Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?
Which software do you use frequently and are unable to replace (either at home or your company) despite thoroughly disliking it?
What makes it so bad? Are there alternatives? Why can't you replace it?
What makes it so bad? Are there alternatives? Why can't you replace it?
What makes it bad: First of all, it uses Electron, thus it is laggy and wastes too much resources. Maybe it is just a pet peeve of mine, but I hate, if an application does not look native on my GNOME Desktop and does not follow any HIG.
Another factor is the proprietary nature of MS Teams. If it was open, there would probably be some other client/some way to have a real native client.
My preferred alternative would either be Jitsi or Matrix, although both have just electron clients they atleast attempt to have a usable GUI. (Except this one thing in Element: The search button is next to the "Start Videocall"-Button)
I can't replace it, as my university uses it.
I mean aside from technology choices, It's just very bad at video calls.
I don't want an "artistic" layout of people that is constantly switching around, or comedy "sitting in a theatre" options. If someone doesn't have video on it'll confusingly highlight some random other participant while they are talking, and when nobody is talking it'll choose a random person with the microphone on and boost whatever background noise (or typing) it can up until it matches speaking volume.
Despite randomly boosting silence, it'll aggressively gate anyone talking, with an obvious fade-up at the start of their sentence and if you are lucky, aggressively cut off the end of their sentence. If you aren't so lucky, it'll do this in every pause between words.
Add to that, random disconnects, chat randomly not working, finding it hard to actually get a list of participants, and that it apparently wants to be slack but makes it hard for people to work out how to actually re-use a channel for the next meeting.
But of course it gets bundled in with all the other office stuff the company purchases; making it the "default" that you have to fight against using. We were only saved against moving to Teams for _all_ our telephony by the fact that it's linux support is really, really bad and that's what all our engineers use.
- I need to use the main menu to enter as a named external user in one tenant, to join and bypass the waiting gate to enter the call. Despite my main account being the same email, and indeed SSO!
- While in that call, you receive notifications from chat messages in your main tenant chat inbox.
- You can't use chat in your main tenant, as you're currently logged into a call as an external in another tenant (still using your main account), so you can see notifications for your messages, but can't reply to them on that device (!)
This is before you consider the use-case of having multiple actual 365 accounts (which Microsoft seems to amazingly have failed to deliver on, despite the fact supporting it would likely increase their bottom line, by making it easier to add contractors into a tenant more easily). Strangely, this is supported far better on mobile, but not at all on PC (!)
It seems they've built it on such a complex architecture of accounts, external users, guests, tenants etc, that they need to unwind this complexity to make it work - which tenants' policies should apply when on a call as an external user, but chatting in another tenant simultaneously?
You’ll get a notification from a Teams instance in one tenant, but you need to switch accounts entirely in order to take action on it, which is REALLY slow for stupid reasons.
Also, you can’t run multiple instances of Teams signed into multiple tenants to work around this, and video conferencing is broken in all sorts of ways if you use Teams from the browser
Try doing a video call with 4 computers. Rather than the oh-so-obvious 1/4 of a screen each, one person gets half, two people get quarters, and you're in a tiny square in the bottom corner.
Even more comical is when one of the participants in using a laptop with two people in front of the camera. Teams will often centre the image, clip the sides, chop off both people, and show the other participants just the empty space between them.
How on earth did this pass QA, or any kind of design review?
- It's basically a Skype reskin, so it has a lot of visual elements and quirks that carry over from that — most of them haven't aged well. The reacts alone are taken straight from Skype, and they never seem to sync up if people react to a comment in quick succession. It seems like a small complaint, but it's really surprising to see in something built by a trillion-dollar company.
- Speaking of UI issues, why does Teams insist on using a custom notification bubble instead of using the native ones that all other electron apps seem to be able to do? They don't play well with full-screen apps, and they're generally pretty clunky.
- Video calls also fall apart if you have more than 4 people in them (even if most people aren't sharing video). This has led to screenshare drop outs for seemingly no reason.
- I don't understand why Microsoft thinks Teams needs to do _everything_ productivity related; it's a mediocre video chat client, a _really_ mediocre text chat client, and possibly the worst calendar I've ever had to work with, which is saying something, because most other calendars I've had to use are pretty awful. The scheduling assistant alone is one of the most counter-intuitive pieces of UI I've ever used, and managing event ownership is a nightmare. IT had to be called in to delete a zombie event that was supplanted by a new event, but the owner of the original event had left the company.
Not to put too fine a point on it: I've had to use a lot of chat clients over the years, from IRC, to Slack, to Jabber, plus some less professional-oriented software like Discord and Steam chat (which is itself pretty bad), and I can say honestly that my loathing for Teams burns with the passion of a thousand suns. That anyone would deliberately choose to pay for it baffles me.
Teams v2 won't use Electron[1]; but for now you can get a small performance boost by just opening Teams using a modern web browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox) at https://teams.microsoft.com/ -- you can even set up a PWA-type app shortcut.
You can uninstall the client after that. I think there's maybe one feature (popout chat windows) that the client has which you can't get in the browser.
I'm a Firefox (beta) user myself, but I would rather try another browser before blaming a webapp -- many issues.
My university pays for Google Meet too, and has a server running Moodle, so I have no idea why professors prefer Teams over Meet+Moodle. And don't get me started on Google Classroom...
The downside is that it is clunky. But even then, it’s exponentially better than native SharePoint, WebEx, etc.
