cloudflare.com/ ?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| You might want to check out Flockport:
| https://thenewstack.io/flockport-time-to-start-all-over-agai...
|
| They're trying to use built-in Linux LXC container features.
| RyJones wrote:
| Expensify
| a_zaydak wrote:
| Windows 10 Home: Ignoring all of the typical complaints about
| windows like bloat wear and Cortana... I would be happy is just
| basic things worked. For example, I often have to switch between
| wireless networks for my job and the wifi icon in the bottom tray
| just randomly disappears about 80% of the time so I have to go
| through the full settings menu to get to it. Also, searching for
| applications or documents from the search bar will also search
| the internet?? I could go on forever.
| was8309 wrote:
| I'll second Windows 10 home. Focus changes from the app I'm
| working on to Windows itself - but the screen still shows that
| the app I was working on. I hit Alt+F4 to close the app (that
| I'm seeing and so think still has focus) and get the Windows
| Shutdown prompt.
| peteri wrote:
| Right click on the taskbar, select taskbar settings. Scroll
| down to notification area, click on "select which icons appear
| on taskbar" then turn on show all notification icons in the
| taskbar.
|
| Should at least mean it's always there.
| benjaminsuch wrote:
| macOS
|
| I have a very bad UX. It's small annoying issues, like minimizing
| a window. If you don't explicitly minimize the window and open
| another program, the other window is hidden. Where is it? How can
| I open it? Yes by minimizing every window until I have found
| mine. For applications, this is not that bad, since you have the
| dock and just click on the icon to reopen your window, but what
| happens if you have several windows open of that app? It's a
| nightmare.
|
| I could write a whole list of toxic UX in macOS.
| jamesvandyne wrote:
| While the UI UX in macOS has degraded a bit, minimizing windows
| you're not using as the main way to manage a desktop is, I
| think, a Windows habit.
|
| macOS works much better if you manage windows with hiding,
| rather than minimizing. Once you get the hang of it, with cmd-h
| (hide), cmd-tab (switch applications), and cmd-' (iterate
| windows of an application) I (almost) never leave the keyboard
| and can get right to the window I need quickly.
| Razengan wrote:
| I find macOS to be much more pleasant than Windows.
|
| > _If you don 't explicitly minimize the window and open
| another program, the other window is hidden. Where is it? How
| can I open it? Yes by minimizing every window until I have
| found mine._
|
| I don't understand exactly what you mean.
|
| > _what happens if you have several windows open of that app?_
|
| One of these:
|
| * Right-click/Control-click on the Dock icon
|
| * Check the Windows menu of the app. Minimized windows will
| have a Diamond
|
| * Press F3 to open Mission Control.
|
| * Press Control+F3 to see all windows of the currently focused
| app.
|
| * Press Alt+F3 to open Mission Control settings and configure
| them to your liking, along with setting Hot Corners for showing
| application windows etc.
|
| * If you "Group windows by application" and have a mouse with a
| scroll wheel, you can use scroll the wheel when hovering over
| an app's window, to "spread" that windows stack.
|
| * Press Option+Command+H to hide (not minimize) all windows
| except the active app.
| hacker_newz wrote:
| When you minimize an app and switch to another, it
| disappears. Even if you alt-tab back to the app it remains
| hidden. It's ridiculous.
| tylerwince wrote:
| The Google Productivity Suite (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Mail) apps
| for iPadOS.
| EmmEff wrote:
| I really haven't had a positive experience with Microsoft Teams
| eu wrote:
| Lawson, but thankfully only a few times a month.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Managed Workplace. It is an RMM tool so it does monitoring,
| automation, and facilitates remote access to client environments.
|
| - Loading up the client list takes forever ~15 seconds
|
| - Loading up the asset list for a given client takes even longer.
|
| - Remote access is hidden behind a 2 layer context menu
|
| - All URLs are dynamic so you cannot bookmark your favorite
| assets / jump boxes. I use a selenium script to automate the page
| navigation because it can take ~5 minutes to get to an asset by
| name due to a combination of needing too many page loads and not
| being able to just start from the search page.
|
| - Terminal experience is way worse than putty. Output formatting
| is always jacked up and a command takes ~5 seconds to return
| output.
|
| - RDP all goes through a relay and your connections will just die
| occasionally.
|
| - 90% of my work interacts with it in some way.
|
| BUT it makes pretty reports for management so we are stuck with
| it. I demo'd some alternatives like apache guacamole or remote
| desktop services but the consensus was that we didn't want to
| take on the risk + we are already paying for a product that
| "works".
| api wrote:
| Jira: slow, confusing, ugly, but then again most of its
| competitors suck too. All ticketing and PM systems suck.
|
| Xcode: don't use it every day but damn it is unnecessarily weird
| and unintuitive. It's clearly something designed for the people
| who know it and nobody else.
|
| Mac Mail, but unfortunately the alternatives suck too and I hate
| web mail.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Windows file explorer
|
| OSX file explorer
|
| Both are unavoidable and horrible.
|
| Where did I save that file? What was it named? Where did that
| piece of software save its file without asking me? Do I have to
| click 10 levels deep to find a file?
|
| Yes, it is a human problem, too, but maybe make things a bit
| easier for humans? I know johnny.decimal exists but good luck
| getting people to use it.
|
| Pretty much any email client And email as a primary mode of
| business communication. Who said what in which message, then
| changed their mind as an aside in an unrelated email thread and
| where's my source of truth about anything? People use their email
| like a chat sorted by most recent.
|
| My mom uses zoom on android tablet and every time I call her I
| spend 25 min on the phone trying to guide you through to
| initiating or receiving a meeting
|
| I paid $300 for capture one but can't use it because I can't
| figure out where it puts my images and why.
| kahlonel wrote:
| Slack
| rightisleft wrote:
| agreed - it's a massive cpu hog for a basic chat client... it
| excels primarily at turning my macbook into a toaster
| xellisx wrote:
| There are a couple issues I have with slack. Threads and
| message editing.
| ypcx wrote:
| I only use the web version. The native version is a resource
| hog (or was, when I last tried to use it).
|
| The network connection quality on Slack calls seems to be very
| lacking compared to other call apps.
| errantspark wrote:
| How is it possible that I have to spend perceptible amounts of
| time to search/view logs? I didn't ever have this problem in
| the 90's or 00's.
| Bradlinc wrote:
| I second this
| behnamoh wrote:
| I third this
| klysm wrote:
| I would consider you fairly fortunate if slack is the worst
| piece of software you use.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| This one burns. Slack is excellent in so many ways, but it
| really wants to become a noise machine that drowns you in
| alerts and simultaneous demands for your attention.
| xellisx wrote:
| You can snooze channels.
| milkers wrote:
| Evernote, Spotify, Netflix
|
| I am gradually migrating to Notion instead of Evernote but I am
| stuck with the other two.
| ScottFree wrote:
| I switched from Evernote to Notion 6 months ago. Their block-
| based editing system drives me up the wall. But, they really
| nailed their media integration in a way nobody else has, so I
| continue to use it.
| Havoc wrote:
| Twitter iphone app.
|
| The home screen stream is this weird mix of people you follow,
| suggested streams, things your followed people liked and ads.
|
| Each swipe down involves "OK I'm looking at something here it's a
| surprise...what is it..an ad? someone I follow? Some other
| gibberish?".
|
| I can totally understand why people just delete the app. It's
| worse than FB imo - which is setting the bar really high already
| treebornfrog wrote:
| Try using fenix, it's a fantastic mobile twitter client.
| c6401 wrote:
| Sorry jira but it's you
| disposekinetics wrote:
| Jira
| tylerwince wrote:
| I almost said this, but... Jira is bad, but it's definitely not
| the worst (in my experience).
|
| It's close though.
| nikivi wrote:
| Don't get how people still use Jira. Linear is great
| https://linear.app
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| That's an easy one to answer. They don't support Linux or
| Windows yet.
| nikivi wrote:
| It works inside web browser
| [deleted]
| detaro wrote:
| SaaS-only is a pretty big difference alone.
| colinbartlett wrote:
| Has anyone here ever met anyone who loves Jira?
| holler wrote:
| love is a strong word, but when Jira is configured well, it
| can be a boon to productivity
| EsotericAlgo wrote:
| The Oracle eBusiness Suite. Specifically, iProcurement.
| phreack wrote:
| Whatsapp, absolutely. Every single night it does a forced backup
| of everything that I do not want and hangs for about 10 minutes.
|
| And if it fails for reasons such as storage getting full, it gets
| corrupted and then it's half an hour until it restores an old
| backup, losing the day's messages. And it also stores a week of
| backups, so that's 7x of the size which on many phones is
| untenable.
|
| And this can't be turned off! I hate it with a passion but
| literally everyone I know is on it. There's even no way to hide a
| conversation from view without blocking it forever.
|
| Awful.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| macOS Finder and how every sane alternative costs serious money.
| fortran77 wrote:
| iTunes
| brundolf wrote:
| It used to be Jira. Thankfully my current company doesn't use it.
| Now it's probably DBeaver, which is hard to complain about
| because it's free and full-featured, but it has one of the worst
| user experiences I've ever encountered.
| artembugara wrote:
| Have you ever worked with SAP?
| darcys22 wrote:
| Agreed, accounting software in general is pretty disappointing.
|
| Thats why i started building my own open source system.
|
| https://godbledger.com/
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Your software isn't any better. In many ways, it's far worse
| than SAP or Oracle/Netsuite, since it doesn't even provide a
| UI (and the issues most people have with SAP and Oracle is
| _how_ their custom UI was configured. It can be as painful or
| as painless as your Integrations team makes it.)
| GordonS wrote:
| SAP was the one that first popped into my head, quickly
| followed by Teams.
|
| The SAP UI and UX are utterly ghastly - tiny buttons
| everywhere, hundreds of options, menus and pathways at every
| screen, and slow on top. It's just horrible to use. Even stuff
| like printing is ridiculously complex, way more than in a
| standard Windows app.
|
| It gets a bit more bearable once you're familiar with whatever
| your area is - for example, you can type in a cryptic code to
| jump straight to the screen you want, and you eventually learn
| to somehow ignore the dozens of UI elements you don't need and
| focus on those you do.
|
| On the dev side, you need to use ABAP, which is absolutely
| horrible - consultants can make a lot of money tho.
|
| I should add as well, I've never used SAP HANA, so that might
| be more bearable.
| gradschool wrote:
| The Intel Management Engine (IME).
|
| The most oppressive piece of software ever written makes suckers
| out of all of us. No amount of campaigning to Intel cuts any ice.
| Nobody is big enough or powerful enough to get rid of it.
| fsflover wrote:
| Exactly. Everyone is using it without realizing. More info:
| https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel
| dkersten wrote:
| I actually very strongly dislike using slack.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Mac OS X. Apple keeps going out of its way to make life harder
| for power users, even though the non-power-users are increasingly
| moving to iOS/Android/ChromeOS anyway.
| Razengan wrote:
| If websites count: YouTube.
|
| It's appalling how such a powerful company can keep so many
| things so bad for so long.
| PostPlummer wrote:
| Straight from the heart! Only yesterday I rented my first ever
| item on YT. An English movie, found with an English search
| query.
|
| "Based on my location" they gave me a French dubbed version of
| it. No alternative sound track, heck not even subtitles.
|
| I live in Switzerland, we have 4 official languages. I speak
| one of them: German. Not a word French. The proposed solution:
| go to apple and ask for your money back. Very poor experience.
|
| Do not even get me going on the "want to use Premium for a
| month"? I've declined that offer at least 48 times. Did not
| want it then, do not want it today. Really a pity since there
| is a lot of cool (not sponsored or monitized) content.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Man, use ad blockers!
| untog wrote:
| Easier said than done if you're watching YouTube on, say, a
| Smart TV.
|
| Personally I'm very content with my Google Play Music
| subscription that also includes YouTube Premium. The music
| service is no different than Spotify (for me, at least) and
| I also get ad-free YouTube on all platforms.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| > I live in Switzerland, we have 4 official languages. I
| speak one of them: German.
|
| What about English? Your post seems to be perfectly idiomatic
| (for this kind of forum) English.
|
| Edit: This is very embarrassing. I had thought English was
| one of the four official languages.
| new2628 wrote:
| I understood it just to mean that they speak only one of
| the four (and plus an unspecified number of other
| languages).
| tootie wrote:
| I assume you mean to ask Google for your money back?
|
| It's funny because I have a client right now asking for some
| advice on how to design a localizable website that can guess
| default language and I'm realizing that no one has really
| solved this very well.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _localizable website that can guess default language and
| I 'm realizing that no one has really solved this very
| well._
|
| The first and most important step is to offer a very very
| big option up front and center for reverting to English.
|
| This is an extremely annoying thing when traveling.
| tootie wrote:
| I've been trying to not assume an Anglo-centric audience,
| but it seems like this is a popular choice. Almost every
| major international site, just has English or region-
| specific English as the fallback.
| kortilla wrote:
| Some little British or US flag in the corner works well
| in my euro experience. I learned to look for that pretty
| quickly spending time in Austria/Germany.
| CM30 wrote:
| Or just a menu that lets them choose their language right
| there on the page somewhere. If you can automatically
| redirect someone based on their browser language, then
| you can add a menu with some language names and flag
| icons next to them too.
|
| Either way, it must like rule 1 of UI design; even if you
| think you know better than your user does, let them
| override that choice when you get it wrong.
| afiori wrote:
| Personally it is a problem that I want to be left unsolved
| :)
|
| Or rather the solution I would like is rarely used, I have
| only found it on some Amazon sites, where you can freely
| choose the country-level localization (via the domain) and
| the language-level localization (via a menu) independently.
|
| It was an happy day when I was able to browse the German
| Amazon in English.
| kortilla wrote:
| What's wrong with honoring the language sent by the
| browser?
| mg794613 wrote:
| Don't. I mean it. It's the same things with assuming
| patterns about names or addresses. A lot of people work
| abroad. Choosing the language yourself _is not a problem
| that needs 'solving'_
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's funny because I have a client right now asking for
| some advice on how to design a localizable website that can
| guess default language and I'm realizing that no one has
| really solved this very well.
|
| Really? How about "guessing" that the client's language
| preferences are those expressed in the Accept-Language
| request header?
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| I will say that paying for YouTube premium is worth for me. I
| hate ads so much.
| ColanR wrote:
| Ublock Origin would save you the ads.
| errantspark wrote:
| No amount of paying for things beats the experience of a
| decent ad-blocker.
| Kliment wrote:
| Use invidious instead. It's a frontend to youtube without the
| bullshit. Not all videos work (only the ones that allow
| embedding) but most do. I've got my browser to redirect all
| youtube.com URLs to invidious and all twitter URLs to nitter
| and it's made an enormous difference. Experiencing software
| that works for you and not against you is a remarkable feeling.
| chrisdalke wrote:
| The UI is bad, but the most frustrating aspect of YouTube is
| the continuous struggle between creators and the automatic
| copyright strike system. Nearly every single large YouTuber
| I've subscribed to has had some experience with a false
| copyright claim interfering with their platform at one point.
|
| It feels like YouTube actively doesn't want creators to grow a
| community on their platform.
| afiori wrote:
| YouTube is between a rock and an hard place, on one side
| creators expect it to be a reasonable platform on the other
| side legacy media will attack it with a viciousness
| proportional to how much it is not a shitty place for
| creators.
|
| Until they stop siding against the creators they will never
| escape from it.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| It must be tough for a struggling startup like Google to
| afford lawyers. With their free cashflow they barely spring
| for 100,000 or so.
| holler wrote:
| some years ago before youtube was googlfied, they had a
| different UI that I was fond of. Then google did a full
| makeover and degraded the experience.
| charlieegan3 wrote:
| I'm not sure it's the worst but I continually find myself
| frustrated by how sluggish slack feels.
|
| Even with the new UI it still seems strange that the site is so
| slow vs others I have to use.
| awinder wrote:
| I work for a financial firm and we, for good or arguably good
| enough reasons, use symphony messenger. Sections of the company
| need something like it for compliance features. But it's a real
| dreadful application, I'd love to have slack or teams-level
| things to complain about it but it's much more fundamentally a
| drag.
| TekMol wrote:
| Android
|
| I have a computer in my pocket but I am not allowed to do even
| the most basic stuff I would like to do with it. Like using a
| shell to work on my files, use git for version control and to
| sync to other machines, use vim to edit text ... the list goes on
| forever. Heck, I cannot even easily backup all of my data. Like
| the contacts for example. No way to read the files in which they
| are stored.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| > Like using a shell to work on my files
|
| As others have mentioned, Termux is Free and Open-Source. You
| mentioned trust, but considering Termux is already open source,
| I'm not sure how the author could gain your trust.
|
| > use git for version control and to sync to other machines
|
| You got me with git, but Syncthing might solve the same problem
| for #2 - there's a FLOSS client available on F-Droid as well :)
|
| > use vim to edit text
|
| I'd assume Termux has a vim package, meaning you can stay open
| source for the entire stack. If it doesn't, then my mistake.
|
| > I cannot even easily backup all my data. Like the contacts
|
| Ignoring using a carddav server for to have them backed up all
| the time, you can easily back them all up in vcard format via
| Simple Contacts - an open source app availble on F-Droid.
|
| Hell, for the most part you can completely disable whatever you
| want, root or no. ADB can disable everything you don't want to
| run, including all the way down to Google Play Services. I can
| verify that, as I've done it myself on my BlackBerry KeyOne.
|
| It (mostly) can all be done, it just takes a little bit of
| looking. Like anything else with modern computing, the fun
| stuff is hidden away, and all we're presented with is the
| glossiest interface the OEM can shove in front of us.
|
| If there's anything that actually cannot be done via FLOSS
| software, I'd honestly love to hear it, because I'm drawing a
| blank at the moment.
| conradev wrote:
| Do you actually want to do those things on the go without a
| full size keyboard?
| ScottFree wrote:
| Sysadmins do.
| [deleted]
| chopraaa wrote:
| Not sure if you're joking or just ignorant. The computer in
| your pocket is not made to do any of that, similar to how the
| computer on your desk is not meant to make phone calls or count
| how many steps you've walked or tell you that there's a car
| accident 500 meters ahead.
| yeah986 wrote:
| i think what he meant was that it would be easy for it to do
| these things, but Android doesn't let you do them.
| johnpaulkiser wrote:
| Hi, we try to be neutral or friendly here on hn.
| yewenjie wrote:
| You can work on a shell, (and even have a full GNU/Linux
| installation) with all standard tools using Termux.
|
| Also, rooting your phone gives you access to all files, but I
| understand it's not everyone's cup of tea.
| TekMol wrote:
| The question is how trustworthy you consider the guy who made
| termux. And if you would trust them to have full power over
| your operating system. I prefer more popular and proven
| providers like Debian.
|
| With rooting it is similar. You usually give full control
| over your machine to "someone from the internet" who provides
| you with the root mechanism.
| jolmg wrote:
| > The question is how trustworthy you consider the guy who
| made termux.
|
| Termux is open source. I fully agree with you on the one
| that provides the rooting mechanism, as I believe that's
| normally closed source.
| TekMol wrote:
| > Termux is open source
|
| Good luck on reading and vetting all that code.
|
| And then installing Android Studio (It is a beast!) to
| compile the code into an APK.
|
| And don't forget to repeat the two steps every time there
| is an update.
| aiisahik wrote:
| Classic example of why companies need product managers to
| decide what problems to solve instead of leaving it up to the
| sysadmin.
| lazyjones wrote:
| I don't use or condone Android (it's just on my backup phone),
| but have you checked out Termux?
|
| https://termux.com
| jbhouse wrote:
| check out termux. it's a command line on android
| hos4m wrote:
| Google Chrome.
| netik wrote:
| webcam control panel. it's meant to adjust and control logitech
| cameras but it resets the camera back to defaults (no gain, no
| exposure) every time a piece of software restarts the driver.
|
| it's wretched and ruins every zoom call.
| ashconnor wrote:
| 1Password.
|
| Core of the product hasn't seen any noticeable features in a
| while.
|
| 1PasswordX was launched without the feature set of the desktop
| version. Dumb stuff that hasn't been fixed in forever like not
| being able to delete a single item from the trash, password
| formulae are rigid - words with no digits or symbols or random
| mess of all characters, no TouchID/FaceID, Apple Watch unlock
| support, can't selectively sync a single vault to say my work
| laptop.
|
| There should be some open standard data-attribute on password
| fields so the app can read in the required formula to create the
| perfect password without me fiddling the settings.
| stblack wrote:
| 1Password supports FaceId and, before that, I used FaceId on my
| iPhone. But I'm using an old version. Has this changed?
| ashconnor wrote:
| Desktop sorry. It does support Face/TouchID on iOS.
| RedRoverRunner wrote:
| I worked at a company that made financial planning software
| called Xplan. What a user could see on screen for their client
| was a combination of _over 1k user capability controls_ users
| group membership, which was hierarchical so you used your parent
| group settings of your primary group unless they were overridden
| (primary group.. yes you could be in any and all groups, all with
| their own settings throughout) _clients group membership_ page
| settings, with every page AND field showing controlled by
| conditional rules that could be based on any of the thousands of
| fields of the current user or client _country set for user_
| module allowed product lists that could be applied at user, group
| or global level, and group hierarchy applied
|
| Client portal could display information using the above rules,
| and more rules
|
| Thousands of site settings were in an admin area which was
| grouped by major module, or just placed on which page the
| developer picked at the time (some pages dedicated to a couple of
| settings, other general ones full of unrelated random settings)
| [deleted]
| daneel_w wrote:
| The platform I'm partly responsible for developing at work.
| Xelbair wrote:
| Firebird, and by extension the industry specific application
| which utilizes it.
|
| This applications is absolutely usability nightmare, created in
| 90s, and it hadn't undergone any change since then. It's database
| design is also absolutely horrible.. yet it is faster, and more
| comfortable to just use plain SQL to work with it than bother
| with UI.
|
| Then there is that piece of shit known as firebird. It has all
| downsides of file based databases, while also having all
| downsides of service based databases.
|
| It also has its own way of doing things, and it doesn't even have
| services/systemctl service by default. Prior to version 2.5 you
| couldn't drop connections, and guess what - that PoS application
| set it to a week.
|
| File itself wont update if there is any live connection.
|
| That piece of shit app uses legacy client dll for firebird, so
| you can either connect to firebird 3, or to firebird 1/2. but not
| both.
|
| And then there is firebird documentation, which is horrible, and
| fragmented.
|
| I could rewrite that piece of shit, and design a better database
| but we won't ever compete with that company for political
| reasons.
| pagade wrote:
| iTunes, Google Sites.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just
| frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them
| however.
|
| AWS. It's UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like
| someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago.
| It's login and identity and resource management is confusing, and
| apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of
| complicated options I don't really understand just to be able to
| change roles. It is literally years behind Azure.
|
| Git. It's purposely archaic commands and syntax leads to too many
| accidents far too often. I recently started using Gitkraken which
| allows you to pull changes WITHOUT needing to commit locally
| first because it uses stashes. It basically does the same option.
| Why can't git be smart like that?
|
| Linux. It's great, but it's so easy to run into configuration
| problems or poor documentation.
|
| Docker. Again it's great but for whatever reason it just works
| poorly on ARM and the whole ecosystem is geared to x86 and it
| just goes and pulls the x86 images and then fails to run them.
| Come on.
| jamil7 wrote:
| Don't agree with you about git at all, I find it's one of the
| few tools I work with that behaves expectedly and gets out of
| my way, if you want that workflow of stash, pull and reapply a
| stash why not make an alias for it?
| recursive wrote:
| The functionality of git is great. Mostly. (I think the whold
| concept of stage/index/cache is completely unnecessary
| though) I find the UI to be inconsistent and confusing. Why
| would I ever want to make a branch without checking it out?
| It's literally never happened, yet it's the default.
