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?
327 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 6159 ms ] threadAt 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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
[1] https://twitter.com/rishmsft/status/1408085784016539653
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://pwa.zoom.us/wc
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.
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.
[0]: https://sailfishos.org
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…
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...
https://shortcut.com
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...
[2]: https://shortcut.com/write-beta
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.
How? I've had zero problems with their desktop and mobile apps.
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.
I use a shared album for pics and video.
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.)