Over time, I’m sure they’ll do what they did with “OneDrive for Business” and build services over time to replace or augment that underlying stuff. OneDrive was a turd a 6–8 years ago but got much better about 2 years ago and seems to get incrementally better.
Slack is organic free flowing conversation, like a chat, that you can thread out of for expansion of a particular though via threading.
Teams is forced threading on each thought and then constrained followup with no ability to thread because you're already in the thread.
I can deal with the tech limitations it's the fundamental UX that makes it a huge garbage pile that is being forced on people because "we already pay for it and all our employees are in it. Also hard to build custom bots for if your organization limits admins.
I think part of this is the fucked up way that Teams handles storing content, because it uses a mishmash of SharePoint sometimes for real file attachments, and some ephemeral blob storage for pasted images.
But it's infuriating because there is no error message, or any way to force reload; you just have to keep trying and hope it works, or go into your AppData folder, nuke the cache, and restart Teams.
It really doesn't make sense to me how such a simple common functionality would break in such a major product. Do they not use Teams... at Microsoft? Did they not notice?
The text in the left sidebar almost looks distorted.
It’s weird.
Often messages just... don't load. To be precise: in a channel you have posts with replies below them; the default view shows the last two replies if there are more. So far so good. Then I click on the button to show more of them, and zero, one, or two more show up -- of the tens that are there. If I reload the page (back to 2 replies) then click the button again, it works as intended, including loading even more if there are many replies.
Then I switch to a different channel and back to here, and it's broken again. Have to reload and retry.
This happens for many but not all reply threads (haven't figured out that pattern yet). However, either a thread always works or it always works only after a reload. Fully deterministic.
This same issue happens with emoji reactions on posts (sometimes only appear after a reload), and the three-dots more-options button in the hover panel of posts: the three-dots button will just be blank white and not do anything until a reload. There is a slot for the button though. It's funny until you have to deal with it (can't edit!).
This is infuriating since it means that when I'm monitoring some channels as TA for a course, I have to constantly reload the page -- which in turn means that I need at least one browser teams open. This is because:
- In firefox, I cannot video call, only voice call. (Why does every other conferencing software work in firefox but not teams?)
- In chrome, I can video call, but while I screenshare my own camera gets disabled -- deterministically. This is something I see with everyone (their camera turning off when they share their screen), so it's not just a quirk of my setup somehow.
- In electron desktop teams (linux), I can do everything, but I cannot reload because it's not a browser! So I cannot fix the brokenness caused by the not loading of content that I described above.
I've reproduced the content not loading issue on another person's Windows pc in native teams, so it's not a linux quirk -- but even so, it also happens in the browser for me which shouldn't be platform-dependent.
My coworkers have joked that maybe MS is designing for this because people having two instances running at all times, frequently reloading one of them, increases engagement metrics significantly.
Does anyone else have this or is my account just broken?
EDIT: I wanted to report to MS but it's impossible to make a screen recording that doesn't reveal personal information of roughly everyone. And MS says that a recording should not contain personal information.
That with Kopete and KDE3.
MS could write a multiplatform QT5 client perfectly by using 1/10 of the resources.
Discord for gaming ramblings and chitchat may be okay, but I hate when software projects misuse it as a support channel.
Give me some forum instead, I know many ppl here on HN dislike discourse, I don't get it though, for me it's a great way to do a forum in a modern way. Can't perceive any UX issues with it (I do know the arguments, I just think they are not true, or much less of a hassle than claimed).
Maybe we need something like discord, but it should have a way to group a question and the following conversation including asking back and answers, and send that to a website where it appears like a forum thread. Basically just select it with mouse, right-click, pick some option, select some keywords for taxonomy and good to go. Should be 5 seconds of work after the person with the problem is satisfied. Yea that is something I would not hate I guess.
Oops... looks like it's been shut down.
That's exactly why Discourse [0] exists. Try it.
There's just something about it that encourages overcommunication. You have announcement channels that people just tell you to mute if you don't like announcements but, well, you miss out on all the announcements. The logging means that too much documentation goes on in a server, alongside memes and motivational posts.
I've actually been playing a game where all spoiler related chat goes in channels that get cleared every 3 days. 90% of the conversation is spoiler related. This is a lot more pleasant - things get documented off discord, and yet there's plenty of chatter and banter.
At first, the novelty of in-lining sections of the web felt magical, now I feel it raise my anxiety level.
IRC is to Slack-likes as a book is to a television.
I still get on DALnet but it's less active now.
In Malaysia, #kampung on KampungChat is popular, often around 1000 people on at any one time. Many of them who used to hang out on IRC during school days.
However, thanks to the magic of internet anonymity, it's full of 40 year olds jacking off now. You have to control the conversation, similar to Omegle. I've had some nice conversations on books and especially chess on there. It appears that the kind of people who join IRC are also nerds in some form.
Now, that being said, they have an alpha version of chat, which is the main reason I've jumped more into it as of late. By being able to take conversations from the chat and port them to topics, making them longer-term group memory and more searchable, gives me some hope.
Still, some of the things just feel clunky. I wish I could put more words to it, I'll try to reflect more.
edit: it also doesn't have a mobile app (it has DiscourseHub, but that's not dedicated to each instance). While the mobile web version is better than most mobile web versions, it's still not an app, which can frustrate me on iOS.
I also recommend learning keyboard shortcuts for Discourse, especially j/k/o navigation and g-u g-n m-t m-r; it runs over most of the friction.
I think there's just a much higher learning curve. I keep learning keyboard shortcuts but I don't know how many of my community members will. Who knows, maybe with a focus on chat will bring a new focus to mobile (and with iOS getting better support for PWAs)
Whichever ones are true, will be worse under discord anyways!