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| > Why would I ever want to make a branch without checking
| it out? It's literally never happened, yet it's the
| default. git checkout -b new-branch
|
| I fairly often make a branch as a sort of named undo point,
| and only check it out if need to undo to that point. Tags
| could work for that purpose too, but the branch approach
| seems safer in my usual work situation.
| mtm7 wrote:
| Wow, I'd never thought of using it like this. Thanks for
| sharing, I just added something new to my workflow!
| michaelt wrote:
| If you want to change from a git-lover to a git-hater, just
| join a project that uses submodules.
| modeless wrote:
| git config pull.rebase true git config
| rebase.autoStash true
|
| I think these should have been the defaults but they weren't
| implemented until later and it's hard to change defaults.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Great to know about these. I still think the current
| default is better: for a new user, it might be scary for
| your uncommitted changes to "vanish" into a stash.
| modeless wrote:
| The stash is popped before the command finishes, so your
| changes don't appear to vanish. Unless there's a conflict
| while rebasing a prior commit. Actually I'm not sure if
| aborting the rebase at that point would pop the
| autostash, but it should.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Got it. In that case I agree.
| zyberzero wrote:
| TIL. Thank you for this!
| jerzyt wrote:
| You are so right about Atlassian tools. I cannot stand Jira.
| Very often, it's easier and faster to fix a bug, then to update
| the status in Jira. It's clutterware.
| StratusBen wrote:
| As for the AWS UI: I completely agree. I'm in the early access
| beta for a product being built that solves almost all of its
| problems and felt you might want to see it: https://vantage.sh/
|
| Pretty sure they said they're launching in July so should be
| live soon.
| schoolornot wrote:
| Unless this is a Chrome extension to redress the existing
| console there is an approximately 0% chance that I'm handing
| keys over or giving some unknown entity cross account access
| for a better UX.
| schoolornot wrote:
| Jira with a dozen plugins is a death sentence for productivity.
| Oh Atlassian finally fixed that bug you reported a decade ago?
| It might have to wait a few months because none of your plugins
| are compatible with the new Jira release.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Enterprise software are like baby outfits you get as baby
| shower gifts.
|
| They are cute, but they have lots of buttons or they have some
| decoration that makes them hard to wash, making them
| impractical to use. While no parent would buy these, every
| parent has them, because someone else made the decision to buy
| them.
| dnautics wrote:
| original source (AFICT):
|
| https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Yes! And also the experience of a recent baby shower.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I'm not by any means an advanced git user but find it to be
| well-designed and elegant. And, being constantly refined.
| [deleted]
| nolroz wrote:
| I used to think I hated Jira until I had to use WorkFront. God
| awful.
| 0xJRS wrote:
| We switched from Jira to Rally about a year ago. Our company
| just did a survey about which tool they'd rather use and Jira
| won by over 95%. We actually joked about having a party for
| using Jira.
| adwww wrote:
| Jira is a pain, but at least it's a known pain and a semi
| useful skill you can take with you when you leave that
| company.
| theknarf wrote:
| I love it. A list where I disagree on everything you listed up.
| Then again, I understand where you're coming from, I simply
| don't agree.
| 1ris wrote:
| I could not disagree more with Atlassian. They are among the
| best software i have ever used. Especially bitbucket is superb.
| Confluence is by far the best wiki I have ever used. Jira is
| 10x better than any alternative I'm aware of.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| I can say many things about BitBucket but it isn't slow. In
| fact it's significantly more reactive than GitHub and GitLab in
| my experience.
|
| Also your posts are hard to read if you systematically writes
| _it 's_ when you mean _its_.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Agree 100% with everything except for Linux and Git.
| _august wrote:
| I started using Clubhouse (https://clubhouse.io) for my
| personal projects and like it a lot for a light-weight
| alternative to Jira, yet more powerful than Trello. Not sure
| how it scales for big teams though.
| midrus wrote:
| We use it at work. Many teams of 5-8 people. We love it.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _I recently started using Gitkraken which allows you to pull
| changes WITHOUT needing to commit locally first because it uses
| stashes. It basically does the same option. Why can't git be
| smart like that?_
|
| This is not being smart, this is trying to be too clever for
| one's own good. Git does what it does because it wants you to
| know what might happen and to decide explicitly.
|
| If I do a 'git pull' without remembering that I was doing
| something and that just goes through and stash my changes
| automatically then I have lost the exact state I was working in
| and I need to work to recover it. Now, on the other hand if git
| stops and tell me that I have changes pending then I can think
| and decide. It only takes a few seconds.
|
| Trying to automate too much can be a false economy.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > AWS. ... apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a
| bunch of complicated options I don't really understand just to
| be able to change roles
|
| I strongly agree with the rest of your characterization of the
| AWS console, but that one isn't true:
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_roles_us...
| -- we use IAM Roles extensively at $DAYJOB and have not yet
| experienced anything that would require a Chrome extension to
| work around like you describe
|
| Their _login screen_ , however, continues to drive everyone
| crazy since the URL you visit depends greatly on which account,
| and at what level, you wish to authenticate to the console.
| With any setup containing a non-trivial number of AWS accounts,
| it's just "oh, what account am I logged into" waiting to happen
| atsaloli wrote:
| The AWS web UI shows an MRU (most recently used) list of the
| last 5 roles only. So if my job calls for me to switch
| between multiple accounts (7 accounts in my case), and I
| can't have all 7 in my history. There is a Chrome extension
| that extends that MRU list. See
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aws-extend-
| switch-...
| still_grokking wrote:
| I would disagree regarding AWS IAM roles. You can't live
| without "AWS Extended Switch Roles"[1] if you have more of
| them. What AWS provides by default is quite a joke.
|
| [1] https://github.com/tilfin/aws-extend-switch-roles
| aamoscodes wrote:
| My personal issue right now is that I have multiple accounts
| with MFA and there's no easy way to differentiate them
| besides this generated account ID in the auth app. This means
| I have to create some type of mapping table between the ID
| and the account, or try to remember what's available
| mdaniel wrote:
| Every MFA app I've used has the ability to rename the
| entry, since the MFA key and the text that are displayed to
| the user are 100% unrelated to one another. And I recognize
| that you might not have the correct privilege level to
| carry it out, but AWS does allow you to create account
| aliases, which helpfully shows up in the console login URL
| blocked_again wrote:
| > feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery
| and Bootstrap years ago.
|
| Unnecessary dig at Bootstrap and jQuery.
|
| There are plenty of websites with great UI built using
| bootstrap. I don't understand how using jQuery has anything to
| do with the UI though. It's just a wrapper around JavaScript.
| edoceo wrote:
| It's just using name brands for describing legacy-jank-by-
| noobs - not really a dig at those specific tools
| SN76477 wrote:
| My company wanted me and the rest of the marketing team on
| Jira. Immediately I was like wtf is this. We were back on
| Trello after just a few weeks.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Disagree strongly on git. On the surface the syntax is ugly,
| but the data model is brilliant.
|
| Once you wrap your mind around what commits, heads and remotes
| are and learn to rebase you get an incredibly simple and fine-
| grained control. I never use stash because it's trivial to
| create a WIP commit and rebase later into the chunks I want to
| ship to permanent history.
|
| Git is like a chef's knife: extremely powerful tool that's
| dangerous in untrained hands.
| y7 wrote:
| I use git a lot, and I like the speed and decentralized
| nature. But I do think there's much to be improved.
|
| Named branches don't really exist in git: there's only a
| moving target name that refers to a leaf node. This means
| there's no "history" associated to a branch except for the
| parent commits. But in merge commits with several parents all
| parents are considered equal, and the system does not contain
| info about which commit belonged to the "main branch" and
| which was imported in. This information can be valuable in
| some cases. This leads to a lot of rebasing just to keep the
| commit log clean, but this actually rewrites history and
| destroys information.
|
| Also, there's no support for keeping two parallel views of
| the same repository (for example, an internal view with lots
| of subcommits, and a cleaner public view with more detailed
| messages, and perhaps fewer privacy-compromising
| names/timestamps).
|
| Finally, handling merge conflicts is still a PITA, especially
| on LaTeX documents.
| skeppy wrote:
| What about a "git init-lite" option?
|
| So many times I want to VC a directory but don't care about
| commit messages, branching, or other jazz more suited to
| collaborative work.
|
| With init-lite, all the power of Git is still there - and
| you can use any commit or command you want, but it's
| default would be to simply VC for every file save. In other
| words, a file save IS a message-less commit.
| sangnoir wrote:
| The good news is that git is extensible enough to support
| this use-case. You would need to wrap git with a
| tool/script that watches for file changes
| still_grokking wrote:
| Sine decades I wish this would be a std. OS or FS
| feature!
| daenz wrote:
| I agree on these points, however many developers don't care
| enough to use it well, so you get screwed up shared
| histories, bad commits, mis-merged branches. I know that the
| nature of a shared tool, but it definitely negates a lot of
| the potential benefits of doing everything The Right Way if
| nobody else puts in the same effort.
| bmitc wrote:
| > Once you wrap your mind around what commits, heads and
| remotes are and learn to rebase you get an incredibly simple
| and fine-grained control.
|
| > Git is like a chef's knife: extremely powerful tool that's
| dangerous in untrained hands.
|
| Although, this is all part of the problem with Git. The
| problem is that it exposes this fine-grained control and
| knife's edge to the user by default. There isn't some simpler
| model that people can work with.
|
| I cut my teeth on source-code control with Perforce. Of
| course, Perforce has many complex features, including stuff
| like workspaces, which as far as I can tell, Git doesn't have
| something like that. Anyway, despite its complex feature set,
| Perforce can be explained in a few minutes. You have some
| code in the repository. If you want to work on it, you _check
| it out_ and it gets added to a _changelist_. If you want
| exclusive change rights, you can _lock_ it to prevent others.
| If you want others to see what you 're working on, you can
| _shelve_ your changes without submitting so that they can
| inspect. When you 're done, you _submit your changelist_. All
| of this can be done via excellent visual tooling or the
| command line. I highlighted things with italics because these
| are the right words for the actions in how Perforce calls
| them. It 's intuitive.
|
| For Git, it isn't that simple. You must first explain a wide
| swath of concepts. I've explained Git to people, even using
| the GitHub Desktop app. It is very confusing and intimidating
| to people, and rightfully so. It confuses me, and I did some
| pretty advanced things with Perforce (and thus source-code
| control) before. And there's no default visual tooling. Git
| also has many names for things that are confusing. Also, Git
| was invented for a very specific purpose: Linux kernel
| development. The vast majority of development does not need
| the same complexity that such a niche development process
| needs.
|
| When I recently wanted to do something in Git, I just could
| not figure it out. Probably simple for a Git expert, which is
| something I am not, but after searching many forum posts, I
| gave up because every answer was different and caveated in
| different ways and wasn't working for me. I installed
| GitKraken and solved my problem in seconds via a single
| right-click. Maybe I'm an idiot and I don't understand Git
| that well; both are likely true. But I am able to understand
| other complex things, so something is amiss. I think the
| primary issue is that Git requires me to study it just to use
| it in basic ways. I have an allergy to overly complex things,
| and so it's just a constant struggle for me. I tend to use
| visual tools for merging, diffing, managing commits, etc. so
| that I stay away from the Git CLI, which exposes the
| complexity in a non-usable way.
|
| Lastly, Git is very narrow minded when it comes to things it
| controls. It assumes everything should be text.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Absolutely agree! Coming from P4 to Git, Git is just
| constantly getting in the way.
|
| I need to make more decisions because of its limitations
| (single repo or one repo per module? Or maybe use
| submodules somehow? With P4, we had a single repo with all
| of the code of the entire organization).
|
| Should I rebase or merge? Or squash commits? Should I
| cherry pick onto a new branch?
|
| If I want to checkout a new branch while I have work in
| progress, do I commit it and later amend or revert, or do I
| stash it? Or do I rely on autostash?
|
| Do I push directly to main, or do I rely on pull requests?
| Should those merge or squash commits?
|
| I understand that all of these options and concepts make
| sense for distributed orgs, like the Linux kernel dev
| community and many other opensource projects. But I don't
| understand why so many traditional organizations are
| adopting Git. Its model is way too complex for the way
| normal orgs work (1 centralized server as the source of
| truth for the whole project), and it has serious
| limitations for anything which isn't pure code and isn't
| carefully curated.
| tryptophan wrote:
| Agree. I always hated git and thought it was so arbitrary and
| unhelpful. Then I sat down for 1-2 hours and read about how
| it works. It's not that complicated of a model that it
| operates on. Once you learn the model, the rest of the
| commands and how it works start making intuitive sense.
| vin047 wrote:
| I've yet to find a good intro doc that explains how git
| works conceptually. There are too few visual examples with
| authors assuming that users already understand the basic
| concepts like commits. To people who are completely new to
| version control, git can appear nonsensical.
|
| Funnily enough I think Atlassian/Bitbucket comes close to a
| good intro doc to git on their site complete with a visual
| guide. I still found it inaccessible to people totally new
| to the basic concepts though.
| tryptophan wrote:
| I found this one to be pretty good:
|
| https://www.sbf5.com/~cduan/technical/git/git-1.shtml
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| Have you seen this one? https://eagain.net/articles/git-
| for-computer-scientists/
| ohhhwell wrote:
| I've found the git branching game to be quite helpful in
| building a visual mental model
| https://learngitbranching.js.org/
| millimeterman wrote:
| I think the best argument against git is to use mercurial for
| a few months. It has exactly the same functionality but a
| nicer and more streamlined interface, especially when it
| comes to branch management.
| kevsim wrote:
| For me personally I find git to be relatively painless (after
| years of svn and P4). But working with people in less
| technical roles (PM/UX) who for whatever reason need to touch
| git occasion, I'm exposed to how inaccessible it is for the
| uninitiated. Not saying that's a good reason to change the
| tool but maybe there's room in the market for a more
| accessible tool.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Interesting perspective about AWS. I like it. It is boring and
| functional. It's not pretty but it doesn't need to be.
|
| If anything I wish they would just change it even less than
| they do.
|
| It does have its buggy areas though, which could be a lot
| better.
| kevsim wrote:
| Fully agree on Jira. Disliked it enough to start a company to
| compete with it [0].
|
| Also agree on AWS. Their UI is so terrible and confusing that
| it makes writing CloudFormation yaml files feel alright in
| comparison. Been using GCP lately and the UI is somewhat better
| though still confusing and weird at times.
|
| 0: https://kitemaker.co
| fredfjohnsen wrote:
| Neat. You made Trello.
| BusterStatus wrote:
| Atlassian does not seem to have an interest in listening to
| their users. My workflow would be so much better if they
| implemented browser or desktop notifications, but they only
| support email or extensions/add-ons if you self-host. Our
| company uses cloud though, so despite all the countless threads
| asking for native functionality, they insist it is not
| important for users.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Like every business focused company that got large enough,
| they stopped making it for the users ages ago and now make it
| for the influencers in the middle management chain and above
| that decide on IT purchase decisions. And most of that is
| about putting CYA far above usability.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _Atlassian does not seem to have an interest in listening to
| their users._
|
| But they do. Their users are project managers. The genius of
| Atlassian is how they've managed to convince so many
| programmers that it's for them. It never was!
| nateroling wrote:
| What's wrong with Confluence? We have a recently-acquired team
| at work that uses it for everything, and loves it. I've used it
| a bit, and I think it looks awesome, and the pricing is super
| reasonable.
|
| Confluence looks better than everything else I've tried/used as
| a doc platform: Notion, Nuclino, Coda, Sharepoint, OneNote,
| Azure DevOps wiki, Microsoft Teams wiki...
| adwww wrote:
| It doesn't help that the Markdown flavour is not standard,
| and is different again from most other Atlassian products.
| mr_toad wrote:
| And you can only use it to compose and not edit.
| theriddlr wrote:
| Webflow. The menus go 10 levels deep to interact with an element.
| As a dev, even I can't understand it. Raw HTML is better than
| their menu-driven WYSIWYG
| aritraghosh007 wrote:
| Amazon Alexa and the FireTV. Been around for some time now,
| several iterations except that the UX hasn't changed, quality
| isn't any better than couple years ago and painful/buggy 3rd
| party app integrations.
| ScottFree wrote:
| Have you tried any other TV OS? FireTV is the best of a bad
| bunch.
| aritraghosh007 wrote:
| Passively used a few others, didn't find them compelling
| either to switch. Why is FireTV OS the lesser evil?
| heelix wrote:
| I can't say I've ever seen a time card system that was not hot
| trash. The more full of enterprise they get, the worst they are.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Outlook for the search and threads. The search is attrocious, the
| well known Ctrl-F means "forward" (why, but why?) and the search
| does not highlight the result in the mail, good luck finding it
| in a 1000 lines email thread.
|
| Email threads are not there; "Find related" works, but it does
| not help organize emails, while long emails with embedded history
| of other 20-30 messages and no capability to identify,
| expand/colapse messages are a nightmare.
|
| And the calendar is useful, but a black box. My calendar has
| about 0.5 GB and I have no idea what is taking up all that space
| and how to reduce it.
| pagade wrote:
| Google Chat (enterprise G Suite offering):
|
| - No way to set status (essential in current remote work
| situation)
|
| - No way to reorder the rooms
|
| - No nested comments.
|
| - Cannot mark conversation unread or have some way to remember to
| come back to the conversation later.
|
| - If you lose your notification you are lost. Cannot figure out
| which room you were tagged in.
|
| - Cannot message to self. This is not a big problem but a good to
| have.
| peteri wrote:
| I agree soooo much with this. Like a lot of google products it
| feels half finished.
| nateabele wrote:
| Workday. There's not even a close second.
| peteri wrote:
| Stuff that you'd expect to be a lot better like objectives and
| reviews seem to involve a lot of scrolling and very little of
| it feels natural. You can sort of smell whatever the internal
| framework is leaking through into the UI.
|
| We've been moved onto Workday and I hate it and I suspect I'm
| going to hate it even more as I've just picked up a people
| management role so I will be spending more of my life dealing
| with it.
|
| Reminds me of K2 process automation which while it has a lot of
| value[1] forces the UI down particular routes which can be very
| sub-optimal for the end user.
|
| [1] Whenever I used it I felt like I could have written the
| small bit I was interested in less time using lots of
| alternative technologies, but the amount of time to add all the
| other bits and pieces like reporting and retrying of process
| steps would kill you longer term.
| snisarenko wrote:
| I wish I could force the Workday CEO to fill out expense
| reports 8 hours a day using his own software.
|
| I bet the software would improve pretty quick.
| politelemon wrote:
| I don't know how true this is, but I once complained about how
| unintuitive and difficult to use workday is. I was told, as bad
| as it is, it's considered best in its class.
|
| I'm not knowledgeable enough, but are there alternatives to
| workday and are they actually worse?
| nateabele wrote:
| Yeah, great question. Netflix, as you might already know, are
| sort of famous for being progressive in lots of ways,
| including & especially HR.
|
| I asked a couple friends who work there what they use, and
| sure enough, the answer was Workday.
|
| While there are definitely better alternatives at smaller
| scale (i.e. Zenefits), at that scale, the only ones I know of
| are Oracle, SAP, and TriNet, which all sound even worse.
| hnu0847 wrote:
| Are there any other CPU/GPU designers here? I feel like EDA
| software in general is pretty frustrating to work with.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Microsoft Outlook - decade after decade the icons change but the
| suckage does not, its 1987 every day when you use Outlook.
|
| Microsoft Teams - drains my battery 1% every two minutes
|
| Slack - the original "let's forget everything we've learned about
| communications and try to discover it again". From the threads
| feature nobody wants to the inability to silence bots or plugins,
| Slack never fails to disappoint. They pitch it as a knowledge
| archiving tool but unless you know exactly where, when, and who
| said something good luck finding it.
