Hacker News Reader

Comment by realmod | Hacker News Reader

GSuite is downright horrible compared to alternatives and its only saving grace is GMail. And its the same with GCloud which makes doing the most basic things slow and annoying. It really feels like most of those GSuite products are there JUST so that Google can say they have it.

View on HN

I've used GSuite for years and find it fine. I do think it performs best using Chrome though. The document collaboration works well, and search works when I need it. Much better than something like Confluence.

What other tools would you suggest in place of GSuite (email, calendaring, collaborative document building, searching/finding docs, etc...)? O365 is all that comes to mind.

> I do think it performs best using Chrome though.

Sounds like a nail in the coffin, to me.

I'll avoid Chrome. Unless it suddenly goes 100% FOSS, gets audited, and every feature that causes platform lockin gets stripped / opened.

Curious what browser you use that doesn't have lockin and is audited?

> I do think it performs best using Chrome though.

Or Chromium which is FOSS.

>GSuite is downright horrible compared to alternatives and its only saving grace is GMail.

I've personally never found a better alternative to Google Meet.

I like Meet b/c it's easy. Click link and people are in a meeting. I don't want to force people to install and app or hunt around for the tiny text that lets people join a meeting from their browser.

Meet is far from perfect (performance issues on Macs), but ease of use trumps that for me personally.

What attracts you to Google Meet? I prefer Zoom personally (despite the privacy concerns), as I can have a meeting with someone without the fans on my 2017 MBP 13" going into liftoff, and the video feeds of the participants never freeze. Legitimately every Google Meet I've ever been a part of has either completely drained my battery, or frozen the video feeds of multiple participants, or both, even if there's just 1-2 other people.

Plus I kind of resent Google Calendar not having reasonable plugins for other video services (Jitsi, Zoom, etc.); feels anti-trusty to me.

>What attracts you to Google Meet?

It just works. You get a link, you open the link, you're in.

Whenever I get a Zoom link, it first forces me to download the app. As in, you open the link and it instantly downloads an executable to my computer, which I need to then go delete. Then I need to fight the website by clicking a series of links to get to the browser version. Then I enter my name and join. Except oops, the meeting has not formally started, so it has now kicked me back to the previous page to re-enter my name. Try again, except later since if you go before it's officially started, you're doing this again.

And that's how bad Zoom is even before you start the call. The UI in Zoom calls is also worse than Google Meet. What the hell is "Join with Computer Audio"? What does that even mean?

This. Meet isn't perfect, but 'click link, meet' is so damn simple.

Yeah it seems like Zoom's falling prey to the "we're a 10,000 seat contract but we really need this feature" stuff. I think using Zoom was fine as long as you could effectively ignore the UI (yeah "Join with Computer Audio" is completely nonsensical, double especially at that phase like, oh yeah I would like to make that decision right now where people don't know I can't hear them and they can't hear me, cool cool cool), but if you're actually using Zoom features beyond like, everyone get on Zoom, it's not wonderful.

Exactly this. Running my own business and that's one thing I do to e-meet people: it's either Google Meet or nothing.

Not perfect, yes my fans go nuts, but it works, everybody can understand how to get in, and it's rather very intuitive. I LOVE GOOGLE MEET.

You should experience what it's like as parents and educators to use Google Meet for school. It's barely usable with massive performance and access issues.

Google Meet unfortunately doesn't just work as easily as it should.

Well, I’m not a parent or an educator, but we’ve had company-wide meetings on Google Meet with triple-digit attendance and I haven’t noticed performance issues.

Your company probably has a better budget per computer than the school for the teachers and students.

The issue I personally have with zoom (besides all the historic security concerns) is that it is typically incredibly complicated to use - too many bells and whistles to do even basic things. Meet generally ‘just works’, and has been better performance wise than Zoom on my hardware.

Zoom does seem to do better overly severely degraded connections (and surfaces that It is happening). The experience is still pretty bad though.

Oh yeah that's totally fair. I was hosting a meeting the other day and one of my participants wanted to share their screen, and I still haven't found where to do that. I just made them host. Their UI is hot garbage.

It's in your meeting settings (sadly on their website, not in the app) under "Who Can Share?".

Amazing, thank you! Who says the Internet is a cesspool haha

>Plus I kind of resent Google Calendar not having reasonable plugins for other video services (Jitsi, Zoom, etc.); feels anti-trusty to me.

It isn't native to gcal, but the zoom chrome extension works relatively well.

It’s downright so simple to use, it’s a pleasure.

But the behavior of auto layout when someone is sharing a screen is completely weird to me. Also their new UI which rolled out to us recently is bit more complex than the simpler one before.

We're forced to used GSuite. I find https://syncdocs.com useful - it lets me collaborate using MS Office on top of GSuite

I’m surprised your employer allows to login to the SyncDocs client with your Google work ID. I’d be fired where I work if I do that.

Google Drive sync client doesn’t even work half the time for me and nothing would make me happier than going back to Dropbox for me.

> its only saving grace is GMail

Is that the HTML version? Because the normal GMail is also horribly slow.

> Is that the HTML version? Because the normal GMail is also horribly slow.

Out of interest, what is slow about gmail for you? I use gmail for work and speed has never been a problem or even an annoyance. Im genuinely interested as some people seem to have a totally different experience to me and it'd be interesting to understand why.

For me, if I have long email threads (think 1 year worth of to and fros), it takes ages to load and keeps moving the position based on images loading etc. The conversation view completely becomes unusable beyond few tens of emails.

Each morning I have to aggressively sift through ~300 emails and archive ~270 of them. Archiving 10 emails at a time can take several seconds, from pressing the archive button, to the email list being refreshed with 10 more items from the previous page.

Opening a conversation that has more than 5 messages in the thread will regularly take several seconds.

EDIT: paging set to 100 conversations per page, with reader view / vertical split to enable reading emails at the same time as viewing the rest of the list of threads.

Similar experiences with Chrome on Win10 as safari on macOS or gmail app on iOS.

It makes me miss Outlook.

A long delay when loading it, a noticeable delay (I’d guess 50-200ms, it’s not consistent) whenever I open any E-Mail. Compared to Fastmail where the start-up delay is shorter, and opening any mail feels instant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com