Can't change because I trapped myself in a company that is MS partner, and have all the Microsoft's suite.
I can expand on some points:
- useless user voice: just go to feedback hub and see it for yourself, years old (now "renewed" because of the migration from User Voice) requests, with default response from the developers "hey! We hear you..." No, you don't;
- terrible Linux support: the current version of Teams for Linux is months old, from October 2021, and I think it's just a wrapper for the web version, but worse, because it uses an electron version that doesn't support screen share on Wayland;
- it's slow, every action you try, hover, focus, text,etc just feels slow and unfinished;
There's still some fight internally between people that like teams (those who has an RTX 3090, that can run teams without sweating) and people that don't, the latter created a channel/group/whatever is called, to change from Teams ("Teams alternatives"), but I think it's a lost cause.
The alternatives I've explored include session, and wire. Session probably would be a great alternative, or at least it seems so superficially. But the user base is extremly small, it still uses electron and they dont seem to release updates very often. It's also essentially just a fork of signal, so you might as well just use that for a few reasons that I'll omit for brevity. As for wire, theres a lot to be desired. But the main complaint I have is that theres no way to put a lock on your session the way there is with signal. I emailed them about it, and they told me they had "no plans to implement such a lock out at this time". I also have issues with it not sending and receiving messages properly. And so on, as such...
Stop using word "security" or "end to end" encryption and then enforcing me to disclose my phone number to use your "secure" app.
This is scam.
Disclaimer; Signal is probably my favorite app in in the world. As someone that doesn't use any Facebook owned services, there wouldn't be any other way for me to chat with my friends and family.
But I'd really like to understand what you mean and if I am falling for a scam. How does disclosing my phone number make it insecure and not end-to-end encrypted?
Communication platform that enforces "KYC"-like disclosure to the platform itself is misleading their users about security.
I've put Whatsapp for broadly the same reasons. So not the Op, but my 2 cents:
I cannot listen to any discussion of "privacy" or "encryption" when the software doesn't let me create multiple anonymous accounts on computing device of my choice, and instead it insists on tying itself to my most personal device and ID at the very beginning.
I don't know if Signal does it, but Whatsapp additionally explicitly requires access to your phone contact list. At which point, the end-to-end encryption feels like sarcasm. What's left? You have my identity and you have my social graph. You can tie me to anything you want six ways to Sunday. You've asked for my most treasured things in the first 30 seconds of installation. Everything else feels like ridiculous security theater that makes my life explicitly worse (especially the lack of seamless multi-device support) for positively zero benefit for myself or any of my friends & family.
I understand broad first-principles discussion, but for me personally:
I DON'T care if my discussion with my mother in law is encrypted.
I DO care if everybody I want to chat with gets my phone number and social graph.
It seems like the only alternative is to fund my own startup, with me as a sole shareholder, just to forbid Jira forever
Also, it is not that great.
Right now, my team uses Jira for tracking bugs and features and whatnot in our custom software development. We also use it for tracking issues and work related to our infrastructure, access requests to our various data centers, budget requests from the team, software and change management planning, site audits, and probably a couple other things I'm forgetting off the top of my head. And yes, there are likely better products for each of those things individually, but then you wind up in the hell of "oh wait, audits go over here in Freebly, but software releases are over there in FrobniTZr", and if you run those tools it's suddenly fifty-leven more hosts and apps to support and keep patched.
Much like Excel, Jira might not be the best tool for all our use cases, but it's pretty good at several of them and good enough at the rest that having everything in one bucket outweighs the potential benefits of a better tool.
On the other hand, if someone would like to fire up a start-up to develop a similarly flexible on-premises work management product to replace it, you'll absolutely find me in line with my wallet open...
Somewhat ironically, they renamed the company to de-conflict with the other Clubhouse (the audio chatrooms app) although at this point said app has all but faded into obscurity less than 6 months later.
With respect to the Shortcut product itself, my experience with it ~1.5 years ago was positive and I would try it again.
We switched off to Jira + Confluence for feature parity that Clubhouse lacked, at least at the time. But it looks like they are very rapidly iterating on the product and adding new features (threaded comments look awesome). I look forward to giving it another shot and watching as it evolves.
It looks like they also now have a Confluence competitor [2], currently in private beta.
[1]: https://shortcut.com/blog/clubhouse-changing-our-name-to-sho...
Also, on-prem means you can decide when to upgrade i.e. you are empowered to prevent the UI from changing daily (in our case at work we haven't upgraded for years).
It’s way faster than any cloud instance I’ve used. Sure, it’s just public browsing, and most features are hidden behind login, but good luck getting that performance from the cloud version.
I can definitely believe that a well-tuned, properly specced on-prem JIRA can be faster than the cloud version ever can be, now. TIL!
As a mechanism of abuse of employees it is superb.
What you're describing is a people problem IMO.
The fun thing? Notion can do way more as project management than JIRA does.
There are alternatives, some worse but most better and cheaper. But Rockwell is the industry standard in North America. So their screens get spec'd.
On the other hand, I did a project with Schneider Unity Pro, similar PLC prog type software and it only crashed once in a whole year, and I blame windows for that crash.
Rockwell, if you go a day wihout a crash, then you start to feel like checking your files to check it hasnt corrupted some shit on the down low.
In more recent times GE royally screwed the pooch with the prog software for their new PAC range.