|
| G-Suite has been awesome for almost five years now, though it can
| be problematic when you need to communicate with people outside
| your org that don't use g-suite for work. Hangouts drains my
| battery fairly aggressively also but not as much as Teams, so
| I've switched to Zoom for video - plus it works seamlessly
| reguardless of which email program people use.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| For what it's worth, I love threads. Prior to threads, channels
| would be pure noise, often intertwining multiple conversations
| at once.
| markus92 wrote:
| They're not done well in slack if you're not looking for
| them! The default reply in a channel is not in a thread, so
| you get people replying inside the thread and outside at the
| same time. Makes them feel pointless.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Threads are good, the Slack implementation is still lacking
| though. They really need the ability to subscribe to a thread
| without commenting in it.
| woobar wrote:
| They have "Follow Thread" (You'll be notified about new
| replies)
| nikisweeting wrote:
| Zulip has absolutely nailed threads imo, it's almost like a
| cross between a forum like Discourse and real-time chat, with
| the best of both.
| javajosh wrote:
| `git`. I mean, its so popular that _you get used to it
| eventually_ but the commands never make sense or map well to the
| mental model of what you 're doing. And "getting used to it" is a
| seriously low bar for software IMHO.
| landtuna wrote:
| Haha - I've used mercurial almost exclusively for maybe ten
| years, and the biggest share of my points on Stack Overflow is
| from a question I answered about a confusing part of git.
| ScottFree wrote:
| Do you have any regrets with sticking with mercurial instead
| of hopping on the git bandwagon?
| superasn wrote:
| Even though what you're saying is controversial I strongly
| agree with you. The number of time I had to Google things wrt
| is git is insane.
|
| Unfortunately whenever somebody asks what could a better option
| there are generally no answers except keep at it and you'll get
| used to it.
| enitihas wrote:
| I have observed vastly different opinion of git among people
| for whom git was the first vs, and people who were using svn or
| cvs before. The former is mostly fond of git, and the latter
| highly critical, mostly I assume because the concepts don't map
| the same way.
|
| While I myself think I am pretty familiar with git cli, I don't
| really use the cli anymore, since intellij covers all the
| features in a much more intuitive way. e.g staged edits,
| rebase.
| tootie wrote:
| SVN is so dead simple to learn and use. And while I see the
| benefit of DVCS it hasn't really had much impact on developer
| productivity. The tools around are just so much more
| sophisticated than what we had for SVN. And I kinda miss
| being able to checkout subfolders directly.
| mansr wrote:
| People who criticise git fall into two categories:
|
| - Those who have never used Clearcase, Perforce, or any other
| enterprise monstrosity.
|
| - Those who have and suffer from Stockholm syndrome.
| detaro wrote:
| Because other things are worse git can't have problems?
| mansr wrote:
| The problem addressed by git or any other serious version
| control system is complex. Any seemingly simple solution
| will be severely limited, even if it does some particular
| things reasonably well (e.g. Subversion).
|
| Git offers the flexibility to let each person work the way
| they prefer, even (to a large extent) on large shared
| projects.
|
| With some wrappers and hooks, you could quite easily
| cripple git so as to emulate most any simple VCS. The
| aforementioned enterprise products barely work at all, so
| replicating their non-functionality might require more
| effort.
| detaro wrote:
| It being flexible is not the reason for all criticism of
| git, and simple wrappers don't fix all its issues. (and
| even if it were, "you need wrappers and hooks to work
| around its pitfalls" would be a completely valid
| criticism)
| yumraj wrote:
| Perforce is fantastic and I'll take it over git any day.
|
| Clearcase I agree was a POS.
| yewenjie wrote:
| People who champion git, how do you counter this?
| shirakawasuna wrote:
| git gud
| bokwoon wrote:
| My use case is simple enough. Git provides a list of
| checkpoints I can rollback to. I generally squash over merge,
| and I use vimdiff to resolve conflicts. I know every command
| I need to do those things. What's complicated to learn?
|
| If you want a coherent mental model of git, just do
| https://learngitbranching.js.org/ and never look back.
| x0x0 wrote:
| I assume that people who find git extremely difficult are
| unwilling or incapable of learning the internal data model. I
| think if you want to have distributed source control, there
| is a minimal complexity that exists. I also previously used
| cvs, svn, and perforce, so maybe that affects my opinions; I
| strongly believe git is a huge improvement over all of the
| aforementioned.
|
| Note I think git could definitely be easier to use, and the
| reuse of eg checkout to switch branches and revert a dirty
| file to either staging or the most recent commit is a bit
| strange. But calling it uniquely bad is silly, imo obviously.
|
| For working software engineers, I both think -- and recommend
| to juniors -- they must invest the effort to learn an editor,
| git, and at least one language + toolkit deeply.
| afiori wrote:
| The internal data model is not too bad, the problem is that
| the commands are overly complex with too many edge cases
| and options
| pedasmith wrote:
| I think that the most important goal of our profession is
| to find and implement high-level concepts so that our users
| don't need to worry about tiny details.
|
| As an example: when I buy a back-up hard drive from a
| typical brick store like Costco, the "back up hard drive"
| is abstracted away: I don't need to study the USB timing
| diagrams, or worry about the details of how the magnetic
| domains are imprinted on the spinning disks, or really any
| of the chemical details of the surface coating.
|
| This abstracting away of details is AWESOME. I can buy a
| $150 disk drive after spending less than a minute
| considering the purchase.
|
| Git, on the other hand...
|
| Let me give a real-life example of where real-life git and
| real-life published work flows don't work: you can go into
| GitHub.com, and make a project. And you can write code in
| Visual Studio, and save it up to your new git project.
|
| Unless, of course, when GitHub.com recommended that you add
| a license. The instant you add a license, the project isn't
| "empty", and once the project isn't "empty", you can't
| trivially push your new Visual Studio project up.
|
| The fix for this is to delete your GitHub.com repo.
|
| I bet you'll reply and say, "that's just real-world
| problem! I only want to hear about theoretical problems!"
| -- which, IMHO, is one of the problems my profession faces.
| Real-world problems are ignored in favor of theoretical
| ones.
| x0x0 wrote:
| > _I bet you 'll reply and say_
|
| Maybe don't imagineer what I would say based on poor
| evidence.
|
| Because (1) github doing that is kind of dumb (though
| (1a) how often do we make new projects?), and (2) we're
| discussing _git_ as used for source control, particularly
| the commands. That 's distinct from using github as a
| remote.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| A programmer doesn't have to know the IR (intermediate
| representation) of their compiler to write code and they
| shouldn't have to know the internal data model of git to
| store code.
| jbhouse wrote:
| I've never had problems with git "not mapping" to my mental
| model of what I'm doing, so maybe you could help expand on
| what that means. But I've run into two categories of people
| that struggle with git
|
| Novice developers that just haven't taken the time to learn
| more than three basic git commands. Their lack of knowledge
| is the problem 99.9% of the time, but they don't know enough
| to know they are the limitation, and they blame the tool
| instead
|
| Old developers that come with a mental model of another VCS
| and either cannot or will not change their mental model and
| continue to be frustrated that they weren't consulted when
| git was designed
|
| A third category may exist, but I have not met these people
| IRL
| tootie wrote:
| Git tooling has improved dramatically and papers over most
| of the confusing parts. The biggest flaw by far is the
| opaque command line rules. There's a reason "how do I undo
| a commit?" has >20000 votes on StackOverlow instead there
| being like "git undo" or something obvious like that.
| There's dozens of Qs like that because it's so far from
| obvious. A lot of git purists in the early days insisted on
| uselessly complex workflows (rebase this and bisect that)
| despite adding little value. And the general concept of
| staging a commit isn't very useful either.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-do-i-undo-
| the...
| mjw1007 wrote:
| Supposing you have an accurate mental model of what git
| does, the odd thing is that many of the most common
| commands don't correspond to simple operations on that
| model.
|
| Most notoriously, 'checkout' and 'reset' have a number of
| very different behaviours depending on the shape of the
| parameters you give them (which is why they've very
| recently added 'switch' and restore').
|
| And some things that ought to be primitive operations don't
| seem to have any simple command at all. For example, if I
| have branch 'wip' checked out, and I'd like to advance
| branch 'dev' to point to the same thing as 'wip' without
| changing the currently checked-out files (even temporarily,
| because I don't want their timestamps to update).
|
| And the preferred commands for managing the per-branch and
| per-remote push and fetch and merge settings have changed
| so often that I gave up years ago and just edit .git/config
| directly.
| javajosh wrote:
| This. A lot of the responses in this thread seem to
| conflate git commands with the git idea. The idea, which
| is to model a tree of files as a set of objects that
| contain metadata pointing to content-addressable files,
| is a very good one. The commands are very bad.
| Apreche wrote:
| Git, like UNIX is a Hole Hawg.
|
| https://steve-
| parker.org/articles/others/stephenson/holehawg...
| pedasmith wrote:
| I hate the Hole Hawg story with a passion. Firstly, because
| it's wrong: the story say things like "it's a cube of
| metal" and "the handle is not ergonomic".
|
| But look at pictures from the maker. It's not a cube, and
| the handle is in fact ergonomic. Indeed, I would hope that
| a drill used by expert for hours every day would be 100%
| designed to make their jobs easier, and that includes not
| given them crippling injuries. And it's 100% purchasable
| from Home Depot. And, looking on Amazon, it's half the
| price of a truly expensive drill.
|
| But there's another level at which the story is bad. The
| story feels like a story about gatekeeping: either you're
| one of the special people, or you're a useless homeowner.
| Either you have big problems, or you shouldn't be here.
| Either you've dedicated your life to drilling holes, or
| you're not welcome.
|
| So, I read the story, and it sounds like both an exciting
| story of a newbie learning that some profession has
| unexpected depth. At the same time, it's also a story of a
| person who wants to be part of the special exclusive club.
| yongjik wrote:
| I read the story and still cannot decide if you're for or
| against git, because "It's so powerful that will gladly
| drill a hole through your wall, and even your foot, if you
| don't give it its full due respect" is definitely _not_ a
| characteristic I want for a system managing my source code.
| GordonS wrote:
| For 99% of git, I'm happy with GUI tooling in the likes of VS
| Code, Visual Studio and Rider - it's clear, and it works
| great.
|
| It's only very occasionally that I have to drop down to a
| command line to fix some kind of merging snafu - if that
| happens, I'm guaranteed to have to Google it, but at least
| I'm also guaranteed to easily find a solution on
| StackOverflow.
| tornato7 wrote:
| GitHub desktop works really well too
| GordonS wrote:
| Yes, I used to use it before VS Code came along, and
| before VS improved their tooling, and before I switched
| to Rider. Github Desktop was probably the first good git
| GUI I ever used.
| johnpaulkiser wrote:
| What makes git different than other cli tools like grep, sed,
| curl, etc?
| [deleted]
| williamdclt wrote:
| - I have to interact with it much much more often
|
| - I have to be a good user of it. I can get away with
| knowing a couple flags for these tools
|
| - Git is inherently _stateful_. I can iterate on my grep-
| ing /sed-ing/curl-ing and try random stuff, but git
| operation can be destructive or leave me in a state I don't
| understand and do not konw how to get out of
| formerly_proven wrote:
| I don't champion git, but it is sort of the least worst SCM
| overall. I'm a graph thinker so that aspect never gave me
| much trouble, but the CLI is a seriously weird jungle of odd
| naming, based limitations1, do-all commands with flags
| changing the entire command out for a different one and
| poorly written manpages.
|
| I'd also like to point out that the concept of not having the
| history local (as in CVS, SVN and some of the still-used
| commercial SCMs), but only on the special sanctified server,
| feels seriously weird and extremely limiting to me.
|
| 1 The by far weirdest one is --set-upstream specifically
| (intentionally?) not working if local and remote branch names
| don't match, so "git push repository branchLocal:branchRemote
| -u" doesn't make "git push" work if you are on branchLocal.
| It feels like that's half the point to have that option in
| the first place. But nah.
| jolmg wrote:
| I've never felt that the commands don't make sense or that
| they don't map to my mental model. Actually I don't
| understand that complaint. It's not like I set a mental model
| prior to learning git and expect git to follow it. I base my
| mental model on git while learning it, so of course it's
| going to map it. That's what learning how to use a software
| entails.
|
| If we're talking about inconsistencies in git, the only one
| that comes to mind is how diff's `...` behaves like log's
| `..` and diff's `..` behaves like log's `...`. I.e. if you
| want to see the changes of `git log a..b` as a single diff,
| you'd use `git diff a...b`. If you want to see the changes of
| `git log a...b` as a single diff, you'd use `git diff a..b`.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| It maps very well to my own mental model? I'm not arguing
| that the parent poster doesn't have the problem that they say
| they have, but it's a problem I do not have and haven't
| encountered very much with new users after explaining it to
| them?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I mean, its so popular that you get used to it eventually but
| the commands never make sense or map well to the mental model
| of what you're doing.
|
| I don't really find that to be the case in normal use at all.
| kortilla wrote:
| I had this problem until I spent time to learn the underlying
| data structure of git. Everything pretty quickly fell into
| place after that (git checkout still has too many jobs IMO).
|
| The git commands do not abstract over the internals, they
| pretty much just provide a direct interface to them.
| _tulpa wrote:
| Honest question: Which bits don't make sense?
|
| For me it's the other way round, git clicked way faster than
| other systems.
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| Git has a very clean and simple data model. Unfortunately,
| this nice model often has very little bearing on how the
| `git` CLI works; it often takes things that _should_ be
| simple operations and confuses or complicates them in various
| ways.
|
| For example, say you've just made a commit, and then realized
| that wasn't what you wanted to do so now you want to undo it.
| This can be described under git's data model as "set the
| current branch to HEAD^ and discard the orphaned commit,
| leaving the working tree alone." For some reason this is a
| "reset" operation (the same command you'd use to unstage a
| file, an otherwise unrelated operation) and you have to
| decide if you want to do a "hard," "soft," or "mixed" reset.
| If you get it wrong you'll have to go grovelling in the
| reflog to get your files back.
|
| To be fair, this situation is improving; the recent
| introduction of the switch and restore subcommands has helped
| to disentangle the especially overloaded checkout and reset
| subcommands, for example. But it's still harder than it
| should be to convert a mental image of what you want done
| into the appropriate (series of) git commands, and vice
| versa.
| afiori wrote:
| The philosophy of git is fantastic, it is its unending
| collection of quirks, footguns, and inconsistencies that
| irritate people.
| snisarenko wrote:
| I agree git is not user friendly. But there are 2 solutions,
| that are pretty low friction
|
| 1. There are great cheatsheets online that you can just print
| out and keep on your desk.
|
| 2. Write a user friendly cli wrapper on top of git (i think
| there might already some projects out there)
| jbhouse wrote:
| at my old company Cherwell sure took the cake my god it was awful
| vermooten wrote:
| yes! awful p.o.s. I've seen Service Now mentioned but it was
| wonderful compared to Cherwell.
| lvass wrote:
| WhatsApp. The desktop version has very few features, requires
| constant connection to a mobile phone and gets out of sync very
| often. It's practically irremediable if you're in a crowded wi-fi
| area and ethernet is the only way to get a good connection. It's
| also designed so no conversation is ever private despite
| advertising it's E2E encryption. Everyone you talk to has
| automatic backups enabled and they're stored unencrypted in
| Google Drive. And the "two step verification" password is the one
| of the dumbest things I've ever seen. It must be a 6-digit number
| that requires you to type it constantly in order to remember it.
| It basically assumes people are too incompetent to use password
| managers or simply writing a password down. Passwords you can
| remember are never safe.
| vardump wrote:
| On macOS desktop, WhatsApp crashes at least once per day.
| Pretty annoying.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| That's weird, I use WhatsApp almost exclusively (in the
| browser) and the desktop version is a joy. Never had syncing
| issues - in fact it syncs instantly for me.
| leephillips wrote:
| It syncs very well for me, too, but there are missing
| features (for example, you can't post a status on the
| desktop).
| pachico wrote:
| Jira is my daily nightmare. I guess the "no CTO was ever fired
| for choosing SAP" applies to Jira too. It just does the opposite
| of that it tries to do, which is making development tracking easy
| (not to mention those silly ideas coming from agile coaches to
| use Jira to measure wrong things, which makes of it a horrible
| combo).
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| IME, Jira makes development tracking easy, at first.
|
| But then, when software developers realize how much Jira gets
| in their way, the good ones do their best to avoid using it.
| Which results in Jira being a great tool for middle-managers to
| query a very stale database.
| hinkley wrote:
| Or it becomes a performance piece that mostly says what the
| developers want to say, rather than the truth.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Jira can do many things. Or so I'm told. I just don't think it
| helps me as a dev.
| pachico wrote:
| Not to mention how horrible Confluence is, which is a product I
| can't believe how strongly it's advertised as a life saver. Any
| editor I've tried is way better. (Every time I have to "insert
| macro > other macros > code > choose title > choose syntax
| highlighter" just to document some code it just makes my life
| more miserable.)
| ivalm wrote:
| So what is like Jira but good?
|
| I use jira at work and I like it.
|
| But our use case is maybe more limited/liberal. For us it is:
|
| 1) list tasks to do and how tasks are linked
|
| 2) archive discussion about issues and integrates with
| butbucket (so in commit it will link to ticket to read about
| why something was done; similarly from issue discussion I can
| see the relevant commits; this also goes well with history
| either by looking to linked issues or blaming in git and
| getting issues that resulted in the commits)
|
| 3) enables pointing other devs to something (I did some partial
| task, need help, I assign or cc someone else, they contribute
| to the issue as appropriate and then hand it back). Helps
| ensure all relevant discussion is centralized and persisted.
|
| What we don't do is use it as an explicit performance/formal
| sprint tool... there is no middle manager questioning me about
| something I wrote/didn't write in jira. is this where people
| start to hate it?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Pivotal Tracker is okay.
| jrockway wrote:
| My experience with bug trackers is that people hate them no
| matter which one you choose. The infinite list of stuff you
| know is broken or sub-optimal crushes the spirit. (Jira is
| particularly bad, because it is slow and complicated, but
| switching to simpler tools doesn't make that underlying
| problem go away.)
|
| When people complain about bug trackers, they probably need a
| new outlook on work. They need to aggressively prioritize
| tasks. They need to be in a mental state where they're happy
| working on the highest priority thing, not the most
| interesting thing. You can't get there by buying a new tool
| for $9.99 per user per month. You probably need a vacation.
|
| At my last job, we switched from Jira to Github Issues to
| Asana. Each tool had the same problems -- bugs were filed
| faster than they were fixed. I am personally okay with that
| -- I know that most of these things will never be done, but
| it's nice to park the idea somewhere. But to others, it's
| crushing, and although people will complain that they don't
| like Jira's UI, what they really hate is that realization
| that they will never "finish".
| Bnshsysjab wrote:
| Spoken like a true manager.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| You'd probably do great with Gitlab then. It lacks some
| features of JIRA but the ones it lacks are mostly what you
| don't use. But it's interface and simplicity is a joy
| compared to JIRA. Literally everything is keyboard driven via
| markdown and built in actions in text. The API is simple and
| crazy powerful.
|
| NB: Not associated with Gitlab the company in any way.
| regularfry wrote:
| In my experience, you can do all that on github directly,
| with the benefit that everything's closer to the code. I
| presume Bitbucket has comparable functionality. Jira is just
| another tool on top that doesn't add anything _unless_ you
| 're doing the perf tracking bit outside the team.
| ivalm wrote:
| I use github as well (but never just bitbucket), I feel
| jira provides a better coordination/overview functionality,
| although I agree in most ways they are convergent. Part of
| it is our jira covers multiples related projects/sub
| teams/independent repos in ways I don't think github can do
| seamlessly (but I never worked on a big project on github
| so maybe it is just my limitation)
| nuker wrote:
| Windows servers in the cloud.
| majkinetor wrote:
| cmd.exe on Windows - trully horrible shell.
|
| bash on *nix - less horrible then cmd.exe but still trurlly
| horrible anyway.
|
| I want to kill myself any time I enter any of those. PowerShell
| cross platform made all my cells rejoice.
| listenallyall wrote:
| ConEmu makes any Windows terminal app far less frustrating
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| The new terminal with PowerShell is quite lovely. I recently
| had to move my work from macOS to Windows and am pretty happy
| after setting it up like this:
| https://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToMakeAPrettyPromptInWindo...
| majkinetor wrote:
| Yeah, lovely. Still, ConEmu is atm far better. If I have to
| install manually stuff, I will always chose ConEmu until
| Windows Terminal comes OTB.
|
| You can get similar stuff only in powershell - this is what I
| use:
|
| https://github.com/majkinetor/powershell_profile.d/blob/mast.
| ..
|
| It isn't that artistic but functinality is the same without
| any dependency.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Agreed on Bash. It was awesome when I first started using it,
| but the quirky syntax and pain to configure for anything
| complex really annoyed me. xonsh is a lot nicer, albeit not as
| featureful.
|
| Did not know Powershell was now cross platform. Never learned
| it, but everyone I know who knows both Powershell and the usual
| UNIX shells prefers Powershell.
| tootie wrote:
| PowerShell and WSL. Windows has thoroughly redeemed itself
| after years in the wilderness.
| majkinetor wrote:
| I never needed WSL. Almost all linux tools are already
| nativelly available.