I don't understand how one or two automation companies can get it so right, and others so wrong.
it still sucks, but other solutions suck even more
More in general, I tend to hate all macro languages, like LaTeX, M4 and the C/C++ preprocessor (fortunately in the latter case the impact is usually more limited, because the C/C++ preprocessor layer is thinner than, e.g., a LaTeX document). They tend to require a lot of shenanigans even to make easy things, so the source quickly become a tangled unmaintainable mess, when each time you touch something, you make seemingly unrelated errors appear.
For a trivial example, consider in C:
#define IDENTITY(x) x
There is an interesting ongoing project to replace it, though: Namely, finl (“finl is not LaTeX”) by Don Hosek, himself a longtime TeX/LaTeX user and developer.
That is a very ambitious project though, and not one finished in an afternoon. Se we will be stuck with LaTeX for years to come.
LuaLaTeX is quite fast nowadays though. Unless you need special glyph support, it’s better than XeLaTeX speed wise.
It’s bundled with jira though and jira is how most companies do scrum or agile or whatever planning work in sprints is called these days. Jira isn’t so bad but it brings brother confluence to the party so don’t let it in.
I use Notion these days. At least it gets out of my way and lets me write. The todo template is mostly sufficient for sprint planning.
Windows 10, useful for some games with friends, because of the “nudges” to change my behavior, like asking if I really want to keep using that program, the magic-fingers messages on installation (suggesting I just blindly trust), and the difficulty to install without an online account, among other things. I can’t replace it yet, but the day will come, one way or another.
You can just not have what's on Game Pass. You will survive. It didn't exist a couple years ago, but now you can't do without?
I would be wary of dating a Microsoft employee, because they don't seem to understand what consent means.
Using the Audi MMI is painfully clunky, inconsistent, and riddled with subscription-locked features. At this point I just immediately wait for CarPlay and avoid touching anything in the car’s native OS.
Honestly they could probably just save a lot of development time by just having a dumb monitor / audio setup that you’re plugging into.
EDIT: Oh, and the Messages.app on macOS makes me pine for the days of iChat.
Tacking ephemeral technology to a long-lasting appliance is a weird idea.
Let’s not forget the fun prompt of whether you want to use the car’s data plan, which if you haven’t subscribed will make your phone unable to stream music.
Of course, it's much easier to find one with Bluetooth; there are tons of other ones with "smart" features that are the same price.
Adobe in the above fields of design are industry leaders, and have the features & functions we’ve come to rely on.
Adobe’s pricing model has become very aggressive, and quite unaffordable for lots.
I admit: my complaints are likely a side effect of being a niche user. I don’t think people curating their own collection of 60,000+ tracks is a use case they worry about.
The only reason I use it is I depend on iTunes Match to make my music available on all of my devices. That’s the one thing it does do seamlessly. The collection is too big to copy to all devices, and some devices require streaming anyways. I have searched everywhere and have never found a viable alternative. I can find alternatives for parts of my use case, but not everything. So I’m stuck with this software..
I have this dream that one day I’ll have the patience to figure out how to write my own GUI for it, but I’ve given up every time I wade into the apple developer docs. I’d pay good money to someone to stub out an app for me so I don’t have to figure it out from scratch, and go from there.
Yes, it turns out you can do worse than iTunes.
There seems to be no real alternative though. All I want is a fast, native email client that supports conversation view and has a good search function. For work, I also require the calendar function, but I don't think implementing that is the hardest part. I know IMAP (or MS Exchange protocol) is a mess, but talking to the server is not the part that is broken for me in Outlook and most other clients. It is search and responsiveness of the UI. But isn't (instant) search basically a solved problem?
I have a plethora of folders and rules set up for each customer, and it is impossible to keep up with incoming items without that Unread filter.
When holding my phone up to me ear after answering a call, the screen won't switch off and random buttons will then get pressed because you know, I'm holding it against my ear.
Can't find any options in the seeing to fix this issue.
My wife has exactly the same problem despite using a different make of phone.
How can Android fail at the most fundamental task?
The alternative of Apple is too expensive for me... More than I'm willing to spend on a phone at least.
I had a moto z that used pogo pins to connect the top screen proximity sensors, that after the adhesive weakend holding the thing together, lost contact.
That was the only time I had an android phone fail to block input when I was on a call...
Btw mines a Nokia and hers a Google, priced mid range.
These are generally simple sensors but they are sort of hard to quality control in the factory and tuning them generally takes some significant amount of work.
The problem for phones without a “notch” like what the iPhone does is that the OEMs tried to put the proximity sensor below the screen. It generally works - but the problem is that the IR pulses emitted by the sensor excite the display and will turn on pixels and create a grey or white spot over the sensor. Product managers later decided that they don’t like this spot, so engineers had to put in all sorts of software mitigation, mostly involving turning off the sensors and making them less sensitive.
An expensive phone generally has a larger team of engineers who will tune these sensors, work on the factory quality control problems and generally make things reliable. Apple, with their strong engineering culture has generally refused to deal with the white dot on screen thing entirely by putting the sensor on the notch.
Unfortunately with lower end phones, you can’t get the same quality that you will get with a $800 phone. There are people who work really really hard to make things better, but its mostly underfunded engineering teams trying to fix problems in software that honestly should be fixed in the sensor hardware by the vendors.
Why not put it next to the camera? That’s what my $200 Pinephone CE does (and the $150 model with the same sensor), and it works well IME.
Unfortunately, it boils down to org charts and who talks to whom in a company.
An engineer who owns the proximity sensor device driver is usually not invited to the meeting where the industrial design lead is showing off the latest iteration to the product and marketing team.
My personal opinion: most obvious flaws in consumer hardware is just a reflection of flaws within the OEM’s org chart and the networks of people within the chart.
If you’re willing to drop most native mobile apps and maybe spend some time tinkering, you could get the far niche-er alternative of a GNU/Linux phone for as little as $150 (plus ~15% more for shipping all the way from China).
Btw price of iPhone is non acceptable for me from two reasons. Device could be easily lost and I do not need powerful HW with terrible battery life for calls and messages.
The whole smart phone ecosystem is all about walled gardens.
I agree about battery life for iPhone, pretty much everyone who owns one complains about how their battery doesn't even last a day. My Nokia X20 can last 3 days with light usage... Which I suppose makes up for the poor proximity sensor.
It's slow as hell, takes 12GB to download, has a 50% failure rate at uploading apps...
Nothing is up to modern standards with it. I'm so fed up with it I'm almost close of building some open source replacement.
The “stacked” option when displaying multiple series is a super dangerous footgun; it will show you numbers that aren’t actually occurring.
If you accidentally make a too-heavy metrics query the entire page becomes sluggish and crashes, and you have to refresh and start from scratch. There’s no way to simply abort the last mistaken change.
If you accidentally make in invalid metrics query (like wrong combination of variables) then the entire dashboard gets into a corrupted state where even if you return to a valid combination of variables, all you get is red. Again, refresh and start over.
I don’t think there’s anything better out there. Perhaps we are a few versions behind, but the last major upgrade we did only made it buggier.
The scrollbars are tiny so you can't really grab on to them and drag.
OK, so you use the mouse wheel or trackpad instead. If you've got lots of lines on a graph the key area itself has a little mini-scrollbar. So as you're scrolling down, all of a sudden your mouse is over that little area and it starts scrolling instead. It probably doesn't have much content to scroll but it doesn't matter, the page won't scroll while you're over that area so you have to move your mouse to some other part of the screen and try again.
OK, so you think you'll put your mouse in the navigation area on the left or something and use the trackpad there, as there won't be any little scrollable areas going by there. But if you place your mouse on the left-hand navigation pane, that doesn't scroll the window. So you really have to place your mouse in the actual content area to scroll using the trackpad, and just deal with the above "sticking" effect.
Infuriating. (Using macOS Chrome with a mouse with a scroll wheel and trackpad)
We’re required to use it for the project I’m working on.
Some things I hate:
* Project backlog is a mess UI-wise. Lots of fields, with little to no explanation of what they drive. Generally a bad UI for working with stories.
* Reviewing large pull requests is very laggy performance-wise.
* Compare branches is broken - I have to start to create a PR, then cancel it, if I just want to compare two branches.
* Release pipeline (not build pipeline) does not allow yaml definition, so you are expected to configure it by point and click, true to form for Microsoft.
* Logging in - I have to bookmark it because there doesn’t seem to be a good direct URL to navigate directly to my repo (as opposed to like a GitHub repo for example). Also the confusing branding with “Azure” probably contributes to this as well.
There are probably more things, but these are some that come to mind right away.
Still, have you ever used Jira? Jenkins? Fisheye? Bitbucket?
How about making an app that actually work on Linux ? That doesn't take 200% CPU when you're in a meeting.
The same on windows, it's such a badly optimized application with memory leak all over the place...
I hate it with all my guts.
I'm currently working without this by using a device issued by my employer, where the Zoom app is pre-installed by the IT dept. and therefore using it for the language class does not make things worse.
1. The "Join from Your Browser" links take you to the worse version, which I assume is legacy or something.
2. There is also a progressive web app version [1] that has more feature parity to the desktop app. It has the grid view built-in, but for whatever reason it doesn't seem to show as many people at a time vs the desktop app grid view.
I opened one tab for the group which had 10 people some sharing video I then opened 3 more tabs for specific languages (English, German, and Russian)
The quality was still good. It was the same as being in a crowded area a train station, but it worked.
I have had interviews with zoom and teams, these were not as good. With less people.
I've tried soooo hard for decades to become comfortable in GIMP but I can never get close.
Gimp, with all features, is free. Photopea charges a subscription.
https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/introduction_from_othe...
It separates Rust ecosystem.
Can’t be replaced because your code is either async from the beginning, or not. You are using either async libs, or some outdated libs because all modern versions have to support async Rust.
If in doubt, just use Tokio. It's much more widely used, has been around longer, has a history of solid engineering, didn't choose to put "std" in its name and race to 1.0 to fool people into thinking it was mature, ...
At home, Light room and photoshop. I swear they are getting slower and more bloated all the time and they keep changing UI for no reason. The subscription model is what rises my hate though.
There are alternatives of course but
I have 15 years of catalogues
I have limited faith anything else will read is own catalogues 15 years from now. How do you pick stable software now (and one does need updates as cameras change etc)
How? I've had zero problems with their desktop and mobile apps.
I could switch to AVR8 assembly but I want a better macro assembly plus the code would not be portable to more capable boards. I guess I could run a soft AVR8 on an fpga board and offload the heavy lifting to the fpga but talk about frying pan to the fire.
its really not bad. I guess at a certain size I'd regret al the inlining
You would never guess from the Arduino docs/examples; it's all written for kids so it can feel like you are actually writing some super simplified C like scripting language like PAWN.
Works great in a lot of places.