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| cmd is the primary reason I switched from PC to Mac.
| p2detar wrote:
| IBM/HCL's Lotus Notes Domino.
| buro9 wrote:
| Every city parking app and every local authority website
| [deleted]
| sershe wrote:
| I thankfully don't use it everyday, but Mac and literally
| everything on Mac (even the terminal started crashing on resize
| towards the end of the time I used it every day). Over time, I
| started keeping a note where I put every bug, missing feature,
| malicious feature, performance issue, driver issue I had with my
| 2 different MacBooks day to day, and it's loooong. I'll probably
| never organize it unless I'm forced to use Mac again.
| jasonv wrote:
| Something else was probably going on with your Mac. The one
| example (terminal) doesn't happen on any of my Macs. And I have
| a few.
| sershe wrote:
| There was a specific thread on Mac whatever, or a bug filed I
| don't recall, with dozens or more of comments. Introduced in
| a specific version, and never fixed (well, as of 2-3 years
| ago), terminal would sometimes crash on reflow. Not sure why
| it would hit specific machines
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I've heard many people complain about OSX in similar ways but
| in 15 years of intensive usage I've experienced only a handful
| of annoyances.
|
| Compared to Windows it's an absolute dream. I left Windows
| because it was a mess and applications constantly crashed and
| also the OS crashed and the multitasking is thoroughly crap. I
| have a Windows machine and every now and then I think "maybe
| it's all better now", and I give it a try and instantly the
| same crashy problems and really bad multitasking.
| sershe wrote:
| Heh, I have the reverse problem, on Windows 7 my uptime is
| measured in months and everything is great. On Mac
| everything, including drivers for the Mac's very own mouse
| and the built-in microphone, we atrocious.
|
| Heck, for my first old 4Gb RAM Mac I installed this piece of
| software from app store that would consume all the memory on
| the system over a short time to force Mac to actually manage
| memory and prevent other apps from stuttering and OOMing when
| the memory was supposedly low (it really wasn't, as this
| app's overload-free-memory routine showed). It even had a
| paid version that would do the memory-overload automatically
| when memory was low. That is the most Mac thing I've ever
| seen :)
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| Do your feelings extend to 3rd party Mac apps? I'm not a big
| Mac fanboy, but I really like using iTerm2 for ssh'ing into
| servers.
| vin047 wrote:
| Macs are weird in that you have to surrender to "The Mac Way"
| before they make any sense. If you try to fight it, it somehow
| manages to mess with you.
|
| That being said, does sound like something else was going on
| with your Macs.
| maliker wrote:
| Microsoft office. Unavoidable in a business context. Slow. Hangs.
| Crashes. Menu options hard to find in the constantly shape-
| shifting ribbon.
|
| I actually have fond memories of office circa 1995 when it was a
| single platform app. Now it's some cross-platform monstrosity
| with horrible performance.
|
| So many features have been piled on top of each other that I
| suspect it's impossible to debug now. Image inserted in a shape
| in a table and commented on? Good luck figuring out why that
| pauses scrolling for 5 seconds when it's encountered. Or
| explaining to someone non-technical why they shouldn't do it.
| vermooten wrote:
| Teams & SharePoint.
| sdussin wrote:
| Without a doubt: Websphere.
| jt2190 wrote:
| I worked with WebSphere (version 5 maybe?) many, many years
| ago. The admin console was seemed like it was designed to
| increase confusion. Eventually a consultant I was working with
| tipped me off that there was a scripting interface, which came
| bundled with Python (Jython). This made administration so much
| easier once I got the hang of the APIs, since I could just
| automate/script things.
|
| I have no idea if this is still possible with modern WS.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Snipping Tool. I will _never_ want to replace a file with an
| identical name. Just add a "(1)" please.
| dilatedmind wrote:
| Also building docker images with bazel
| tasubotadas wrote:
| Windows Command Line
| Nextgrid wrote:
| LinkedIn.
| mindhash wrote:
| Totally agree. LinkedIn is dumbest ux sitting on a gold mine of
| data
| zachrose wrote:
| Google? It captures me with its convenience and illusion of
| transparency but is probably also selling a window into my
| deepest curiosities.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Anything from Oracle really!
| balls187 wrote:
| I guess the beauty of being old is that I have experienced how
| software has gotten so much better.
|
| It's interesting seeing negative comments about things like AWS,
| Git, JIRA, etc, and compare to what my career was like BEFORE
| those were mainstays.
|
| It's cool that so many people aren't satisfied with the status
| quo, and will continue to push the to make things better.
|
| To throw in my answer, G-Suite (as an IT Administrator).
| PopePompus wrote:
| iOS:
|
| I almost never use it myself, but I get called upon to deal with
| it for some of my relatives. The fact that you can't just mount
| the file system on a non-crippled computer and transfer files to
| and from the device just drives me mad. Getting someone's music
| into the right place if they don't have access to a machine with
| iTunes is miserable. When the "files" app appeared a few years
| ago, I thought "finally, they'll let you manipulate files
| directly", but no - it's just another silo too restricted to be
| of any use.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _The fact that you can 't just mount the file system on a
| non-crippled computer_
|
| What do you mean, non-crippled computer?
|
| I think one of the reasons iOS doesn't expose the device as a
| Plain Old Disk is so that it can continue to enforce content
| restrictions etc., i.e. such as those set by parents.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Basically most web apps. They are a clunky, laggy imitation of
| native apps. For a couple of historical reasons we are all using
| them, but still there is an enormous abyss between web apps and
| real native apps.
| overgard wrote:
| I don't use it anymore luckily, but from a couple years ago:
| Xcode!! Unstable, baffling interface decisions, very poor on
| features and the features that are there are unreliable. By far
| the worst IDE I've ever used.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Yeah and when it's updating some includes you can type faster
| than it'll show the new characters. That always really messes
| with my brain, when I press a key but a different (previously
| typed) character shows up instead.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I'm not a big fan of Microsoft but Visual Studio beats Xcode
| hands down. It's slow, unreliable, the code completion is
| abysmal, refactoring support is poor and the documentation is
| half hearted.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Agree. On 2020 that thing doesn't even have tabs for the open
| files.
|
| Xcode is one of the most obvious evidences of Apple's despise
| and contempt for programmers (others being crappy
| documentation, frequently deprecated APIs, appstore with
| authoritarian rules, etc).
| andrekandre wrote:
| > By far the worst IDE I've ever used.
|
| xcode is a total pain, but i would have to say eclipse takes
| the cake imo...
| perceptronas wrote:
| Any modern OS: MacOS, Windows or Linux. All have major problems.
| _Works out of the box_ vs _is actually fast_ vs _is good UX_ and
| so on.
|
| All of them lack some kind of functionality: mail calendar apps
| are buggy (win and mac), GPU suspend problems (linux for me),
| can't replace hardware parts(macos), weird finder problems, weird
| "explorer.exe" problems, weird nautilus problems.
|
| Why can't OS'es just work? Why is UX getting worse? Frustrating
| to say the least.
| ScottFree wrote:
| It's not just Desktop OS's. Mobile, TV and Car OS's are mostly
| terrible as well. Are OS's really that hard to do well?
| lupinglade wrote:
| All the security/passwords/confirmation prompts is tiring as
| well. And from the developer side its even worse, at least on
| macOS. Security Scoped Bookmarks are a nightmare to work with
| for anything but the simplest case.
| odiroot wrote:
| That would be German mobile banking apps (websites are just
| slightly better).
|
| My current bank just wrapped a mobile website in Android app.
| Logging-in with a fingerprint, though supported, takes 3 or 4
| attempts.
|
| The app is also very slow and fails miserably on slow mobile
| connection (very common in Germany).
|
| Finally the app doesn't do the 2FA feature, it's offered by
| another, even worse app from the same bank. They're too cheap to
| offer SMS option.
|
| The 2FA app can only be registered using snail mail confirmation.
| osrec wrote:
| Add UK mobile banking apps to that list as well.
| literallycancer wrote:
| SMS leaks info to anyone who cares to listen.
| burnte wrote:
| Outlook. Hands down, it's utter trash. I quit for the web version
| at my company. I'd LOVE to get rid of it, and I'm the damn CIO.
| keb_ wrote:
| Skype for Business. Everyone I've spoken to in my company has had
| connection, audio, or screen-sharing issues. Personally, I
| consistantly have issues with what I've listed plus instances
| where Skype just flat out refuses to launch, or it crashes, or
| messages are randomly dropped or fail to send, or file/image
| transfers that just __do not work __. It is truly baffling.
|
| I noticed another comment thread about Microsoft Teams, but for
| me, Teams is a godsend compared to Skype for Business.
| aliswe wrote:
| Hacker News.
| SurgeonCoder wrote:
| Trakcare [0] electronic medical record system.
|
| As far as I can tell this is a demo EMS from Intersystems, they
| provide Cache [1] to companies developing _real_ EMS with modern
| user interfaces. They don 't sell this product in the USA (so not
| to upset their customers), but have dumped it on the rest of the
| English speaking world.
|
| I suspect here is some sort of NDA with those unfortunate
| Hospitals taking this pile of stinking PS%^PS" as I have never
| found a user group or trustworthy review.
|
| I get to use it at ground level (talk about poor UI), at
| management level (no coherent db integrity, very poor reporting)
| and have seen a complete inability to reconfigure the system to
| cope with COVID.
|
| When ever we see demos for new clinical system I always ask
| "Would those coding this system accept this level of
| quality/usability in their daily software tools?". The marketing
| guys look at me like I'm from another planet.
|
| I know "you get what you pay for", but for something hundreds of
| thousands of Hospital staff will be using for patient care (we
| don't bill in the UK), there should be a floor below which no
| company should offer half-baked dangerous products. Trakcare is
| in the sub-basement.
|
| [0]: https://www.intersystems.com/au/products/trakcare/
|
| [1]: https://www.intersystems.com/products/cache/
| MapleWalnut wrote:
| Intersystems purchased Trakcare, which was developed by an
| Australian company. They'd love to sell it in the US, but Epic
| is Intersystems largest customer and they have an agreement to
| not compete in the US.
|
| Cache is the most archaic and least usable programming
| environment I've ever experienced. Unit tests are not a thing.
| MUMPS, which underlies the whole system, is stringly typed. The
| entire stack is junk, so it's no surprise that Trackcare is
| either.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Relatedly, does anyone else keep a list of fantastic indie pieces
| of software? I have a few bookmarked like Privacy.com,
| WeTransfer, and GraphMe (OS X oscilloscope over an FTDI cable).
| I'm so thankful for all of these and I'd love to hear about
| others.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Apple Music. Trying to make it play something on a HomePod from
| iOS takes a computer science degree.
| [deleted]
| las_balas_tres wrote:
| MySql Workbench. What an utter piece of crap.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Jira is bad, but Google Doc and Google Drive are so, so much
| worse.
|
| Knowing it is not Jira is what makes Pivot tolerable. Knowing
| both are coded in server-side Java, though, is oddly satisfying.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Do websites count? Ebay can be pretty bad at times.
|
| But the winner must be agresso, or whatever it's called now. Just
| awful in every sense.
| yewenjie wrote:
| Android.
| enitihas wrote:
| What is so bad about "Android", as in stock Android?
| yewenjie wrote:
| Mobile devices have insane potential, but we are essentially
| stuck with Google's design choice monopolies, rendering the
| OS consumer-friendly but a terrible experience for power
| users.
|
| What's worse, there is no viable alternative to it, though
| some tries have been made.
|
| The default Android phone comes with loads of bloated and
| useless apps that spy on you. Unlocking bootloader,
| installing a custom ROM, installing all your favorite apps is
| a long and painful process (some vendors take weeks to
| approve your unlock request).
|
| All of these, in the name of a platform which is'open-
| source'.
| propogandist wrote:
| the latest versions of android has virtually all data
| collection options enabled, and virtually every app from the
| keyboard to the phone app is trying to phone home constantly.
| Google has become increasingly privacy hosile and they're
| trying to get as much information as possible from the end
| user.
|
| You have to make an effort to get ROMs without GAPPS and even
| then, Google is making changes to the OS prevent things like
| MicroG from succeeding.
| timpark wrote:
| This was back around 2005, so I imagine the software has improved
| since then, but... Sonic Scenarist for DVD authoring.
|
| The thing we hated most about it apart from the slowness
| (computers were slower back then too, but anyway) was that it
| auto-saved after every action and had _no undo_. If there was an
| option to turn this off, we couldn 't find it.
|
| It was all too easy to select a bunch of items and accidentally
| drag them to the wrong place, and so we ended up just making a
| backup copy of the project file from time to time, and before
| attempting any type of operation that might mess up.
| pankajdoharey wrote:
| iTunes
| bluedino wrote:
| Skype (Windows)
| ypcx wrote:
| From the point of UI / UX, I cannot think of a worse software
| than Skype (all platforms including Android).
|
| It's always a hard struggle, effort and suffering to make a
| call to a phone number, even if this phone number is in the
| contacts of the phone, or has been called before.
|
| Adding to that, when Microsoft acquired Skype, they were
| offering to merge the Skype and Live accounts, which I agreed
| to, which rendered my Skype account unusable (with credit on it
| and lot of contacts registered).
|
| The. Worst.
| tpurves wrote:
| I agree with you, but raise you with Skype for mac.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Skype is now shit everywhere because it's the same Electron-
| based garbage.
|
| Back in the day Skype used to have a beautiful, native Mac
| client.
| enitihas wrote:
| I feel neither of you might have tried Lync for mac, it beats
| skype hands down.
| XCSme wrote:
| Android on my TV: (keeps crashing, internet sometimes not
| working, sound volume usually is wrong, etc.)
|
| Nvidia GeForce Experience: I don't actually use it daily, because
| it doesn't work. I have not been able to start it for the last 6
| months without getting a startup error. I contacted Nvidia
| support, reinstalled, downgraded, updated, problem is still
| there. The tray icon always shows when there's a new update, but
| I have to manually download it.
|
| Google Chrome: Whenever I ALT+TAB back to Chrome it freezes for 1
| second. It could be one of the extensions I use, but never found
| the cause. Google's own note-taking app, Google Keep, was
| crashing the browser on Google Chrome:
| https://support.google.com/docs/thread/9482426?hl=en
| millimeterman wrote:
| I disagree about Chrome. It's absolutely not perfect, but
| considering its sheer complexity - browsers are probably
| comparable to an operating system at this point - bugs are
| fairly rare and performance is quite good.
| frank2 wrote:
| Considering its sheer complexity its is indeed well-executed.
| I just wish I didn't need something that complex to read a
| document on the internet.
| literallycancer wrote:
| If you just need the driver and don't care about the fluff, you
| don't need GeForce Experience AFAIK. Same for Adrenaline.
| duncanawoods wrote:
| > Nvidia GeForce Experience
|
| My god what a bad experience... to update my graphics driver I
| am first forced to log-in which would be bad enough but then
| also solve two captchas and then for some reason these frequent
| driver updates are multiple gigabytes in size. I have no idea
| what the hell they are doing.
| smabie wrote:
| Ehh, this isn't really true. You only have to log in once
| (not every time) and the drivers usually clock in at around
| 600mb, not multiple GBs.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I boot up my windows machine maybe once a month; I'm not
| sure what the login timeout is, but it seems to be at most
| that. I always have to log in. My password is something
| like "fuckyounvidiayoupieceofshit".
| duncanawoods wrote:
| Yep, same. I dual boot and only rarely use Windows.
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| All of my "worst" softwares that I use daily have alternatives
| that are equally as bad if not worse IMO or will be a huge pain
| to switch to, so I still "love" them by comparison.
|
| Lastpass + Authy - main frustration is helping wife use them -
| her usage is less frequent so she needs help each time. Also they
| don't sync reliably so adding new accounts can be painful.
|
| Anything that starts automatically on boot by default, slow to
| launch, or has a separate "installer/updater" that is constantly
| annoying me (looking at you Adobe everything)
|
| Alexa - only listens to me; doesn't cutoff quickly enough when
| someone tries to issue a new/improved command or dismiss a
| response
|
| So many posts on here about X not working on Y system where Y is
| not a money maker for X. Yes, you are an afterthought.
| yeah986 wrote:
| Windows 10
| aklemm wrote:
| What do you dislike about it? I enjoyed Linux desktop for many
| years, and then spent almost 10 years on OSX enjoying that, and
| now I've been on Windows 10 for a couple years and find it just
| fine. It's completely out of my way, doesn't crash, and so far
| updates haven't eaten my data.
| non-entity wrote:
| I would like Windows 10 a lot more if it didn't ship with
| adware / spyware.
| eps wrote:
| It's not better than Windows 8.1 in any dramatic way, but
| it's chokeful of junk than no user wants - ads, telemetry,
| forced updates, the whole OS-as-a-service angle, etc. You
| don't feel like you _own_ the machine anymore. It 's like you
| bought it just to let Microsoft to do as they please with it.
|
| Then, there's also the UI that is just... awful. Touch-
| oriented white-on-white macro bullshit for people with poor
| vision. It's a smaller gripe and easier to fix, but still.
|
| Windows 10 really feels like something that Microsoft decided
| to stuff down everyone's throat just because they were in
| position to do so. It clearly shows that MS treats users as a
| cattle, basically. You can moo all you want, but that won't
| change a thing. If you don't think it's true, look at LTSB
| (or what it's called now) - that Windows 10 edition for
| people who are _really_ paying. Can 't piss them off, so - no
| ads, no Windows Store, no Cortana or any other crap just
| gushing out mainstream Windows releases. So it is perfectly
| possible for MS to release reasonable OS editions _and_ they
| readily recognize their bundled junk for what it is, it just
| they don't give a fuck of what unwashed grey masses want.
|
| So, yeah, Windows 10 _is_ the worst piece of software. Not
| because it 's lacking in the tech department, but because of
| a fundamentally rotten and disrespectful attitude towards
| their users on Microsoft's part.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| What stops you from just buying LTSB? I believe we pay $130
| per employe per month for Windows enterprise and the entire
| office suite. In my opinion, it's a pretty good deal.
| listenallyall wrote:
| >> What stops you from just buying LTSB?
|
| Microsoft -- it doesn't sell those versions to
| individuals (or even small companies without Volume
| Licenses).
| listenallyall wrote:
| Agreed. Win 7 was the pinnacle in terms of stability, UI
| pleasantness, staying out of the user's way -- overall
| usability. Other than WSL, every new "addition" in Win 10
| is a negative.
| haolez wrote:
| OneDrive for Business. You can't move folders with more than 5000
| files in it (including subfolders). This is by design. The
| Windows 10 app is atrocious. It fails more often that not. It's
| built on top of SharePoint, which brings a lot of confusing
| features and configurations that makes no sense to someone just
| looking for a way to store the company's files.
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| Printing.
| ypcx wrote:
| ConsoleZ on Windows that I use with Cygwin, being on one hand the
| best terminal app for Windows, on the other there were things
| that were driving me insane. The main project seems to be sort of
| abandoned, so I eventually fixed them myself[1].
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/youurayy/console/releases/tag/1.19.0-pers...
| mellow2020 wrote:
| Do you know ConEmu? It has pretty extensive configuration and
| is under active development. Though I am not that much of a
| console user so I wouldn't know the pitfalls, if any, I just
| love it because it's so configurable, and it's been very good
| to me.
|
| https://conemu.github.io/
| ElMono wrote:
| Another option worth trying is Microsoft's Windows Terminal.
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
| jacekm wrote:
| If you are willing to fix stuff by yourself I can recommend
| Babun[1]. It's unmaintained but still works. Its biggest
| problem nowadays is running Cygwin update - some urls are
| obsolete and you need to substitute them.
|
| [1] https://babun.github.io/
| brentis wrote:
| In summary:
|
| Docker: crash o plenty Service now (bloated forms system on .net
| or slower) Teams - UI, no sizing of window, spyware (look it up)
| One Drive/ SharePoint (ugh - group of us said we would take pay
| cut to not use) Finder - anything but. (How is a file in past 30
| days and not recent that I made 5 seconds ago?) Photoshop? Nobody
| mentioned here. Adobe anything... OSX Mail - particularly Big
| Sure flavor Itunes Connect SAP Concur
| podgib wrote:
| G-Suite
|
| Google Slides makes me want to cry every time I have to use it.
| Google Docs isn't much better. They're poor web versions of
| office software from the 90s.
|
| Google drive is a disaster of product. Uploading and finding
| files are both incredibly painful.
|
| Google sheets is fine for simple stuff, and I get why people use
| it, but there's far better alternatives. For anything moderately
| complex it's a dog.
|
| I can't stand the gmail interface, but I can at least see why
| some people prefer it. It's the one part of the suite that isn't
| far inferior to its competitors.
| techslave wrote:
| you are mistakenly judging g suite on the individual product
| requirements. eg how a spreadsheet should function. that's not
| what g suite is.
|
| all features are MVP and the main selling point is being
| collaborative.
| podgib wrote:
| Fair. I also find the collaboration tools clunky and annoying
| to use.
|
| When judging it as a whole, I find it worse than judging
| individual components. For example, sheets on its own is a
| decent tool; sheets as part of the suite is dragged dow by
| the rest.
| tzury wrote:
| Most frustrating first: 01) Atlassian entirely.
| nearly broekn, far from elegant and far too many times broken.
| 02) Slack. using it since communication is a must.
| Yet, noisy, using search too many times (left menu poor
| performace) 03) npm. oh lord. miss the old plain
| vanilla Javascript days.
| afpx wrote:
| The entire AWS web console.
| d3nigma wrote:
| Operating systems and browsers in general
| tqwhite wrote:
| Twitter on the web. The worst program I have ever used. Jumping,
| twitching, changing so I can't read. It is torture.
| puranjay wrote:
| One of the worst apps I use regularly has to be Google Play
| Music. The UI is horrible enough, but it also randomly deletes
| tracks from my library - including my _own_ tracks that I
| recorded under my own name. And sometimes the tracks will show up
| again randomly. The worst is when tracks don 't show up in my
| Songs list, but if I put it on shuffle, these tracks will start
| playing.
|
| I don't know what's the status now, but Spotify India had too
| small a library when it was first launched. Otherwise I would
| have made the switch
| raffraffraff wrote:
| YouTube music makes GPM look amazing
| sheinsheish wrote:
| oh man and the recommandations are so bad
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| recently gotten worse, it's started giving me a huge list of
| top 40 stuff that doesn't jive with my tastes
|
| and on the web/desktop version you only get like 4
| recommendations, but the mobile gives you a whole fistful.
|
| seems like abandonware mostly. too bad its replacement
| (youtube music) is complete garbage. the web version can't
| even cast.