Boto is in a similar vein. Stupid capital letter arguments. No type information, no autocomplete.
want to, say, log in? i hope you like OAuth and/or dealing with JSON
want to configure a less popular service? enjoy downloading plugins with documentation that’s one or two minors behind stable. (for azure specifically, enjoy like 75% of anything you’d actually want to do being “in preview”)
It's idiotic handling of direct messages history with its enforced uneditable limit of number of conversations shown, previous conversations disappear and become unsearchable cost me waste time, wasted nerves and wasted communications.
First, it doesn't let me create a userID & password. I cannot create an account on my tablet or computer. I cannot start using it anonymously. I cannot have multiple accounts for multiple purposes/groups. It insists on being installed and tied to my phone with my phone number - how ANYbody can talk "blah blah encryption blah blah privacy" when it's tied to my private protected hard-to-change personally-identifiable phone number right at the beginning is beyond me to the level I feel I'm in a twilight zone.
Second, it is completely unusable unless I give it full and privileged access to my contact list. WHY? I want to chat with 3 specific people. I want to give you address/userID/token of those 3 specific people. But no - it won't work at all. This is where discussion of "yada yada privacy yada yada encryption" further loses all possible meaning.
Third, I cannot easily use it on multiple devices. I have two phones, Galaxy Note 8, and half a dozen laptops and computers and tablets I use daily for various purposes in various locations. I have taken it as granted for the last 30 years that I can check my email/ICQ/AIM/MSN/Hangouts/FB/WHATever on any of those that I choose to. But nooooo... not Whatsapp. Why? Because Privacy & Encryption. L-O-L.
It is the most regressive piece of code I've had the privilege to have forced upon my by both techie and non-techie friends and family alike, and it makes me livid every time.
I got this thing for free on Freecycle and it works amazingly well mechanically, and the printer worked out of the box. No matter what I tried though, getting the scanner to show up as a device and be interfaced with any modern hardware required me to set up this virtual machine to be shared with the local network.
(Yes I tried CUPS which worked great for the printer but not the scanner.)
Straight up hostile to power users since 7.
Too much of a pain to migrate to Linux completely and would have to keep a copy of it for work anyway.
How is it a pain?
Migrating the OS itself and files/documents is a piece of cake, obviously.
The other thing that I dislike but can't get rid of is JVM. Mind you, Python, Go, Javascript and so on is worse, but JVM is what I have to work with, unlike the rest of them.
Confluence (slow and the awkward editor. I often need to directly modify the raw html to get the page rendered correctly. for example when needing to add long paragraphs under one bullet point.)
Jira, so slow and complex.
Gimp, its usability is the worst. but no other alternatives under linux.
But what it can do is powerful. For something there’s no alternative.
They have provided a Python interface and I always want to use the Python interface more to work around the language problem. Also Sympy has a way to read Mathematica expresssion I think.
TBH, I don't think that the language is badly designed for a CAS. Most CAS (e.g., Maxima, Maple, etc.) all use a language that's heavily influenced by functional programming languages. But yeah, Mathematica is terrible for numerical work, and doesn't play well with other external libraries or tools.
Actually as a functional language it is not bad. It is not the programming paradigm that it is at fault. I remember someone praised Mathematica as the best language out there because of its functional paradigm.
I’m not sure if anyone has called it a read only language too. But in some sense it is. You can look at a notebook and have no way you can write a code like that without working it through interactively. I once got one that basically there’re multi solutions and the next step chose one of the solution, where somehow which solution you pick is deterministic but you wouldn’t know without running it interactively. (There are perhaps better way to do it programmatically but the “best” practice wasn’t well known or encouraged.)
Another way to think about it is, it is not a language that one can just write a program on its own. It almost must be developed interactively. And because of that nature, it is easy to lose track when it is getting long.
Some of this are more general problem, like Jupyter which starts as something imitating the Mathematica notebook experience. But in those cases, it is much more easy to refactor things in a module and reuse them. (Where lack of namespace separation in Mathematica is a big contributing factor.)
I’ve developed a tiny Mathematica package for personal use, so I’m not an experienced Mathematica-ian, but I think what I said is well known problems of it.
Interesting, and thanks for the link. I didn't know such a term existed, although I'm a bit disappointed to see C and Lisp in the list, which some consider to be extremely well-designed languages.
> Another way to think about it is, it is not a language that one can just write a program on its own. It almost must be developed interactively. And because of that nature, it is easy to lose track when it is getting long.
I agree. Although Wolfram Inc. has been pushing WolframScript and Wolfram Engine (and the IntelliJ IDEA plugin), at the end of the day the Wolfram language is best suited for interactive development, i.e., through the Notebook interface. And Mathematica Notebooks do not play well with most version control systems and are best treated as binary files.
Another example from what I heard directly:
A few years ago, from one of the project nominated for the Gordon Bell prize, one of the Scientist showed us their code. For perspective, this was to be run on Intel KNL so it is extra hard for the compiler to optimize it well. Since our machine is from Intel (and the contract stated they will provide support), Intel engineers were involved in optimizing a kernel. In the end they generated hundreds of lines of C code and committed to the code base directly. It was partly because it is time-sensitive so they can't wait until they modify the Intel compiler to optimize that code, so they sort of optimize it manually. Now if you read that source code, there's no way you can modify it, rightly fit into the description of "write-only" language.
Also, there's a less well known term of read-only language. I can't find a wiki page for that. But I think AppleScript is on the list, because you know, reading an AppleScript makes it looks quite straight forward it should be written this way, but if you're asked to reproduce it or write something similar, you can't. Hence read-only.
Edit: It was described in earlier history of the same wikipedia page but was removed: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Write-only_langua...