|
| somehow at google we went from "mobile first" to "mobile
| only" and i guess only old guys like me care? it's just
| terrible. the new google podcast web interface also does not
| support casting. i'm not sure how one wing of product
| managers at google can't talk to the other to make sure their
| products just support basic standard google media
| infrastructure?
|
| i tried spotify and it was also terrible. so not sure what to
| do.
| nishs wrote:
| Also try Apple Music.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Apple Music on iOS os fine. It's terrible on macOS. Every
| action feels like quicksand.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| It's implemented as WebViews with Ember.js inside, it's not
| built with the native macOS UI like everything else in the
| app so there's always fundamental incompatibilities (like
| no click-and-drag between Apple Music and your playlists).
| everdrive wrote:
| I tried briefly to put all my music in Google play (years ago,
| now) and had a similar experience.
|
| It was terrible, and I felt like I couldn't find certain tracks
| very easily. I wasn't sure if this was accidental, or not. Do
| you know why tracks are deleted from your library?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I had no issues with disappearing tracks, but Google did
| helpfully replace much of my uploaded music with the
| "censored" versions, asking me to re-upload songs it threw
| away. Thanks, I'll go dig up that hard drive any day now.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| CUDA.
|
| The GPU is the new Floating Point Coprocessor. (I think they are
| likely to be integrated on CPUs even for high performance use-
| cases, eventually. Although this is only happening very
| slowly...) It should be be programmed with vendor-neutral CPU
| instructions and if need be, trapped by the kernel and emulated
| or delegated appropriately. But all of this should be totally
| transparent to the user application.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| +1
|
| And when you need to profile something, get ready to set up
| custom drivers, custom kernel flags, and recompile 30 GB of
| libraries and source code for that custom cupti.so.
| stakkur wrote:
| Microsoft Windows. Followed closely by Microsoft Outlook,
| Microsoft Teams, and...god help me...SharePoint.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Microsoft Teams.
|
| I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic
| features that messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-
| Talk, real multi-window (even with the recent "pop-out"
| functionality), and its UI is all the worst modern trends. You
| cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS
| styles, etc).
|
| Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and
| every time my computer sleeps/wakes it sits in offline until you
| open the main window from the system tray. Those are year+ old
| bugs.
|
| While it is often updated[0], the Team's priorities leave a lot
| to be desired. Adding new gimmicks and tie-ins while ignoring the
| dilapidated state of the core software itself for two+ years now.
|
| [0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-
| mic...
| blcArmadillo wrote:
| I actually like the UX of Teams' chat more than the other
| common chat services. Main reasons: 1. There is
| whitespace between messages 2. My replies are a different
| color and right justified
|
| Most of the other common corporate chat apps just look like a
| wall of text to me.
| sershe wrote:
| +1. I don't actually have too many complaints about the
| features, other than perhaps that the download management is
| intrusive and inconvenient, but it's SLOW. So SLOW. It's mind
| boggling how much CPU it uses and how much it stutters when
| merely typing.
| gcatalfamo wrote:
| And why the hell is it not native
| jl6 wrote:
| Can someone explain why Teams is so totally unable to
| interoperate with _anything_ else, to the point where you can't
| save messages, you can't export chats, and you can't even print
| them! The lock-in is intense.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| That is a bit of a strange statement. There is an API, there
| is an app store full of the Trello's and Jira's of this
| world. Chats copy and paste or share to Outlook just fine for
| me. You can even use Flow to save all of your chats...
| literally anywhere that has a connector. The lock-in is
| imaginary.
| ack210 wrote:
| I've never felt that anything has captured the essence of what
| it's like to use Microsoft's software better than the URLs
| Teams generates for meetings scheduled via Outlook. Why use
| something like Zoom's 9 digit meeting numbers when you can have
| a 250+ character url complete with long seemingly random
| strings and a url-encoded JSON object?
|
| The plugin will try to hide this behind a "Join Teams Meeting"
| hyperlink, but on more than one occasion I've had the link
| converted to plaintext, leaving the recipient with no idea what
| they're supposed to do. So every time before sending a teams
| meeting from Outlook I have to extract the mess of a URL and
| manually paste into the location field.
| prepend wrote:
| It's weird how OneDrive does the same thing. Why not use the
| Dropbox and gdrive method of some uid? Obviously a super long
| url with paths and query string variables is better, right?
|
| Microsoft is pretty cool with training though. During the
| training they said this wasn't an issue because the url gets
| converted to the file name on display. And we'd only ever
| want to paste urls into outlook or teams, nowhere else.
| retromario wrote:
| My biggest annoyance with Teams is its shitty search
| functionality. You search for a topic you discussed with a
| colleagues a few weeks ago. It'll show you the direct hits, but
| there's zero way to jump to that point of the conversation and
| see the context, the message before or after.
|
| It's so infuriating.
| robin_reala wrote:
| The worst thing about Teams is that for no reason they've
| decided to roll their own notifications framework on macOS that
| doesn't respect Do Not Disturb settings. That's the absolute
| minimum a notifications system should do: stop appearing when
| told to.
| Terretta wrote:
| And is considered a full fledged "window", a decision
| bringing a whole host of annoyances if you have multi screens
| and/or do window management.
| kingnight wrote:
| There isn't anything that gets me so flustered throughout the
| day than this.
|
| I would turn these banners off, but as far as I can tell,
| there is no way to get badges to show up on the icon (only
| other cue to remind me people want to talk to me) without
| these banners.
|
| I really wish there was a 3rd party client that was all
| native that I could use. Teams is definitely the worst part
| of my software stack.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Same on Windows. Doesn't use Windows 10 notification system.
| This means sometimes I get a proper Windows notification and
| at the same time a message and instead of the two
| notifications to be stacked they are overplayed on top of
| each other.
| jasonv wrote:
| Spark, the email client, has this same problem on iOS. When I
| go for a run I DND my iPhone but Spark keeps sending
| notifications. I ended up deleting it and settling for gmail
| on the phone, but in actuality, I resist doing any email on
| my phone because the gmail app is so terrible. Maybe it's a
| "win".
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Odd, that shouldn't be possible on iOS...
| rorykoehler wrote:
| We switched over recently too and it suffers from trying to be
| all things to all people.
| abhgh wrote:
| Tell me about it. We moved from Slack to Teams to cut costs.
| Common story.
|
| Leaves a LOT to be desired.
|
| 1. The UI took the fun out of well, whatever, Slack was/is. For
| some of the common interest channels at work, I see less people
| going to them.
|
| 2. I'm in a group where we frequently need to share images
| (mostly plots) among the members. Sometimes they just
| disappear. Yes. You upload an image during a conversation, come
| back to it a few min later, its not there, and the person at
| the either end of the chat hasn't seen it either. Guess what OS
| I'm on: Windows 10 Pro.
|
| Because of this I've resorted to using the web version of teams
| occasionally, which doesn't seem to suffer from this issue.
|
| 3. This one is actually baffling: when I try to upload an image
| in 2 different conversations (one after another), the second
| one complains the file already exists. This is during _upload_.
|
| 4. Inconsistent UI: did you know you could reply to individual
| messages from the Android app for Teams? Doesn't work on web or
| the windows desktop client. So when I am catching up on a
| conversation, I occasionally switch to the mobile app to reply
| to specific messages.
|
| So that's my workflow: the Teams website opened on my laptop
| browser for most of the messaging, Teams running on mobile, in
| case I need to reply to specific messages, and Teams running as
| an application on my laptop for video/screen sharing calls.
|
| 5. You cannot specify a Download folder. Yes that's a thing in
| 2020. [1]
|
| But, yeah, "costs". I miss Slack.
|
| [1]
| https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
| [deleted]
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Don't forget posting a link rarely embeds properly. Posting a
| YouTube video doesn't show a player like practically every
| modern chat platform.
|
| Oh and the most insulting part is how they treat its users like
| children. You can use giphy to embed a gif but if you search
| for any "bad" words it says no results. Search for fuck, and it
| hides them. Everyone using it is an adult, why apply this
| conservative boomer "nO sWeARIng alLOweD"?
|
| To top it off if you instead copy paste a giphy url it doesn't
| embed that properly either!
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Everyone using it is an adult,_
|
| It's the primary platform for entire schools, now. Whoopee.
| So you're going to get lots of new child protection features
| (that fail at their intended purpose) added.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| There is pretty fine grained control for admins over that
| kind of stuff though.
| dylz wrote:
| For the last bit, giphy basically lies to serve ads and
| tracking. A giphy .gif URL is not actually a .gif, or an
| image file even.
| w_t_payne wrote:
| +1 for Teams.
|
| It's horrible.
| hinkley wrote:
| As a recent Teams user, I don't know if Teams is bad on its own
| merits, or if the conception is just enough different from
| Slack that I can never quite figure out whether a feature
| exists and where it's hidden.
|
| Generally I don't have much time to mutter about Teams because
| some Atlassian monstrosity is busting my balls.
| arprocter wrote:
| I noticed earlier even if Teams is switched 'off' in Startup
| Apps it'll still run when Windows starts unless you tell it not
| to under settings in the client
| 0xfaded wrote:
| To kill the Linux version you need to run "killall teams" in
| a loop because it keeps trying to respawn itself
| nisse72 wrote:
| Teams is utter shite. Especially if you're forced to use the
| web version (because linux). This goes for all of Office365.
| imhoguy wrote:
| There is desktop version for Linux. It is still web app,
| probably wrapped as Electron app, but it integrates a bit
| better than plain web tab.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Windows version is also a Web app in electron
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Same with Slack
| nisse72 wrote:
| Yes but ms gov cloud is unfortunately not supported.
| GordonS wrote:
| +1 for Teams. Video calling actually works great, but gods the
| UX is appalling! It's just so confusing and inconsistent.
|
| As you said too, the whole thing is buggy. Sometimes screen
| sharing doesn't work unless you reopen the app, for example.
|
| The wiki feature is crap (at least the web version, I haven't
| tried the desktop version of the wiki) - formatting is a mess,
| markdown support is practically non-existent, it's buggy as
| hell, and so unbelievably slow.
|
| If they had a feature freeze and concentrated on overhauling
| the UI and fixing the bugs, it could actually be a great
| product... but as it is, it's loathsome.
| zarify wrote:
| The screen sharing one has bitten me a couple of times. I
| record live classes for students, and we've had occasions
| when someone who was away goes back to the video and it's a
| black screen with me nattering away as if they can see it :/
|
| That said, apart from the shitty embedding support and their
| channel management, I REALLY like Stream and using it for a
| video lesson platform. The captioning is quite good even for
| my fast talking, Aussie accent and jargon.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Company switched to it from Slack recently for cost cuts.
| Generally a huge downgrade of user experience: channel threads
| are mess to read after a while of being away; no way to
| lookup/mention other users in private chats; chats and channels
| is like two separate apps- constant switching between them;
| activity feed is not always up to date; messages once red on
| desktop are still left in notifications on mobile; chats list
| is dynamic - very easy to choose wrong chat by mistake; code
| snippet editing is unintuitive.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Teams is absolutely awful. I also have all the crashes,
| undelivered notifications, shitty UI, but whatever, that's par
| with Microsoft.
|
| I have an issue where if there's any sound in my room in a
| meeting, it reduces the volume of someone else talking to me
| even if my mic is muted. My workaround is to only keep one
| earbud in and constantly listen for cars driving past outside
| so I can crank up the volume in advance. So Teams is literally
| painful to my ears.
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| I miss ICQ.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I am going to go against the grain and say I rather like Teams.
| Video calls work really well. Voice calls are clear. Screen
| sharing occasionally doesn't work as some have noticed, but
| restarting the call seems to fix it. It is so much better than
| Webex though. I think it is still suffering from the teething
| troubles of trying to bring so many things under one umbrella,
| Sharepoint (which already had groups), Skype for business,
| Onedrive and chat. This has created some quirks which will need
| ironing out.
|
| The killer feature really is that it is a dream to deploy for
| admins who already had AD. I pushed it by group policy and sent
| an email telling people to log in with their existing Office
| credentials. I can't remember what I did with macs, I think I
| may have just told users to grab it from the appstore.
|
| Think of all the admins faced with having to move their whole
| company to home working with no notice for Covid-19, you can
| see why Teams is an app that has found it's moment. Teams has
| been the saviour of many companies during the crisis. I'm sorry
| but minor UI niggles (which I personally don't find
| problematic) just pale into insignificance.
| ImaCake wrote:
| I've been using Teams for some work and I also agree that
| it's pretty good. I really like the integration with
| OneDrive/Sharepoint so you can build up a project of files.
| Using remote files on local instances of MS office products
| is seemless and super easy to do. Of course, the version
| control isn't as good as something like git, but my coworkers
| are not familiar with git and don't have any interest in
| learning it. So at least with Teams I can have my work live
| on a Team's folder/repository thing so anyone else at my job
| can access it when they need to, complete with version
| history!
| fmpwizard wrote:
| Like many others, we were also forced to use it at work, hard
| to pick the worse part of Teams but a big one is how slow it is
| from the time I click the "reply" link until I can actually
| type a message. So many times I click, start typing and then I
| notice it missed about 4 to 5 letters, and I don't even
| consider myself fast at typing. Oh, and how you upload a
| file/image, need to wait until it is fully uploaded but after
| that you still need to click the "Send" button to actually post
| the file. It's definitely an enterprise kind of app, one that
| makes sure you take forever to do anything.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| + 1. While in a chat if I open a voice call with that person,
| it creates a new instance with the chat frame closed. If I want
| to navigate into a channel and open a file, if I go back to the
| discussion the file is closed, I need to navigate again. It
| should have multi-window, multi-tab capabilities.
| olav wrote:
| +1 for MS Teams. I am forced to use it at work, too.
|
| Terrible audio focus on a single speaker, it really forces you
| to speak like on these old CB radios where you had to say
| "over" every time you were done talking.
|
| The single window UI follows the mobile-first trend but is
| awfully inefficient on my three monitor setup, even more so
| with screen sharing.
|
| Plus, our admins lock the whole MS Office 365 down so that
| there are no APIs or third-party plugins allowed. Data in it is
| just trapped.
|
| Such a waste of human potential.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| >Plus, our admins lock the whole MS Office 365 down so that
| there are no APIs or third-party plugins allowed. Data in it
| is just trapped.
|
| To be fair, that's a _feature_ from team 's perspective. If
| your admins are worried about sensitive data leaking out at
| all, and refuse to have a whitelist of approved 3rd party
| integrations, then that's on them. Imo it's a good thing to
| allow admins to do.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| The feedback from our users has been that the audio quality
| is amazing. Sounds like a hardware problem to me. Perhaps you
| are one of those annoying people who won't wear a headset in
| a conference call, so we all get to hear your background
| noise?
| [deleted]
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Don't forget Outlook randomly crashing due to the Teams "add-
| in" failing, and Teams thoughtfully reinstalling and re-
| enabling add-in whenever it gets updated.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| Rearrangement of messages in channel based on threads, forcing
| replies that weren't in thread out of order.
|
| A UX that encourages replying out of thread because it's too
| darn confusing.
|
| Unable to quote messages on desktop, but you can on mobile.
|
| Unable to be signed into more than one Team. Have they never
| heard of consultants? At one point last year I had 4 separate
| Teams I needed to be signed into. Microsoft's solution have
| different Chrome profiles (Yep, Chrome, not Edge) for each one.
| My laptop only has 16GB of ram, so that didn't last long...
|
| Super unclear UX around document viewing. I open a file in
| Teams and if I have write access I am instantly saving all
| changes. So many times I've shared a document for feedback and
| then had to recover the original version from Sharepoint
| because people changed a lot of things without Track changes
| on.
|
| Based on Sharepoint. 'nuff said.
| kevsim wrote:
| > Rearrangement of messages in channel based on threads
|
| Wait, what? Do threads move when they get replies or
| something?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Yup. Straight to the bottom of the page. Did you know,
| they're pushing it into schools? Every time a student asks
| a question, all other students lose track of which pieces
| of work they've still got left to do.
| zarify wrote:
| I've use Teams every day in education for a couple of years
| now.
|
| My favourite file access "feature" of Teams (I verified it
| was in fact working as intended, at least until the pandemic
| and the warts started getting more obvious) was that class
| teams had read/write access by default for all files in a
| team. This meant every student in a class team could modify
| what you uploaded by default. Of course fixing this required
| opening up the team in Sharepoint and fiddling with
| permissions, totally something every teacher is expected to
| figure out right?
|
| Not really a software feature, but their update rollout style
| is awful as well. Announce features 4-8 weeks in advance of
| rolling out patches. Inconsistent rollouts, so my home
| desktop might have the latest feature patch, but my work
| laptop won't (I was around 4 weeks out of sync at one point).
| Manual checking for updates won't apply the latest patches.
| Meanwhile their consultants in education are crowing about
| all the new features or bug fixes.
|
| I actually like some of the feature set, and it's very useful
| in an educational setting now they've brought some of the new
| features online (3 months later than would have been useful
| for the pandemic lockdown in my part of the world, but oh
| well), but enough frustrating elements that I'm constantly
| supporting workmates in its use.
| LandR wrote:
| I hatE Teams.
|
| Search is broken in it and if you scroll back a few days on a
| conversation it just stops loading messages...
|
| It's just awful.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Scroll down and up again to get it to trigger loading more.
| You'll lose your place, though, because it will immediately
| jump, then unload what it just loaded...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Peoplesoft Financials.
|
| I travel once a quarter on average for work. I probably spend
| about 6 hours on vouchers afterward, between account resets, etc.
| My employers rules are pretty brutal, but the system is
| impossible.
| wecloudpro wrote:
| Any apple product.
| tqwhite wrote:
| Oh yeh!! Also, Trac.
|
| There is literally nothing good about that issue management
| program except that it is free. It is impossible to understand
| what you are looking at. It is just awful.
| landtuna wrote:
| tmux. I mean, I know it's better than screen, but I'm a user of
| emacs for 25 years, and I still can't get used to the tmux
| keymapping. I'm reluctant to customize them because I want my
| fingers to do the right thing on an unfamiliar system. And so
| many of the defaults are just bad, like constantly renaming
| windows when you run commands (without making a config file
| change). Even the command line arguments are different for the
| same parameter depending on which sub-command you're using.
| tome wrote:
| > I'm reluctant to customize them because I want my fingers to
| do the right thing on an unfamiliar system
|
| How often will be be on a system which _does_ have tmux but
| doesn 't allow you to download your own tmux.conf from GitHub
| (or wherever)?
| klysm wrote:
| I'm very grateful for iTerm - I tried to use tmux on a few
| occasions but it's just so bad with the defaults. With some
| software it's fine to have bad defaults but the occasions I
| need tmux is on random systems where I don't want to have to
| ship dot files around.
| [deleted]
| geogra4 wrote:
| Oracle openair
| nprateem wrote:
| Finder on Macs. I've used a Mac for over 5 years and it still
| amazes me how unintuitive it is for basic tasks like copying and
| pasting files, creating new directories, etc.
| oneplane wrote:
| I've been using it for 25 years but don't seem to have the same
| problem. Across macOS Finder, Windows Explorer and the likes of
| KDE and Gnome's file managers most of those tasks are
| identical.
|
| Copying and pasting are universally hotkey+c and hotkey+v as an
| example. Creating a directory is context->new in all cases.
|
| Some changes were weird for a small period of a few days, like
| when moving from Classic Finder to Mac OS X Finder where the
| priority of hotkeys for new windows vs. new directories
| changed. Or when in Windows the address bar got a lower
| priority than filesystem abstraction of user directories (at
| which point the purpose got mixed). Same with Gnome2 to Gnome3.
|
| I'm curious to see if it's "hard" as-is, or "hard" when you
| come from one single environment with a lot of experience that
| is hard to adapt to something that is not visually identical.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Is it possible to cut and paste files/ folders in Finder?
|
| I feel like I try every few years and am unable to do it.
| oneplane wrote:
| I think it's in the standard system-wide list, let me
| check.
|
| Edit: yep, it's in the 'common' list:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236
|
| They are also visible by simply clicking a menu or context-
| menu which shows the shortcuts on the right side at the
| end. Alternatively the built-in Help is actually usable as
| well as searching for menu items (click help and the text
| field will also interactively point to menu items with a
| big floating arrow when hovering over the search result
| with your cursor - that functionality works in all native
| HIG-conform apps, and it is dynamic so it also works when
| you have stuff like a "history" menu in the menu bar in a
| browser).
| g_airborne wrote:
| Instead of using Cmd+V to paste, use Cmd+Option+V to cut
| from the original location and paste. I like it because it
| lets me postpone the decision to copy or cut until the very
| end :)
| notoriousarun wrote:
| Please Check Alfred https://www.alfredapp.com
| cheeze wrote:
| I found alfred to just be bloat after they improved
| spotlight. I have it installed but rarely actually use it at
| this point.
| qmmmur wrote:
| any good alternatives to your problems?
| m0xte wrote:
| Not the OP but I use a shell and "open" most of the time.
| [deleted]
| Razengan wrote:
| I don't mind the Finder, but I do use Path Finder now and then:
|
| https://cocoatech.com
| nikisweeting wrote:
| I've been an avid TotalFinder user for years, it fixes pretty
| much every gripe I have with Finder:
|
| https://totalfinder.binaryage.com/
| mindhash wrote:
| I can't find anything easily. I am used to moving around by
| tweaking path ( win explorer). Really miss that
| vosper wrote:
| If you know the name of what you're looking for Spotlight
| search (cmd+space) can be a quick way to find it. Not always
| helpful, depends on what you're trying to do
| silveroriole wrote:
| This. It's easier to swap to a terminal and mkdir than figure
| out where in hell the new directory button is. I constantly
| paste files into the wrong directory because I'm actually
| 'focused' on a dir that's one above or below where I think I
| am. The noise it makes when you paste sounds like an error
| noise. It seems to take delight in re-ordering my files in
| random ways every time I open the window. I still haven't
| figured out how to simply order the list in date order when I'm
| trying to upload a file. The whole thing drives me insane.
| rapind wrote:
| The privacy invasive, security nightmare, resource hog, commonly
| referred to as the web browser.
| pagade wrote:
| Any poor sole here using Google Jamboard? Half cooked product
| released out ever!
| thibautg wrote:
| TrustArc cookie / GDPR / tracking popup. It is filled with all
| the possible dark patterns.
| runjake wrote:
| Whatever the OS I am using is, be it macOS, Windows, or Linux.
|
| It always feels like I'm working against the OS now that the OS
| philosophy has shifted to being all things to all people.
|
| If it's Windows or macOS, it wants to advertise to me, or prevent
| me from launching certain apps or features.
|
| If it's Linux, it's trying to shift me into some ill-thought out
| use pattern. This is fixable, but at a significant time cost
| customizing things. Actually, I'm being unfair to Linux,
| environments like XFCE pretty much stay out of your way. But I
| don't like where the mainstream DEs are going.
| enitihas wrote:
| macOS Finder. It is hard to fathom how bad a file explorer could
| be if you have used only windows and linux file explorers. Finder
| is astonishingly bad. Default search is global, it means
| searching while you are in a folder will search across all
| documents. This can be changed, but search is even then far worse
| compared to windows or linux.
|
| Sometimes Finder simply won't show certain files, and you need to
| do a mv from terminal to another folder, where you can see them
| in finder.
| mindhash wrote:
| +1 I hate it. Probably only thing about my mac
| EmmEff wrote:
| +1
|
| I am quite comfortable dropping to a terminal to run `ag` but
| this shouldn't be necessary. Such wasted potential in a GUI
| file manager and seemingly no chance it'll ever be improved.
| tornato7 wrote:
| This is a very good answer, even getting to your user root
| directory is a pain in finder, I have usually go to terminal
| and run 'open .' to get anywhere.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| ooohh - is that how I do it :-)
|
| thanks !
| JimDabell wrote:
| There are plenty of ways to get to your home directory in
| Finder that are easier than opening Terminal:
|
| - If this is where you most commonly want to get to, Finder
| => Preferences... => General => New Finder windows show <home
| directory>. All new Finder windows will open there
| automatically from now on.
|
| - If you leave the above setting on its default, new Finder
| windows open ~/Documents. Hit [?]|. Or if you have the path
| bar switched on (View => Show Path Bar), double-click your
| home directory in the path bar.
|
| - Drag it into the sidebar or go to Finder => Preferences...
| => Sidebar and tick your home directory.
|
| - Drag it into the dock.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Drag your home folder to the finder sidebar.
| Someone wrote:
| Or into the toolbar (https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-
| help/customize-finder-to...)
| qppo wrote:
| cmd + shift + h, to go home
|
| cmd + shift + g, to go to any directory.
|
| browsing the menu bar for keyboard shortcuts is useful.
| larrydag wrote:
| SAS. I do data analysis everyday and it is just so antiquated to
| modern data needs. The organization I'm with is on a path to
| sunset and move to Python. Can't happen soon enough for me.
| nabogh wrote:
| I work as a control systems engineer and ClearSCADA is my biggest
| pain point.
|
| Crashes all the time on both the front and back end. Bloated mess
| of user displays that you have to drag and drop elements on by
| hand. Oh and let's not forget that I'm usually interacting over a
| slow RDP connection.
| rainforest wrote:
| Gradle. I appreciate that it is a fast build system, and a lot of
| it does just work. When it doesn't just work it's a nightmare.
| The config language is completely opaque and undiscoverable
| (Kotlin might fix this, but I ran out of patience to understand
| how Gradle works a while ago) though.
|
| In many respects I think the fact there's a commercial version of
| it is a sign that it's lacking in the UX area.
| [deleted]
| zanmat0 wrote:
| Ryver, an unheard of, abominable clone of Slack.
| 236dev wrote:
| I haven't ever used it. Why don't you like it? Is it buggy or
| lacking features
| hinkley wrote:
| npm will be the official reason I stop writing Node code at some
| point. It does not know what it wants to be and it disagrees
| violently with concepts from the tools it pretends to emulate.
| This whole lock file debacle makes me angry and I'm not close to
| the only one.
| technotarek wrote:
| iOS
| XCSme wrote:
| Probably no one will say Stadia. And it's not because it's good.
| tclancy wrote:
| I'm definitely disappointed as well. I want to love it, but too
| often it undercuts it's own value proposition by being
| pixilated, jaggy and slow. And we have a gigabit connection
| plus Google WiFi, so there's not much excuse.
| westoque wrote:
| JIRA.
|
| The most complex simple system I used. Simple in theory (Project
| Management) but complex in implementation.
| manicdee wrote:
| The main problem with Jira is inexperienced admins deciding
| they have to use all the bells and whistles all the time.
|
| Replace your IT team before you replace Jira.
|
| My Jira experience is that I couldn't live without it.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| It amuses me that the applications meant to promote agile work
| practices are presumably written in an agile environment, are
| almost universally shite.
| regularfry wrote:
| It is _really, really hard_ to do better than a whiteboard
| with some cards on it.
| maxk42 wrote:
| So... Trello.
|
| No wonder Atlassian bought it.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Not sure why people do not use Redmine more. Its totally
| awesome, free, cross platform, stable as much as software can
| be, can run hundreeds of projects, thousands of users without a
| glitch, and OTB is trivial to use. With plugins it can be
| anything you want.
| manquer wrote:
| Not to mention it is _slow_ as molasses(on the cloud at-least)
| and the UI is unwieldy with way too many clicks required for
| the simplest of actions.
|
| I am sorely tempted to build a frontend so that I can avoid
| wasting so much time on it. Just a better frontend not yet
| another project management tool that will not be bought by
| management.
|
| I don't understand the slowness at all, even if their backend
| and architecture is Fubar to fix at this point without massive
| work, they could have handled it in UX with non blocking
| loading states, backgrounding actions which were slow etc?
| jasonhansel wrote:
| I would pay good money for a Jira CLI, preferably with an
| ncurses UI to make it easy to navigate.
|
| (Edit: also, every program for managing Bluetooth devices
| ever made.)
| manquer wrote:
| There is go jira cli https://github.com/go-jira/jira not
| sure how good it is
| bberenberg wrote:
| Ran across https://getbodo.com a while back. Dev is a really
| nice guy and cares about improvements. I think it has a long
| way to go, but what software doesn't.
| xellisx wrote:
| And there is the on prem and cloud versions. And they are not
| feature matched.
|
| One of these days I want to look into setting up Phabricator.
| kevsim wrote:
| > And there is the on prem and cloud versions. And they are
| not feature matched.
|
| This is my daily nightmare. We're building a competitor to
| Jira [0] so naturally we want to allow people to import their
| issues from Jira into our tool. Integrating to Jira cloud is
| a reasonably good experience. But Jira server? Total chaos.
| We needed to dig up an ancient OAuth1 implemention just to
| get users authenticated and it didn't get any better from
| there.
|
| 0: https://kitemaker.co
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| I moved my small team to phabricator after a couple years of
| using GitHub and Asana. We all loved phabricator from
| previous companies.
|
| Not only was it really easy to set up, but I think we all
| enjoy our tools a lot more now too. I still contend that
| phabricator rules the code review world: nothing else is as
| good. The projects feature feels just as good as Asana but
| without the slowness.
|
| We do still use GitHub just as a dumb master (phabricator
| imports from it), but I'll likely invert that soon enough to
| use GitHub as a mirror.
| nawitus wrote:
| Interesting, as I have the inverse experience with
| Phabricator (and the related tools in that ecosystem like
| arcanist). I don't like it, and nobody else seems to like
| it.
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| Jira and Graylog compete for the top spot in the list of
| software with search functionality I'm too dumb to use
| properly.
| jacekm wrote:
| Yeah, you need to master JQL to be able to find anything.
| Once you do that however (and once it's configured properly)
| Jira is actually quite enjoyable to use. I had a couple of
| episodes with other issue trackers and I always missed Jira.
|
| And since we are complaining about search feature I must
| mention Confluence. Like I've said you can query Jira with
| JQL but in Confluence you're out of luck.
| vosper wrote:
| Yeah, JQL is the key, and they do a good job with
| suggestions and completions in the query editor. One of the
| few parts of the Jira UI that I actually think works pretty
| well.
|
| Don't get me started on editing workflows...
| dron01 wrote:
| Agree. Way too slow and too many clicks. Ajax loading is so
| annoying when its slow.
| vosper wrote:
| And they don't seem to prefetch anything. Why aren't they
| loading my labels, team members etc in the background as soon
| as the main data has loaded, so they're ready to go when I
| want to edit a field?
| tootie wrote:
| JIRA is heavyweight, but I've never been remotely satisfied
| with any of the competitors. If your team is more than 5 people
| or you have multiple teams, you're absolute going to need all
| that sophistication from JIRA. If you ask me what's the worst
| piece of software I use every day today, it's Asana.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| > If your team is more than 5 people or you have multiple
| teams, you're absolute going to need all that sophistication
| from JIRA.
|
| Can you give more detail? I've been on larger, successful
| teams without JIRA, and every time JIRA _was_ introduced it
| was a net-negative for real productivity.
| raun1 wrote:
| ClickUp
| seehafer wrote:
| Slower than Jira in my experience.
| regularfry wrote:
| This just isn't true. We have a bunch of teams, all on Jira,
| and _none_ of the inter-team coordination happens via Jira,
| mostly because One Size Fits Nobody. We 're not using much
| that's Jira-specific for the intra-team stuff either.
| randomdata wrote:
| I'm not sure it is worthy of the rewrite requirement, however.
| It doesn't seem to offer any functionality that is actually
| useful, save giving some people jobs pushing boxes around.
| giantzoc wrote:
| Jira was a complete nightmare at my last position. I am still
| convinced it was the PM's poor implementation so they would
| have the box pushing job. Everything was customized and it
| took me weeks to learn the workflow.
| ajauntyshark wrote:
| I use JIRA for personal projects and at work. It's coming to
| the point where JIRA is so slow that I'm willing to invest the
| time to migrate my personal projects over to something else. If
| I simply want to add a label to a ticket it can take an
| unreasonable amount of time. It's mind blowing when I'm paying
| a decent amount for seats.
| jjav wrote:
| gmail, by so many orders of magnitude.. Email interface designed
| by people who seemingly have never tried to read email.
|
| Threading is completely broken, filtering is broken, compose
| screen is unusable.
|
| At previous companies I've had to use gmail but was able to use a
| sane email client via IMAP so it was almost ok (although still
| somewhat broken as gmail doesn't handle IMAP correctly). At
| current work they disable all access except via the unusable
| gmail web interface. So definitely gmail is the worst I have to
| put up with everyday.
|
| jira would be a distant second, but no comparison.
| creativeembassy wrote:
| Gmail was so groundbreaking when it first came out in 2004.
| AJAX was barely a thing, and Gmail used it in spades
| everywhere. I remember it being mindblowing when you didn't
| have to wait for full page refreshes for simple actions.
|
| My problem is that it's remained frozen in time for years.
| Yeah, they tweak the visual design every few years. But so many
| other email clients have far surpassed it, and they've done
| nothing. Other than create Google Inbox. Which was amazing. And
| then Google shut it down. [?]
| _1tan wrote:
| Can you recommend a client that surpassed it?
| ypcx wrote:
| There was this Google Inbox thing which was loved by many
| including myself. A true successor to Gmail, in my opinion.
| But Google scrapped the project.
|
| Edit: clarify
| millimeterman wrote:
| Inbox may have been a good concept but the actual software
| was horrible. The site took ages to load and was painfully
| slow.
| hacker_newz wrote:
| I agree about threading, but how is filtering and compose
| broken?
| nikisweeting wrote:
| I actually love Gmail's UI, I find the tagging, filterting,
| important/not-important, different colored starts, etc. all to
| be extremely powerful.
|
| Anytime I try to switch to another client I find myself missing
| those features and end up going back.
| doomrobo wrote:
| I hate to say it, but Signal.
|
| Signal has consistently been a pain to use for my moderately
| sized (<15) friend group chat and for 1-on-1 threads too.
|
| Messages sometimes don't arrive or arrive out of ordered and
| appear in the wrong order, scrolling up has random jumping
| behavior, opening the chat in iOS causes my audio to stop
| playing, there is explicitly no way to back up any of the chat,
| copying multiple messages is broken on desktop, search is super
| slow and search result previews have been corrupted for as long
| as I can remember, sharing links through the iOS share menu
| causes the app to behave super weird or just crash (my mom can't
| share links with me through Signal), you can't mute conversations
| on desktop (IIRC there have been two PRs implementing this
| feature in the last 2 years; both not pulled), mutual
| verification is so frustrating that I literally got yelled at
| when trying to explain it to my parents, I sometimes can't take
| pictures from within the app, when I can take pictures the
| viewfinder is half the resolution of the actual camera and
| everything looks blurry, the most recent app update causes a
| several second lag whenever I open the group chat, and I am
| throughly convinced that every issue I've mentioned is so low
| priority for the people running the show that they won't get
| fixed for a very long time. At least we have stickers now.
|
| Seriously though I believe in what Signal is doing and will
| probably continue to use and suggest the app. But it will hurt
| every time I do it.
| jeanvalmarc wrote:
| Weird, as anecdotes go I've always thought the signal iOS app
| was very polished. I just checked three of those issues (camera
| access, shared links, search) on an iPhone 11 Pro Max and I
| wasn't able to reproduce. I suspect Signal may not have a QA
| group large enough to test on every phone/environment.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| Yes, I've given up trying to report these issues as it's been
| years since my initial reports and I've never seen the things I
| reported fixed.
|
| Signal desktop has been broken for almost a year for me "Error
| handling incoming message" is shown instead of each message.
| Theres no easy way to transfer messages between devices out-of-
| band when migrating to a new device (e.g. via encrypted binary
| backup blob). Messages constantly fail to arrive when they're
| sent, I often get them days after the person sent them. etc. I
| could go on...
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Signal desktop "works" for me in the sense that I _usually_
| receive messages, but probably about once a day one of my
| conversations suddenly displays somewhere from 20 to 70 lines
| of "Error handling incoming message." In talking to people
| this doesn't seem to be in response to any actual activity by
| the person on the other end.
|
| I feel like I've seen Signal problems appear and get fixed,
| like for a couple months the desktop client just wouldn't get
| half or so of the messages I received, and then one day it
| seemed fine again. But the long deluges of "Error handling
| incoming message" have been present, as far as I can tell,
| for the entire time that I have used Signal Desktop, perhaps
| 3 years. I guess I consider it a feature now. :/
| vin047 wrote:
| Can't comment on the rest of your criticisms but you can
| (finally) backup chats to iCloud - features' been present for
| the last few months.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Gated behind enabling two factor authentication for some
| reason. Which I'm never enabling because (A) it's impossible
| to turn back off and (B) you need a second Apple device for
| the second factor.
| vin047 wrote:
| By two factor you're referring to the Signal PIN? If so, A)
| is there any real reason that you'd need to turn it off? b)
| where does it say you require a second Apple device?
|
| Looking at the documentation though, I think I should
| retract my statement about Signal featuring iCloud
| backups... according to the docs 1) you can only transfer
| your data from one device to another and 2) the
| transferable data doesn't include message history [?]
| mdaniel wrote:
| Have you reported that behavior, preferably with a debuglogs
| attachment in their GitHub tracker (or even the community
| forum)?
| dmurray wrote:
| That would be a fair question if GP had complained about one
| specific but niche bug. It's disingenuous when he complains
| about multiple problems, at least some of which don't need a
| detailed bug report to discover, and specifically points to
| two PRs addressing one of his complaints which weren't
| merged.
| evo_9 wrote:
| Google Chat for our teams internal slack replacement.
| creativeembassy wrote:
| Dropbox. I've used it for a decade, but now it's slow, bloated,
| and takes over CPU and memory like there isn't a single other
| program I need to run... and I was paying $20 for the privilege.
|
| But a few weeks ago I switched to Syncthing[0], and it's the best
| software transition I've ever made. Opposite of everything
| Dropbox is now: fast, simple, and I don't even notice it running
| in the background. Seamless setup, and FREE. (So good, you're
| gonna want to donate anyway.)
|
| [0]: https://syncthing.net/
| encom wrote:
| I hate Dropbox for different reasons, and switched to ownCloud
| about 4-5 years ago now, I think. Running it on Digital Ocean,
| and backing up to Tarsnap. Absolutely love it. I get that it's
| not for everyone, but it's really not that hard either.
| vin047 wrote:
| What's the verdict between ownCloud and NextCloud?
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| My problem with Dropbox is the client would silently fail and
| stop on my Windows boxen. As this was easiest (UI-wise) way to
| share docs quickly between my wife on her windows box and my
| various Linux/Windows boxes, this was a deal breaker.
|
| Also moved to Syncthing. And equally happy.
| rawrmaan wrote:
| Haven't heard the term boxen in a long time :) any chance you
| were part of the Distributed Computing/[H]ardOCP community?
| ajb wrote:
| I've been looking into a few of these (need to replace
| keybasefs before zoom kills it)
|
| - syncthing does one thing well. However you need to be your
| own server admin. Which is great if you are or your company
| will do it for you, but I don't want to do it for my personal
| stuff.
|
| - syncany is exactly what I want, but it didn't get out of
| alpha, the team apparently didn't make money and have stopped
| maintaining it, and it still has some scary bugs, although
| probably my needs are somple enough that they woulnd't be
| triggered.
|
| - cryptomator looks good itself, but you need something else to
| do the cloud storage part, which ideally supports webdav.
| Unfortunately the davfs2 crashes my linux box and the other
| alternatives don't seem to be much better.
|
| - nextcloud and owncloud again want you to be your own server
| admin
|
| - the guys benind tahoe-lahfs have a reputation for solid
| crypto and reliability, but it is complex to run.
| privatestorage.io were going to do a managed version, but it
| doesn't seem to have materialised yet.
|
| - There are solutions like internxt and ipfs where everyone
| stores everyone else's files. I'm not sure I trust that not to
| go down without warning.
|
| - proton are supposed to be coming out with a protondrive,
| which hopefully will have an open source client, although
| locked into them.
|
| - There are proprietary ones like tresorit and spideroak, which
| have closed clients. I may have to grit my teeth and use one of
| them.
|
| - A bunch of others I didn't evaluate yet.
|
| What I want is for someone else to do the server admin part
| (availability and backups), but without my trusting them with
| my keys, which I only use with open-source client code. I don't
| mind paying a reasonable amount, but apparently this is hard.
| vz8 wrote:
| Dropbox may be unwieldy, but the document version history has
| been a lifesaver.
|
| I'd love to find something for an environment where there are
| many people (many uncomfortable with technology) sharing a
| folder full of code, documents, and media for a project --
| something that acts as a robust safety net. OneDrive is ok but
| has failed us multiple times (failed to upload, failed to sync,
| filed to notify).
|
| Can Syncthing handle anything resembling an enterprise (ok,
| enterprise-light) setup? The last time I tried it on Android
| (~2 years old), it was painful, and that was just for my own
| personal backup, not a shared environment.
|
| Thanks
| butz wrote:
| What's your plan for off-site or cloud backups?
| RMPR wrote:
| Not OP but nothing prevents you to configure Syncthing with a
| VPS.
| ajb wrote:
| True, but syncthing does not encrypt at rest. There is an
| open issue about it [1], but it appears that the assumption
| that you want to personally control all the machines you
| run it on (and therefore can trust the admin of those
| machines) is deeply embedded in its architecture.
|
| [1] https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/109
| Yoofie wrote:
| The problem with Syncthing for me is that there is no bi-
| directional syncing on Android if your files are stored on an
| SD card. You need to resort to rooting your phone or messing
| with a bunch of hacks to overcome this issue.
|
| Otherwise, its great.
| spapas82 wrote:
| That ain't true: just create your sync folder in your sdcard
| under Syncthing's application-specific folder, e.g. /storage/
| 014A-7323/Android/data/com.nutomic.syncthingandroid/files. It
| is mentioned in the faq and works great for me (two way
| sync).
|
| I'm using a Moto g5 plus phone with android 8.
| nathan_f77 wrote:
| The main reason I use Dropbox is to just have a cloud backup of
| all my files so I don't lose anything. It doesn't look like
| Syncthing serves the same purpose, and syncing files to AWS S3
| is also a lot more expensive than Dropbox. (2TB costs $46.99 on
| AWS S3, vs $11.99/mo for Dropbox.)
| paganel wrote:
| I've still havent't figure it out how to open an email in a new
| tab with just a single click when inside GMail. It. used to be
| possible, of course, like all HTML links (by clicking the middle
| button on my mouse, for example), but since 3 or 4 years (at
| least) that feature disappeared. I'm still upset about it and
| that is why I consider GMail "the worst" piece of software I use
| everyday (it's also because I don't use that much "different"
| pieces of software).
| Recursing wrote:
| What about ctrl+click ?
|
| I use that often, my only complaint is that it you close the
| main window, for some mystical reason it decides to also close
| all the other tabs opened that way
| paganel wrote:
| Thanks for that, sincerely. Still looks a little bit awkward
| because it only opens the email message in sort of its own
| thing (no menus like in the "main" tab) but it works.
| [deleted]
| frank2 wrote:
| Google Chrome. (I use Chrome because all of the other browsers
| are even more annoying to me.)
|
| Technically speaking most of the code that seriously annoys me
| runs _inside_ my browser, but IMO it was never realistic to hope
| that the myriad creators of individual web pages or web sites
| would collectively create a good experience for me: my only hope
| was for the makers of browsers to make choices different from the
| choices they actually made.
|
| Clarification: the web browser makes a pretty good framework for
| creating user interfaces, IMO, but it is a bad way for an end
| user with preferences sufficiently similar to mine to access
| writing on the internet. Sadly it is the _only_ way to access
| most of the writings on the internet.