The number one reason why they're bad is that they are not native apps. They need a tab in the browser, or a fake browser window.
The second reason they're bad is because Google does not care about the user experience. Each of these is probably assigned to a random intern every three months and she just does whatever she likes with it.
The third reason is that I know how good each of these category of apps can be. I've used slack, zoom, excel and word. Each one of those is lovingly crafted to satisfy the users every need, comparatively. Knowing that such apps exist makes it even more painful to use Google's half baked knock offs.
1. No calling function. Most of the times I want to immediately call a person, like a phone. It should make the other person's computer ring, and they should be able to answer the call with one click. Gmeet doesn't do this.
2. Screen sharing options are extremely limited. Compare the ways zoom allows you to share your screen to what meet does. It's hilarious.
3. No screen annotations. No cursor control. No screen pointers. It's quite annoying to have to use such a limited product.
4. Screen sharing and video quality is atrocious. Again, look at zoom to find out what you're missing.
5. Screen recording is horribly low quality. It's almost impossible to read text on a shared screen recording, even though it was readable in the call itself.
6. Layout options. It seems Google has discovered the worst possible algorithms to lay out videos on the screen during a call. Many times it will even minimize presented content, and then everybody has to manually pin the thumbnail. There is no option to overlay the speakers video over presented content, which should be pretty high up in the list of features.
7. In call chat is lost after the call ends. It just goes straight to /dev/null. Who signed off on this?
I can go on, but I'm frustrated now just thinking about it. The problem is people don't even know how good the other stuff is. So it's hard to convey my helplessness.
2. Elaborate? The screen sharing in Meet is what Chrome provides in general and I see the same options when using other web-based tools like jitsi. Zoom has a native app which presumably allows it do other things, but given that Chrome can "share entire desktop," "share a window," and "share a tab w/audio" I haven't actually found myself wanting any other behavior. Also, I consider not needing a native app an advantage and Zoom's web-based offering is trash.
3. Agreed, although to be fair I only find myself wanting this when presenting slides and Google Slides does have them.
4. Zoom supports 1080p while Meet does 720p, but if you're using any video features then Zoom apparently drops to 720p as well?
5. No argument there.
6. I've literally never experienced what you're describing. If more than one person is presenting content then the first presenter might be displaced by the second, which might look like "minimizing the presented content." If you have manually pinned anyone that always takes precedence. No option to overlay in Google Meet is a major annoyance.
7. Google Meet's chat is ephemeral unless you are recording the Meet. I think this goes into a bucket of design decisions that can all be lumped together as "No one is using Google Meet as their only communication tool." I've never needed things like Zoom's DMs that are inside a call. When I'm trying to have side conversations with coworkers I just use our normal chat tools. Google Chat is probably only better than Microsoft Teams among the "real chat apps," but it's definitely better than Zoom's built-in messaging.
Two things that have made it so that I cannot stand every over video calling product is that Google Meet does automatic video brightness adjustment, which helps a lot when you don't have a great set up at home, and the audio noise cancelling is insanely good. It is hard to overemphasize how good it is. You can whistle and clap and play music and type on your obnoxious self-indulgent clackity keyboard and other people will only hear your voice, plucked cleanly out of the mess as if everything had been mic'd separately. It's by far Meet's best feature and so far no one else has come anywhere close.
Disagree heavily on docs, sheets, and meet. Meet is a bit wonky in Firefox but I wouldn't trade it for any of the other options we've tried. I consider docs, sheets, and drive to be best-in-class for what we use them for, which is pretty much always collaborative.
Gsuite in general is accessible and works well for Collab.
And of course Teams is on a whole different dimension of pain.
I agree. That's why I believe each of these apps should be a native app, built for your os. MS Word on windows 10 is an unbeatable word processor. Nothing else on the web comes even close. Same with Excel.
I can't replace it because it is the corporate standard at work.
The UI seems to work against me. Search? Don't even bother, better off with just your eyeballs. Refresh? No, try logging out and back in.
There are better alternatives, both when it was chosen and now, but it wasn't my decision to make.
I don't use anything from them myself, but I cannot avoid dealing with it because relatives and working colleagues still use MS stuff. Recently our school introduced MS Teams and it is terrible. ICQ was a better messenger than this abomination.
As for other software, anything Electron based that could be a plain Web application or a background process using the user's already installed Web browser or system Web widgets.
On that note anything that takes ages to start on Android or iOS, which are clearly not native, and I can replace them because they are key apps without alternative from the companies, like e.g. banks.
And then you look for alternatives and find that it's years ahead of the rest.
So slow that it is a bad tool slow.
It has a totally insane smorgasboard of options UX, lots of jargon, a horrible markup syntax, limited interop with git forges, and a host of other problems, but the real showstopper is how goddamn slow it is.
It’s clunky to use, particularly with the apps. Things crash all the time and when it decided to do a software update it goes into a spinning loop for hours during which none of the TVs in the house work.
Hate it, but the household have decided to keep Sky…
The problem with Excel is that it was written before the M/S GUI became standard, and so nearly all of the keystrokes are count-intuitive.
I use it rarely these days, but when I do, I spend hours swearing at its clumsy non standard GUI interface.
I use a shared album for pics and video.
There are some recent messages on Usenet about "Web considered harmful" and commentary/discussions about such things, including some of my own comments.
Douglas Englebart must be rolling in his grave at a comment like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
It surprises me that Confluence continues to be the only thing sitting in the middle of those, and while some competitors have started to shyly emerge (Bookstack, xWiki, I think there's one in progress at Jetbrains), nothing feels like it's really aggressively going after the Confluence market-space directly. Given how many people I've seen comment that they're not fond of Confluence but can't seem to replace it (at least, not until Atlassian forced their hand with the server-license fiasco), it seems like a natural space for people to pursue.