|
| Written documents can be extremely simple: just a sequence of
| characters in some well-known encoding, but most of the actual
| documents of interest to me on the internet are essentially
| programs that require execution in what is essentially a "virtual
| machine" as complex as any general-purpose operating system.
| adventurer wrote:
| Google Chrome is constantly creating temp. files that
| eventually take 40GB+ of one of my drives until it is
| completely full. Every few months I needed to manually remove a
| ton of files. It drove me back to Edge, which I thought would
| never happen.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Have you tried Firefox?
| [deleted]
| ufmace wrote:
| Scrolling through the top few dozen posts here, I see a bunch of
| commonly used development software. IMO, all of those do have
| some issues, but none are remotely comparable to the horror show
| that is internal software at medium-large corporations. I've used
| a bunch of these, actually worked on improving a few, witnessed
| the development process for others. There's no point in naming
| them, because people outside the company will never use them.
|
| These types of programs are uniquely terrible for reasons
| described in other posts - the people doing the development, and
| setting the priorities for development, have no connection to the
| people who need to use it day to day. Different offices, rare
| personnel crossover, systems specifically designed to discourage
| direct communication. They're usually big and complex enough that
| a ground-up redesign is either impossible, or will inevitably
| gather enough poor management decisions to be about as bad as
| before by the time it becomes remotely practical to use.
|
| I recall one place where a critical application required to
| record data and deliver it to clients in a realtime application
| was based on an X-Windows application running in Windows XP using
| the one X-Windows manager that sort of worked there. Yes, really.
| I know it's a super weird combo, but it's what we had. I ended up
| moving into a related software department, and got some behind
| the scenes info. Turned out that there was just one guy left who
| was still actively coding for it, already past retirement age,
| but kept on anyways out of desperation, because nobody else was
| willing to touch that codebase. There was a project to build a
| more modern replacement application, with all of the usual
| corporate bloat and ever-slipping deadlines. It wasn't great, but
| at least it ran natively on Windows 7 and had a better UI. I
| think they moved over to it entirely after a while, but I left
| that place before that move was finished.
| akshaydeshraj wrote:
| Slack. Hands down.
|
| No issues with the actual product per se, which is quite nice.
| But the experience while using Slack goes bad exponentially as
| the team scales if certain usage guidelines are not put in place.
| deforciant wrote:
| Yeah, hate slack as well. I'm working on 16 core/32gb machine
| and it's still slow, switching between workspaces takes ages
| and sometimes it completely stops working. The only way then to
| fix it is do ps aux and kill a bunch of processes... I really
| wish they paid someone to rewrite their app!
| rob74 wrote:
| Same app, but different reason: resource usage! Completely
| unacceptable for something you have to have running in the
| background the whole time...
| omosubi wrote:
| What usage guidelines need to be put into place for it to be
| successful?
| sakisv wrote:
| Not a guideline, but a feature I'd like to have:
|
| Allow me to disable any kind of indication that someone is
| talking, not just to me (red dot) but anywhere (blue dot).
| Not everything needs my attention and having the tray icon
| change its state is distracting.
|
| You can mute the channels, sure but why not make that as an
| option in the notifications settings?
| glerk wrote:
| You can disable the notification badge:
| https://slack.com/intl/en-
| ca/help/articles/201355156-Guide-t...
| codingdave wrote:
| Don't @channel every single time you say something would be
| my rule #1.
|
| After that, it would be to set the expectation that Slack is
| not actually real-time. We defined a 2 hour response
| expectation on my team. We don't want people stopping work to
| check Slack every few minutes, we want to do our jobs.
| biztos wrote:
| I don't have a serious answer, but having used Slack for a
| few years in my previous job I have a half-serious one I
| actually applied for a while:
|
| * Don't use Slack after 10am.
| hashhar wrote:
| I had to write a personal bot way-back-when which listened to
| all my DMs and mentions and let the people know that I'll get
| to them before the end of the day and that if I still didn't
| they could call me up if something urgent.
|
| It's important to set the expectation that chat isn't meant
| to be synchronous.
| gitowiec wrote:
| Confluence by Atlassian. It is very slow, it gets stuck with
| bigger documents, or has no useful editor tools (eg marker) and
| it constantly had issues and bugs. Sincerely Jira is another
| piece of crap.
| dogmatism wrote:
| Cerner
|
| Literally kills people every day
| axegon_ wrote:
| * Jira - over-engineered, unnecessarily complex and utterly slow.
|
| * Zoom - worst video conference product __EVER__. Can't say a
| single good word about it.
|
| * AWS admin console - same as jira, at least it's not slow.
|
| * VPNs in general annoy me beyond reason too. At this point I use
| a raspberry pi to connect to the vpn and I use it as an SSH
| access server (and tunnel respectively).
| dmd wrote:
| I use Zoom because it's _better_ than literally any other video
| conference product I've ever used, and I've tried a LOT of
| them.
| fish45 wrote:
| Have you tried meet.jit.si? The quality is pretty bad but
| it's way easier to use than zoom which kind of has a
| reputation for it. I got my dad set up with jitsi in hardly a
| minute whereas zoom took around 10 minutes
| dmd wrote:
| Yes. As you point out, the quality is abysmal.
| odensc wrote:
| Discord is somehow the best video conferencing tool I've ever
| used.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| The magic of aws is is to use the command line tools and sdks.
| Retardo_88 wrote:
| What do you not like about Zoom, and which video conference
| product would you recommend instead?
| xenospn wrote:
| If I had it my way, I'd just use calendar invites and
| FaceTime. The quality is 10x everything else.
| arrayjumper wrote:
| My experience with zoom has been on linux.
|
| I hate the fact that it requires you to install the client
| for it to work.
|
| The client randomly spikes in cpu usage while running in the
| background. Multiple times I've also had this issue where
| I'll try to right click the zoom icon in the system tray and
| quit zoom, causing it to hang and reach 100% cpu usage on one
| core.
|
| I also don't like that on clicking on a zoom video call link
| sometimes the browser to client redirect works but sometimes
| it doesn't and you need to then go back and click the link
| again.
|
| For me, Google meet works much better.
| leephillips wrote:
| Same here (ububtu, dwm). I can use every other web-based
| video conference platform with no problem (jit.si, google
| meet, and others) but zoom eats all memory and crashes the
| browser. The app refuses to run, complaining that I don't
| have ibus installed (I removed ibus, because it's one of a
| hundred unnecessary layers of crap added by distro
| maintainers).
| imposterr wrote:
| I haven't personally tried this on Linux, but on macOS at
| least, the feature to take calls in the browser is hidden
| behind a bunch of dark patterns.
|
| Take a look at step 2 here: https://it.umn.edu/services-
| technologies/how-tos/zoom-join-t...
| errnoh wrote:
| I was planning on mentioning Zoom as well. The Linux client
| especially is insanely bad, iirc it also drew itself on top
| of everything.
|
| My suggestion on Linux at least is to use the web client.
| Just get the url, do a 's#/j/#/wc/join/#' to it and open it
| in browser of your choice. You'll need to copy the password
| manually, sometimes it might require captcha etc, but at
| least it's somewhat usable.
| tyldum wrote:
| Zoom can be browser only, it just uses dark patterns to
| lure you to install the client. The link to join by web
| appears when all others fail...
| literallycancer wrote:
| But why would you use it when it has like 1 second
| latency. Google Meet is kind of meh but works. Or pure
| audio calls like Telegram or something like Mumble (which
| has rooms, you can host a server yourself, is open source
| and doesn't suck).
|
| I can see why salespeople prefer video calls but for
| technical topics it just doesn't make sense.
| axegon_ wrote:
| Some of the major problems: 10% of my CPU and ~1GB memory by
| simply launching the application on linux. Absolutely
| ridiculous. Can't remove passwords from my personal meetings,
| controls are sluggish as hell, like I'll click to either turn
| on or off my camera and have to wait for 3-4 seconds for it
| to actually do anything. Multiple smaller problems piled on
| the side as well.
|
| People love to shit on Skype but even the web version of
| Skype behaves better than zoom for me. Google meet, Skype,
| meet.jit.si - I take any of those over zoom.
| odiroot wrote:
| > Zoom - worst video conference product __EVER__. Can't say a
| single good word about it.
|
| I was forced to use Skype in the early 2000s. Believe, it was
| much worse.
| cure wrote:
| > * Zoom - worst video conference product __EVER__. Can't say a
| single good word about it.
|
| There are tons of problems with Zoom, no disagreement there.
| But the heaping pile of crap called Skype for business formerly
| known as Microsoft Lync is a lot worse. It doesn't even run on
| Linux...
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Helm
| stunt wrote:
| Jira & Microsoft Teams
| cs702 wrote:
| The software that powers almost every appliance or device on the
| "Internet of Things" that I've ever used.
|
| The manufacturers of those appliances and devices really do NOT
| know how to develop usable, secure software.
|
| See https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en for egregious
| examples.
| michele_f wrote:
| CheckPoint VPN client: pure evil.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| The Apache big data suite (Hadoop/Spark/Yarn/Hive/HDFS/etc).
|
| In several years of big data engineering work, I've believe I've
| seen only one application that couldn't be refactored into a
| simple multi-instance framework-free program. People use the big
| data frameworks as glorified distributed-job management tools,
| and the resulting systems are more fragile, more complex, more
| vulnerable to weird version compatibility errors, and less
| efficient.
| Copyrighted wrote:
| I never used the Apache big data suite daily.
|
| I had a project in college where we tried to add a feature to
| Hadoop. Half the battle was spent trying to pass their test
| cases and figuring out why we couldn't build the program due to
| dependency issues.
|
| Even though we were trying to build w/Hadoop's docker image,
| each team member had issues unique to them. The documentation
| definitely didn't help.
| caffeine wrote:
| Would be very interested in a blog post / further reading about
| this!
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| It would be an instant hit. Can't wait to read more.
| Aperocky wrote:
| I had prior industry experience.
|
| Eventually it was realized that getting a larger box and just
| spend sometime to think about cleaning the data is enough. But
| that didn't sound as good.
| riku_iki wrote:
| You can also think about two layers infra: have large big-
| data storage, have simple logic of extraction of
| aggregated/filtered data from it, and do complex work on your
| large box within single process.
| Aperocky wrote:
| It still made sense to store stuff in Hadoop - but it
| didn't make much sense to do anything further than
| extraction in the cluster, which we definitely did try with
| Spark + mllib.
| whack wrote:
| Are there any good articles or blog posts that describe a
| "multi-instance framework-free" design that would replace a
| Spark application? I'm having some trouble conceptualizing your
| suggested alternative, but am very interested in learning.
| ddmichael wrote:
| Someone had to mention this.
| codr7 wrote:
| And I belieieve you. I designed my own on-disk log based format
| for my last two prorojects.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Related: https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos15/workshop-
| program/p...
| theptip wrote:
| > People use the big data frameworks as glorified distributed-
| job management tools
|
| Do you have any tools you like for job management without all
| the distributed-systems baggage?
|
| I've heard folks advocate for Make for this kind of thing,
| perhaps that or some other orchestration tool that deals with
| job dependency graphs would be the unix way? (Having a nice way
| to visualize failed step would of course be a plus; a common
| use-case is "re-run the intermediate pipeline, and everything
| downstream".)
| walleeee wrote:
| There's a bunch, at various levels of abstraction and
| slightly different primary use cases: Luigi, Dask, Airflow,
| Celery, Dagster, Prefect, Metaflow, Snakemake, Nextflow, etc
| lixtra wrote:
| Have a look at airflow.
|
| However, so far I didn't switch from rundeck & make.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Airflow is really limiting in some non-obvious ways:
| https://medium.com/the-prefect-blog/why-not-
| airflow-4cfa4232...
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Netsuite trumps everything, I have fond memories of JIRA as well
| Urinal_Pube wrote:
| PTC Creo. My company specifically omits it from the job
| description because they know they'll get fewer applicants, yet
| they refuse to change. The go-to response is "you just need
| training". Training that no competing CAD programs require.
| tnsittpsif wrote:
| * BMC Remedy (Oh my god. Utterly disgusting experience.)
|
| * Atlassian JIRA (never really got the hang of it.
| Overcomplicated.)
|
| * Workday (the web app is sloooooow.)
|
| * MRemoteNG (The best SSH client on Windows. Also the worst. Alt
| + Tab navigation annoys me to hell!)
|
| * iTunes on Windows (Why is it like the way it is even in 2020!?)
| non-entity wrote:
| > Why is it like the way it is even in 2020!?
|
| Isnt apple trying to kill iTunes in general?
| mancerayder wrote:
| Outlook for Mac.
|
| The menu options are a mix of redundant 'possibilities' from
| where you find things, 'icons' that don't seem to be obvious in
| what they represent, the GAL is broken (w/ Office 360 cloud), the
| Outlook connectivity becomes disabled when I disconnect from VPN
| and I have to click on "Send/Receive" under I think "Tools" once
| to re-enable it, the list goes on.
|
| Over 15 years ago a senior dev I worked with walked up to our
| (Sys Admin) communal bookshelf, and noticed a book called Outlook
| Annoyances. He remarked, "Hm. That looks like it's way too short
| of a book", something I've found hilarious to think about ever
| since.
| findso wrote:
| Google Doc Search
|
| Google Doc search is totally useless
| billconan wrote:
| gimp
| kleiba wrote:
| Interesting. Granted, I don't use Gimp every day but I do use
| it regularly and the more I do the more I like it. Nothing is
| perfect, of course.
| yewenjie wrote:
| What do you use GIMP for? Also, have you given Glimpse a try?
| mch82 wrote:
| It's come a long way and slowly keeps getting better. Hopefully
| it'll exit this list someday :-)
|
| I wish I knew how to get design feedback to the GIMP team in a
| way that would be appreciated & that people might take action
| on. I also wish they'd rename it something like "Image Lab" so
| it would be easier to promote at work.
| caffeine wrote:
| Bank apps (eg. HSBC's consumer app). For the most part they are
| buggy, crashy, slow, lacking in features, and fail to do useful
| things (like support copy paste, export transactions to CSV,
| email transaction, etc)
| mightyscouse wrote:
| HSBC app _shudder_ , I rage quit the bank because of it,
| transferred everything over to Monzo. Truly infuriating and I
| think it's the only bad app review I've ever left.
| dive wrote:
| Apple Xcode. Not because it is bad-bad or worst. Just because all
| other software I use is better. Firefox, Things, Emacs, etc.
| Perhaps, this is what is happen when there are no alternatives. I
| know about AppCode from JetBrains, but in many cases (like, build
| system, dependency management, etc.) it behaves just like a
| wrapper on top of the Xcode or requires to launch Xcode itself.
| baoyu wrote:
| Spotify on Mac.
|
| It's Chromium-based, so, of course, it's slow. Specifically,
| search is excruciatingly slow, removing an album from your
| library redraws the whole page, and--most frustratingly-- as soon
| as you lose internet connection, your perfectly nice and readable
| page get replaced with "Artist pages are not available offline".
| It's a list of tracks and albums which is updated (at most, on
| average) several times a year, why require connection to continue
| showing it?
|
| Not Mac-specific, but extremely weird: sometimes Release Radar
| playlist has tracks by wrong artists with the same name. I don't
| think a recommendation model would use names instead of IDs, so
| it probably means that track was first ascribed to a wrong
| artist, and that's... even worse?
| crazygringo wrote:
| I think you have a problem with your Spotify installation.
| Maybe try removing it and re-installing it?
|
| I use Spotify all the time on my 2016 normal-powered Macbook
| Pro and I don't experience any of your performance problems.
| Everything's lightning fast including search, and I've got
| 10,000's of tracks saved in 100's of playlists.
| tarasmatsyk wrote:
| Hard to pick between Skype and buggy apple mail client that
| splits my screen every few minutes just to fetch new emails
| (super annoying)
| huseyinkeles wrote:
| Home Assistant.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I still love it and it makes my life easier
| but it just breaks all the time, especially when I update it.
| jhot wrote:
| Home Assistant is amazing but you really have to read the
| release notes for every release to make sure something you're
| using isn't going to break. I appreciate the improvements it
| has seen over the years but it's definitely not something you
| can just update and assume all is well.
| huseyinkeles wrote:
| I think it's also lack of manual and automated testing. Few
| weeks ago one of the updates just broke the iOS companion
| app. (For everyone).
|
| I had to rollback to my latest daily snapshot and didn't
| update until they fixed it, which took around a week.
| leafario2 wrote:
| Eclipse. Killer feature being a live expressions viewer for my
| embedded target.
| caditinpiscinam wrote:
| Google Maps on android. It has such a hostile UI: zoom out too
| far and the thing you're looking for disappears. Zoom _in_ too
| far and it disappears again.
| tex0 wrote:
| GnuPG
|
| I'm surprised that it hasn't come up, yet. But it's CLI interface
| as well as it's data model are truly archaic. It's near
| impossible to properly invoke from other programs or scripts and
| most users don't even understand half of it's "web of trust"
| concepts.
|
| This is especially bad since small mistakes can easily break your
| security model.
|
| I don't want to rewrite GnuPG, I want a fresh start without all
| the cruft.
| eddiegroves wrote:
| Atlassian's Confluence (Cloud). A showcase for the decline in web
| based software forced by the move to make everything a SPA. A
| terrible new editor experience. Slow JavaScript heavy page loads.
| No persisted markup editing.
| surajs wrote:
| Chrome
| enitihas wrote:
| What is so bad fundamentally about chrome apart from the Google
| telemetry.
| yewenjie wrote:
| Memory consumption.
| drewboo wrote:
| Genuinely curious, has this always been the case for Chrome
| or have the evolution of features brought this on?
| yewenjie wrote:
| What's stopping you from using another browser?
| 08-15 wrote:
| That would change the brand in the answer, but not the
| spirit.
| frank2 wrote:
| It is possible for Chrome to be better than all of the other
| browsers and still be the worst piece of software GP uses
| every day.
|
| If you like the web, then maybe this does not compute for
| you.
| michele_f wrote:
| CISCO WebEx: the worst.
| daviddaviddavid wrote:
| ServiceNow.
|
| Perfect storm of abysmal design/UX used to represent a bloated
| and confusing underlying information architecture. It's possible
| that I'm using an poorly configured version/instance of the
| product, but good lord, I'll do anything I can to avoid using it
| at work.
| dmd wrote:
| Same. We have it at my job (at a very large healthcare org) and
| I will do almost anything to avoid using it. It's so bad that
| there are people who avoid it entirely, preferring to use their
| own instance of some other tracker, who then have an assistant
| whose FULL TIME JOB is to copy stuff back and forth between the
| two.
| cpach wrote:
| And this is the ITSM system that has the best reputation of
| them all AFAIK :)
| lelc wrote:
| Seems like all tools in this space (IT service management) are
| terrible. At work I have to use HP Service Manager. Just
| thinking of it makes me nervous. Made for bureaucreats by
| bureaucreats!
| jimbob45 wrote:
| It's a super competitive industry so everyone is bloating their
| product trying to shove as many features as they can in without
| thinking how that affects performance. AI/ML is public enemy
| number one here.
| hacker_newz wrote:
| Every time I complain about ServiceNow someone pops up saying
| "You're just not configuring it correctly". A service that
| relies on the user to configure properly (or rather, have an
| in-house expert) is not a good service.
| b00palicious wrote:
| Hi! Designer at ServiceNow. Would love to know a bit more about
| what you're going through. Specifically what products you're
| having a hard time with and maybe a perspective on what we
| could do to improve. I'd be more than happy to take it back to
| the team(s).
| jl6 wrote:
| Not the previous poster but my experience of ServiceNow is:
|
| It's slow.
|
| It's rarely clear which button you need to advance a
| workflow.
|
| Some buttons take irreversible actions, others lead to
| further information, and these two types of buttons look
| identical.
|
| The point about a confusing underlying information
| architecture is spot-on.
|
| Pages can have multiple tabbed sections which is
| disorienting.
|
| The approval interface makes it very unclear what you are
| approving without looking it up elsewhere yourself.
|
| You have to right click on a column header to find the export
| to Excel option?
|
| Asterisk apparently means 'contains' when searching, unlike
| search syntax in any other product.
|
| No apparent way to search all fields in a list - you have to
| choose which field specifically to search in.
|
| URLs are long and ugly.
|
| Users are displayed as FirstName LastName, which is friendly
| and all but there is no way to disambiguate when two users
| share the same name but have a different User ID - and
| clashes like these happen _all the time_ in my company of
| >100k employees.
|
| I've no idea how much of this is fundamental to the product
| and how much is the fault of our configuration. There may be
| useful features of which I am unaware, but the UI does not
| invite discovery of these if they are there.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| Thanks for speaking up, and for personally caring about your
| product. But many (most?) of us have concluded that providing
| feedback at this level tends to have no observable impact.
| b00palicious wrote:
| I appreciate the candid reply. I'll infer what I can with
| the comments that roll in.
| osrec wrote:
| I have nightmares about ServiceNow from my banking days.
| Requesting anything via it was like trying to solve a weird
| puzzle - you need to fill every cryptic field in just right, or
| `computer says "no"`!
| mectors wrote:
| Windows, usability is worse than MacOS, installing software is
| more complex than Android and iOS, code is worse than any flavor
| of Linux but still somehow it is default for most people with a
| 9x5 job.
| ju-st wrote:
| Kodi on Raspberry Pi: slow loading menu, random hangs & crashes,
| getting bluetooth LE working was a adventure, BLE remote key
| presses are only recognized after pressing them several times
| when waking up, SMB file access not reliable (mounting a smb
| drive and then accessing it works much better), plugins are flaky
| at best (youtube needs api keys, youtube cast with extra plugin
| works mostly (when it does not crash), amazon video stutters on
| SD video, satellite TV is much less reliable than VLC on Windows)
|
| I'm still using it because the alternatives come with their own
| drawbacks (usually high price but still having enough quirks).
| Bnshsysjab wrote:
| I moved from Kodi to Plex and haven't looked back. Granted I
| don't use Pi devices (my tv supports plex natively) it works
| much better than I ever found Kodi to
| bobbean wrote:
| I'd say basically half the software I use on a fairly regular
| basis is usually pretty much garbage. Corsair Link is a clunky,
| laggy mess. It takes like 10 seconds to open it, every single
| time, even if it's running in the background. I have yet to use
| good software for "peripherals". Google home devices are cool
| when they work, but I've gotten frustrated with them too many
| times that I barely use them. I could go on.
| billysielu wrote:
| Amazon Music on Android because every time I open it it shows a
| full screen ad for their music subscription service.
| techslave wrote:
| 1 git
|
| 2 jira
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Jira. Slow, clunky, stupid syntax, no integration with source
| control, idiotic menus everywhere, and a laggy UI that makes zero
| sense.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| iTunes because it adds indirection I don't want and yet somehow
| is required for a variety of tasks I'd rather do from my file
| system or browser.
| kvgr wrote:
| Android Auto on my Passat b8... I made it work 2 times. Any other
| tries it just restarts again and again... I tried to reset
| csctory settings on a car. Uninstalled android auto app... I will
| be forced to use sygic with mirror link.
| cocoa19 wrote:
| There's a lot of essential software that I would improve, but I
| wouldn't replace or rewrite:
|
| - Nautilus. Serious usability/UX problems.
|
| - Audio in linux. Ubuntu often selects the wrong audio devices
| (microphone, headphones, speakers)
|
| - Linux sleep/hibernation. System hangs are common.
|
| - GRUB. The interface is dated, why is it so ugly?
| m01 wrote:
| Re: GRUB: Have you looked at rEFInd, assuming you can use UEFI?
| http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind has a screenshot and docs,
| although you may also wish to refer to your distro's docs (e.g.