Send me an email at Paul at dokkument.com and that's exactly what we are working on. Yeah unforturnely you will not see anything interesting on our landing page
Anything electron: massive hog of resources and will never be rewritten on a nonbloated platform.
Every single package manager and scheme still seems fundamentally broken and are bad compromises. But there's no money in fixing it so it will always be broken. I salute people doing the thankless work of packaging OSS and language libraries. You are fighting the good fight, even if it is a losing war.
Any and all OTP (time suck, blocks automation, debatable gain over "good passwords").
IDEs (every IDE becomes an intense love/hate relationship... Intellij is dragging to a halt on a couple "medium sized" projects... but what would I replace it with? Eclipse hahahahahaha?)
Javascript: still an awful language, even with a ton of improvements and typed options. May webassembly kill it, although webassembly is probably another google trojan horse to control the web.
Java: should stop "improving" itself and just work on the JVM and migrating people to Kotlin/Scala/Groovy/Clojure.
G Suite (well, it's better than outlook, but spying and the sword of Damocles with getting locked out with no recourse)
Microsoft Windows (still have an iron grip on games, I hate everything else about it since Windows 7), although a glimmer of hope is that it does eventually have a real unix core.
Bash: the number of stackoverflow searches per line of code whenever I have to write bash is like 5:1, as in five stackoverflow searches per line of code written. But what options do you have? Perl is dying, fish/zsh isn't ubiquitous, etc.
Installing any software written in python will probably fail, or worse, break all my other python apps. Example: AwsCli
AwsCli: again, stackoverflow searches to line of code/command ratio is terrible. options aren't well documented, responses aren't documented or well-exampled, error codes change between releases (seriously, HOW MANY DIFFERENT error messages can expired credentials result in?)
Aws: please someone start beating these people. Oh, the options are google and microsoft. Oh well.
OH! The AWS CONSOLE: What a piece of shit. How much money does AWS make every minute? Basically enough to actually fund a team for this? This is for ec2/secgrps/r53 aka the bread and butter. And they DID rewrite it, and managed to make it FAR WORSE. Performance is awful. Screens refresh and move items as you try to click on things. Do I have a choice for adhoc stuff? Oh the cli? See above.
It's very much alive and kicking.
It happened to me, I don't even start X to watch movies, music or chat/IM.
Even gaming, then. Roguelikes and IF have amazing playability and stores, and Mednafen has an SDL2 backend, so running it under the framebuffer/KMS does everything faster.
There's no ads, no notifications, no social media bullshit with mental manipulation, no Electron turds eating half of your RAM.
Wordgrinder and sc-im plus Gnuplot do magic in the CLI/TUI.
It's like the old K.Mandla/Inconsolation's blog but with a step taken further.
Use pipx to install any python "tools" (cli executables and the like). keeps each package in its own venv, so they don't clash.
Chrome breaks privacy in many ways, but I can't find a decent alternative, similarly secure, blink based and with Chrome extensions support that doesn't have similar problems (Brave, Vivaldi).
That being said, my statement still stands. In that case, I can just summarize it as "I can't find a browser as secure as Chrome" (implying that yes, Brave and Vivaldi do the same, they are just less open about that)
Security does imply privacy, because one of the most important things in warfare is keeping information away from your adversary. If your browser is freely giving away information without a care in the world about who gets that information, then of course that information will end up in the hands of your enemies, and from there it can be used to do something you'd more readily recognize as a "security breach."
What's bad in Chrome is not necessary bad in Blink. Blink happens to work well and be very wide-spread, and also being open source. Usually I look for these 3 things together when choosing open source software.
None give me capability based security. All are the equivalent of a fortification build out of crates of nitroglycerine. Any inbound inject of control that works turns them into a devastating resource for the enemy.
Seriously, why can't you add a markup layer to a hypertext document without copying it and embedding said markup? This exposes you to the dangers of copyright law, and the trolls that exploit it.
Talk about false advertising.
i don’t hate it per se. it’s actually quite good at what it does. but i don’t like paying for something i can implement myself but can’t because making time to do so and justifying it is challenging
It's a garbage app, made by a garbage company running like garbage on a garbage protocol. There is no realistic alternative because friends and family expect you to have it.
Especially if the reason you ditch Whatsapp is for ethical/moral reasons.
There isn't much that's wrong per se, but when compared to e.g. Telegram it's much worse.
Outside of SMS, I only use Skype, Slack and Whatsapp for instant messaging, and in terms of spam, SMS, which is bound to my number, gets the most spam, which is already quite rare.
To be fair Telegram, privacy and security concerns aside, is a pretty high bar. Surely Facebook has the resources to make an exceptional app, but apparently they don't think it'd be worth it for them. I really wish something like Matrix had clients as good as Telegram's!
This would all be easily fixable. You could be able to start a chat by entering (or, more realistically, copy-pasting) a phone number. And instead of a phone number, you could be shown the other person's profile name (like in Telegram).
https://wa.me/their-number-with-the-country-code
Paste this link(after putting their number) in a chat with yourself (https://wa.me/your-number-with-the-country-code) and just click the link.
It is a built in feature. People can generate wa.me URLs for their account in settings.
That is a domain owned by WhatsApp. It's not some unofficial service.
Didn't we learn in school not to fall for peer pressure? You have a choice here.