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/REFInd)
| jsrcout wrote:
| Anything with the word "Enterprise" in its name or description.
| Any "Enterprise" search system will be useless or unusable [0].
| Any "Enterprise" file/document management system will be a
| nightmare in any possible way.
|
| [0] I once had a page-long note file on literally _how to search
| for a document by title_ in $HUGECO 's search application.
| Because it took me 3 hours to figure it out the first time. Not
| exaggerating. It would probably be easier to operate a DNA
| editing machine than this thing.
| axaxs wrote:
| Anything by Atlassian, but specifically Jira and Confluence.
| rainyMammoth wrote:
| Slack. It has become the ultimate annoying piece of software that
| I feel I always need to check and keep an eye on. There is an
| untold expectation to always be online. It's using the same
| mechanism as Facebook to keep you hooked with dopamine.
| billysielu wrote:
| Android because 2-3 years of updates is far shorter than the
| lifespan of the hardware.
| [deleted]
| rhizome wrote:
| All of Google's Android apps, by far.
| indit wrote:
| Calibre eBook reader. Wonder why no competition from other in
| ebook reader apps.
| econcon wrote:
| 1. Gimp (not natural to use it, so UX/UI sucks)
|
| 2. Freecad (difficult, weird UI)
|
| 3. WordPress+WooCommerce (they charge you for as basic as simple
| shipment tracking plugin)
| bribri wrote:
| Service Now
| hinkley wrote:
| I recall reading the Subversion architectural chapter in
| Beautiful Code. In fact it's probably the only chapter that stuck
| with me (there's another IIRC but I can't recall which. My brain
| didn't make an association to the book).
|
| One of my design mental exercises is to try to figure out if you
| could tweak the svn architecture into a DVCS, preserving the
| superior subtree support. I think it could have been, it's just
| that theory and execution diverged.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Bash and its derivatives, I think.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Hands down, it is JIRA. But close seconds include zoom, ring
| central, and slack video/voice calls.
| elviejo wrote:
| - GitHub + why do we centralize issues, documents for a
| _distributed_ version control? + why do we use a a closed source,
| walled garden to develop free software?
|
| - Git + it's a leaky abstraction. + why do we need to know about
| the stash? + why is it that changing to a different branch
| doesn't give any visual clue, even worst it keeps the files I'm
| working on that are not part of the repository yet.
|
| for an academic treatment of the defects in Git read: What's
| Wrong with Git? A Conceptual Design Analysis S. Perez De Rosso
| and D. Jackson. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International
| Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on
| Programming & Software (Onward! 2013)
| recursive wrote:
| 99% of git usage seems to involve one or fewer remotes. Maybe
| multiple remotes is just not that useful.
| zenhack wrote:
| Fwiw, my usual work flow involves 2 remotes, one for the
| project's mainline repo and one for my fork.
| ufmace wrote:
| I frequently have 3+. Github/Bitbucket if it's shared
| there, maybe a original repo if it's a fork I'm submitting
| PRs too. My server if it's something I'm running an
| instance of - I like to deploy my personal services via Git
| pushes. Sometimes a copy of the same codebase on another
| personal computer or two - if I don't feel like pushing it
| to Github, sometimes I'll push and pull between computers
| directly.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| Cmsynergy
|
| The worst version control software known to man.
|
| It is a bloated IBM tool from the 90s, takes 10 minutes copy a
| repo that would take git 5 seconds. It has a lock modify unlock
| paradigm, so if your coworker forgets about a file they were
| working on and they get promoted, you can forget about working on
| your project ever again.
|
| The paradigms are backwards. The project doesn't branch, the
| files do. You make your commits before you do any work.
|
| It's slowly being phased out at my company, but it can't seem to
| die fast enough. A lot of people have built their careers on this
| tool so it's hard to kill.
| _____s wrote:
| Mail.app on macOS. Some macOS apps are really great (Notes or
| Safari for example), but the average quality is poor. Mail, for
| example, is slow, search almost never works, etc.
| Jaxan wrote:
| I have used Mail.app and the default mail app on windows 10 a
| lot. Can you believe that the default windows mail app is even
| worse? Very basic features are still missing after many
| years...
| boulos wrote:
| I remain convinced that somewhere inside of Mail.app someone
| decided to try to speed up search with some approximate index
| or badly rewritten strcasecmp.
|
| Mail not being able to properly find an _exact string match_
| correctly means I had to give up and just use GMail in Chrome
| and on iOS. Once GMail on iOS added IMAP and SMTP, I never
| needed to go back.
| DenseComet wrote:
| I'm also using Mail.app right now and I've been having similar
| issues with search and stuff. Does anyone have any
| recommendations for good desktop email apps on macOS?
| dnh44 wrote:
| Interesting I've always thought mail.app has had amazingly
| good search. I recently moved away from it though because I
| wanted a more flexible workflow and tried a quite a few other
| clients. The "pretty" macOS mail apps had not very good
| search functionality so they were unusable for me.
|
| In the end I went with Mailmate and I'm extremely happy with
| it.
| antepodius wrote:
| Try mutt. Classic, simple, scriptable, it's got everything
| you could ever want!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(email_client)
|
| Depends on your definition of 'desktop', of course ;)
| IlGrigiore wrote:
| I like to use Mailspring [https://getmailspring.com]. It does
| what it needs to do, without too much fuss. The UX is clear
| and I can connect multiple email accounts and use the unified
| inbox without any issue. I am in no way affiliated to the
| product.
| techslave wrote:
| outlook. everything is looks good but littered with bugs and
| exceptionally weak dev teams behind it.
| oneplane wrote:
| I'm also using Mail.app on my macs and while I never had those
| problems I do see people complaining about those things a lot
| and I'm curious what would cause that. Apple's
| radar/bugreport/feedback stuff is hidden so that's somewhat sad
| (but understandable) but maybe it turns out most people have
| the same problem due to similar context (account setup, data in
| use or something...).
|
| The most heavily loaded Mail.app I seem to have is one with two
| MS Exchange accounts, iCloud, a couple of IMAP accounts and a
| single POP account. I generally archive everything older than
| ~10 months out of my inbox leaving a combined 43k messages in
| that virtual inbox 'group'. Maybe people with larger message
| stores trigger some programming fault?
| dschuessler wrote:
| I have a love/hate relationship with Mail. It has exactly the
| feature set and UI I would want from a mail application.
|
| But god, these bugs. Somwhere down the line it became strangely
| slow. It's constantly displaying false values on how many
| emails it is about to fetch. And I accidentally deleted emails
| on more than one occasion without having a clue on how that
| happened.
| dave_sid wrote:
| Apple News
| coronadisaster wrote:
| Android. Very bad for the consumer, from a privacy standpoint.
| Hopefully a plain Linux phone will be my next phone.
| superasn wrote:
| Anything which requires me to use a Google captcha or hcaptcha. I
| generally don't get annoyed very easily but spotting fire
| hydrants and traffic lights just to login into a site to which
| you are a paying customer is plain nonsense.
|
| I've actually decided to move my entire infrastructure from
| Digital ocean to AWS because of this captcha before login
| nonsense (thankfully DO reverted it just in time)
| ColanR wrote:
| I've started intentionally making my answers subtly wrong.
| E.g., if something might look like a fire hydrant, but isn't, I
| mark it positive. I usually have to do it a few times anyway,
| and it makes me feel better to think Google's AI datasets are
| inaccurate.
| quicklime wrote:
| Hah nice, I thought I was the only one who did this!
|
| I've noticed that in the more extreme edge cases, it lets me
| through anyway. Maybe other people aren't paying enough
| attention to notice that there's actually a difficult-to-see
| street sign in that particular square.
|
| Sometimes I feel bad that one day, a Waymo car is going to
| miss a stop sign because of me. But then, I also resent being
| used as a free mechanical turk, and they should know better
| than to rely on random people from the internet to build
| safety-critical systems.
| mastazi wrote:
| In my experience, when I do it slightly wrong it actually
| takes less steps to get through. I guess in the age of Yolo
| v4 and such, doing it "too well" actually makes you look like
| a robot?
| errantspark wrote:
| I can't agree more, the idea that google derives an economic
| benefit from my work makes my skin crawl.
| etrautmann wrote:
| On top of being incredibly annoying, I find it insulting to be
| put to work training algorithms by clicking on the 5th
| iteration of spotting bikes and cars.
|
| Infuriating
| mch82 wrote:
| Yes! Captchas are terrible. Does the support pole count as part
| of the traffic light? How much of the bus needs to be in the
| square for that square to contain a bus? What counts as a
| street sign?
|
| And on top of all that, the frustration that I know I'm not a
| robot the entire time.
| Freeboots wrote:
| I usually dont mind too much, but my god i cant stand the
| slow.... faaaaaaaaaaade........ iiiiiiin.
| Kiro wrote:
| What's the alternative? Why does DO have a captcha to begin
| with?
| sinsterizme wrote:
| Completely agree, but I must hand it to whoever came up with
| this idea. Absolutely brilliant.
|
| "Folks, we need an absolutely massive data set to train our
| text recognition algorithms. We need people on the internet
| volunteering this data."
|
| "Impossible! What could we possibly offer them?"
| mdaniel wrote:
| It may not surprise you to learn that his Ph.D. was on "on
| Games With A Purpose, which are games played by humans that
| produce useful computation as a side effect" and is same
| person behind Duolingo
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_von_Ahn
| max0563 wrote:
| Apple CarPlay is an absolute piece of garbage. It always hangs on
| the "connecting to iPhone" screen. I just want to see my nav.
| Infuriating.
| recursive wrote:
| The Android one completely disables my phone. The car never
| acknowledges that anything is happening. The worst is when it
| does this when I just want to charge the phone in a car.
| oehtXRwMkIs wrote:
| I find it more infuriating that car makers like BMW make you
| "rent" CarPlay despite already paying for all the hardware.
| They make you pay extra for a luxury vehicle to overcome their
| garbage infotainment system only for CarPlay itself to be
| disappointing.
| pivo wrote:
| They reversed their position on that, didn't they?
|
| https://www.autoblog.com/2019/12/04/bmw-free-apple-carplay/
| michaelwm wrote:
| In case this helps, my Android Auto went through an infuriating
| phase where it refused to connect, and my cars screen would
| continue to say exactly what yours said. For about two weeks I
| was incredibly frustrated, until I discovered that I just had
| to clean out my phones charging port with a toothpick and it
| immediately began working again. The dust and debris from
| repeated connection and disconnection had piled up and
| prevented certain data pins from connecting, but once removed,
| it worked like brand new. I now clean out my phone's charging
| port every month and haven't run into the issue again. I was
| relieved that the issue was this simple to fix, and hope yours
| is too.
| max0563 wrote:
| This was an issue for me recently, I had a massive hair ball
| in my charging port. I was having charging issues and what
| not. The not connecting issue was a problem long before and
| after the hair in my charging port though. It's definitely a
| cause in some cases though.
| dmd wrote:
| ... and why is it Lotus Notes?
| https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3ilzey/were_a_bunch_o...
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| The internet. I mean, I love the concept of what the internet
| could have been, but it's currently the most hostile thing I have
| to deal with on a daily basis. Bad actors are too prevalent, and
| the amount of BS stuff we've tried to come with GDPR/Cookie
| banners, Do Not Track, AdBlockers, etc.
| nknealk wrote:
| Surprised not to see this here, but doing data engineering
| against any Adobe product in creative cloud.
|
| Specifically: AEM, AAM, Omniture, among others. My favorite is
| AAM's "only Adobe could come up with such a stupid data
| integration" file format:
| https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/audience-manager/user...
|
| The omniture S3 feed comes as a 1004 column TSV. And for fields
| that capture user inputs, they don't escape backslashes. But the
| escape backslashes everywhere else. I filed a ticket on this over
| a year ago but still no fix.
| jheriko wrote:
| Every period. Web period. Browser period. Ever.
| mister_hn wrote:
| Maven, since the dependency hell and that __every__ single
| project requires the same ugly boilerplate and yak shaving tasks,
| worsened if the infamous release plugin is used.
|
| Jira, because it's too slow and bloated from features you never
| use anyway.
|
| IntelliJ, because it freezes on every 6-7 autosuggestions, on
| projects of 50-80K LOCs.
| sershe wrote:
| Heh, one thing I love about Jira is all the UI redesigns. At
| some point I was using 3 Jiras for the same project - a public
| open source one, an internal company one, and another one
| shared with a customer. All 3 were different (but relatively
| recent) versions and all 3 had considerably different UI.
|
| They really ought to fire all the PMs who justify their
| existence by moving menus around.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| The only reason I use Maven is because there is a lot of copy
| paste code snippets floating around to get things done.
| caffeine wrote:
| Surprised to hear this about IntelliJ, have used it for many
| years without issue on substantially larger projects. Can't say
| for sure, but your freezes might be a solvable artifact of your
| setup.
| holoduke wrote:
| I have seen quite some companies. and everywhere the same
| thing. intelij once the beloved replacement of eclipse now
| gives the same experience as eclipse. insane in memory use.
| constant indexing and slow scrolling ui's. spontaneous
| hanging and frustrating slow code hints. now I admit that
| it's also a combination of many tabs in Chrome, using docker
| etc. hell everything became slower last few years. CPUs just
| didnt make enough progress I guess.
| hashhar wrote:
| I see such issues on larger multi-module projects. A very
| reproducable example would be something like Presto
| (https://github.com/prestosql/presto) or Debezium
| (https://github.com/debezium/debezium).
|
| I've increasing the JVM heap as much as I reasonably could
| but giving 2GB of Heap to an IDE on a 16GB system seems
| wasteful.
| avalys wrote:
| The only thing wasteful here is paying for 16 GB of RAM and
| then deciding to arbitrarily restrict your primary
| productivity tool to using 1/8th of it.
| necubi wrote:
| A common reason for IntelliJ to freeze is not giving it
| enough memory, which causes frequent GC stalls. You can try
| increasing the max heap by following the instructions here:
| https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/increasing-memory-
| heap.h....
| tomp wrote:
| The worst thing about maven is that you actually _have_ to use
| it. The Maven Central website is so bad that I still haven't
| difured our how to actually find a package, and building
| /packaging or even just launching JVM manually is so verbose I
| never want to do it. There are alternatives but they suck even
| more (sbt => Scala => additional bloated dependency that's slow
| as hell, gradle => need to include the executable in every
| project + worst backwards compatibility ever ... once I spent
| an hour hacking gradle versions trying to install & run a
| project before giving up)
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > gradle => need to include the executable in every project
|
| Hmmm ... one of the things that kind of made me really stick
| with Gradle is the wrapper tool that make sit dead easy to
| bootstrap a build _without_ including gradle in the project.
| Of course, the first thing the bootstrap does is download
| gradle, so maybe that 's what you mean ... but it's been a
| small price to pay for me.
|
| There are much worse things about gradle ...
| quelsolaar wrote:
| IOS Podcast App. Its absolutely terrible. Stops playing in the
| middle of episodes, forgets what episode it is playing, episodes
| disappear, and it throws up a spinning wheel again and again...
| topkai22 wrote:
| I moved to Spotify in order to get my feeds synced across
| devices. It's mostly been a better experience, but for some
| insane reason you can't add a proper feed to Spotify.
| codegeek wrote:
| Not anymore but until 2012, it was Lotus Notes at my work. Hands
| down the worst piece of garbage I have worked with.
| tilolebo wrote:
| You weren't the only one:
|
| http://www.ihatelotusnotes.com/
| topkai22 wrote:
| I consult to a company that uses Notes to this day. It pains me
| every time in see it opened up.
| di4na wrote:
| Git. The UX and design is broken af, nothing work, noone get it.
|
| AWS. I don't know where to begin. Nothing make sense. Nothing
| works.
|
| Docker. This thing is basically backward at every step. We should
| have never packaged different things on linux as a single
| "container". It does not work that way and that has created more
| pain than solve anything.
|
| K8s: same Go: same
|
| Venv. Goddamnit this never worked well and same as git, noone
| gets it.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| FWIW using `python3 -m venv` gets rid of most of the virtualenv
| headaches of the last decade. They finally built it into the
| language, and using -m forces it to always install with the
| same version of python you're actually running, instead of
| borking your system.
| platz wrote:
| Has anything ever worked for you?
| Retardo_88 wrote:
| This question sounds snarky but is actually valid, I think.
| Most of the parent comment's complaints about extremely
| popular technologies simply boil down to "Nothing works" and
| "No one gets it", without any further elaboration. Perhaps
| the problem lies with the author of the parent comment rather
| than the technologies themselves.
| di4na wrote:
| Yes. Nearly everything on top of the BEAM.
|
| Oracle Cloud seems honestly to go in the right direction. And
| it pains me to say it.
|
| Hnoeycomb is a great tool built in a way that make sense.
|
| Gitless is a good progress over git.
|
| There are lot of examples. This is a thread about the worst
| things though.
| platz wrote:
| It would be very interesting how the API ecosystem would
| look, if BEAM were pervasive. Haven't used it myself but
| OTP seems like the right level of abstraction for networks.
| recursive wrote:
| What is BEAM? I tried looking it up on google.
| sershe wrote:
| I feel like to understand Git, you need to understand pointers.
| I love git, it's so much better and so much easier to reason
| about than Perforce/whatever, in my view.
| usui wrote:
| This is a hit list against many major modern technologies. Yes,
| they they might not be working for you and it does not make
| sense without the time investment. Can you really say they are
| the worst software you use among the many other software you
| use very day?
|
| I consider my worst pieces of software to be the ones where I
| cannot, for the life of me, understand even a tiny amount of
| why things were designed that way, or why things fail, or why I
| continue to subject myself to such torture. For the
| technologies above, I run into many issues with them, but I
| frequently feel that is on me, not on the software. They have
| also solved many real problems as well as exacerbate some
| others.
| osrec wrote:
| Genuine question, what don't you understand about Git? I
| personally like it, but the learning curve is steep for some of
| the more complex operations. But then again, it is doing fairly
| complex things at that end of the spectrum...
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I find Git powerful and extremely useful, but at the same
| time I recognize the usability is a major pain in the rear.
| Some notions are not intuitive (ex: pull request, origin,
| branch checkout), most operations require more parameters and
| switches than needed. I love it and hate it at the same time,
| cannot live without but cannot fully enjoy it either.
| di4na wrote:
| I understand it. That change nothing to the fact it is a shit
| UX, that does not help you to learn it and have relatively
| bad errors messages.
| NateEag wrote:
| As an ardent git user who has converted multiple teams to using
| it, I could not agree more.
|
| Git has an absolutely atrocious interface, at every level.
|
| The power it gives you once you've mastered it is probably
| worth it, but I'm not sure of that, and I think a much better
| UI that still retains a lot of the power (and adds more
| horsepower, even) is very possible.
| di4na wrote:
| I never said that it was not useful or that it was not better
| than any of the competitor solutions.
|
| Just that it was bad. It can be quite bad in itself and
| totally better than every other solution.
| NateEag wrote:
| Uh, I was agreeing with you.
|
| "Quite bad and totally better than every other solution"
| sounds about right to me.
|
| With the caveat that it's apparently a worse option than
| Perforce and Mercurial for huge monorepos a la Facebook and
| Google.
| inetknght wrote:
| - Google products.
|
| - - Gmail intentionally doesn't filter spam or phishing emails.
|
| - - Google Voice used to be useful but today is being blocked by
| more and more services.
|
| - - Google Contacts is pervasive and uselessly so.
|
| - - Google Calendar also supports tons of spam and phishing.
|
| - - I stopped using Chrome because it stopped being a _user
| agent_.
|
| - Atlassian products. Slow bloated pieces of privacy violating
| garbage.
|
| - - JIRA is more and more confusing every day. Frequently
| changing UI incurs cognitive costs. Its workflows are confusing
| af.
|
| - - Confluence is functionally inferior to Media Wiki. That's not
| even the worst part; the worst part is that it doesn't use markup
| like the rest of the world.
|
| - Microsoft products.
|
| - - Skype. Once upon a day Skype was nice and usable. Today Skype
| is functionally, measurable, objectively less useful and less
| stable than it was just half a decade ago.
|
| - - Github. It was great until a few weeks ago. That new UI is
| still worse.
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