Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 666 posts

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#351

Post by jpindar »

simbalion wrote: post #184
huhtenberg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photoshop is incredibly glitchy, at least its Windows version is. It manages to crash even while initializing.

CS5 never crashes for me... That said, The price tag is obscene. Large price tags for specialty business software is fine when the publisher is an indy developer with a small demographic. Photoshop does not qualify. I understand they will charge whatever the market will pay, but that doesn't make it right or "not evil". It's 2016 and I think we should really grow up as a species. Competing so ferociously with your fe…

Corel PaintShop Pro is a professional quality program that's almost as almost as full featured for a fraction of the price. I create content for virtual worlds and once I moved past the beginner's stage of using free programs (of which I believe Paint.Net is the best) I bought PSP and found it has everything I need.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#352

Post by justinlardinois »

ibudiallo wrote: post #65

I feel that sometimes bad is synonymous to "hard to use". A lot of software is hard to use with a bunch of unfriendly settings. But the more time I spend trying to figure out, the better I get. One example is Git. I used to use SVN with a GUI and it was a breeze. When work required me to use git, I hated it. But after a while of using it, I stopped doing the 'how do I do svn feature X with git' now I understand it, a…

As someone who's young enough to have never used anything but git, I get the impression that knowing how a different VCS works makes it hard to learn. Git was super intuitive when I learned it, I think just because I was never taught any other way of doing things.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#353

Post by simbalion »

zeta0134 wrote: post #337
nostrademons wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I used to use Notepad++ back around 2005 and it was a piece of crap stability-wise. Frequent crashes, and not-infrequent UI glitches like syntax highlighting just stopping working. This isn't a reflection on its state now , but I'm trying to make the point that good software takes time . They've had 13 years to clean it up now, and evidently it's gotten a lot better. But that's worth remembering when judging th…

Seriously, if Ubuntu were a single piece of software, it would top my charts. I don't even use it regularly anymore except on my work Desktop (I run Arch linux on all my personal machines) but the sheer level of "Just Works(tm)" is mind boggling. It quite handily picks up my weird wireless cards and video devices without fuss, and I haven't managed to fully break an Ubuntu installation (mostly dealing with nVidia bac…

I recommend Debian for similar reasons. It might not be as magical as Ubuntu but it still works out-of-box for a variety of common hardware and is built on a great free as in free philosophy.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#354

Post by justinlardinois »

hack_edu wrote: post #32

ffmpeg and libav

Disagree on ffmpeg. It certainly gives you a great degree of control, which is great if you know a lot about video formats and codecs and such, but as a casual user my first step for ffmpeg is always googling "ffmpeg convert X to Y" and copy and pasting from Stack Overflow.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#356

Post by limelight »

virmundi wrote: post #201

RabbitMQ. It just works. We're operating with in the normal use case for it. We turn it on, transfer 50k or so messages a day, then forget about. The memory is fairly low, CPU is low and constant. The connections for month or year long clients stay open.

In my experience, RabbitMQ is close to the opposite of reliable.

When I think of reliability, I think of Postgres: it works well, and it's hard to make it not work reliably. With RabbitMQ, it's hard to make it work reliably.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#358

Post by justinlardinois »

Probably the most off the wall choice in this thread, but I say HP Scan and Capture: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/hp-scan-and-captu...

It's a Metro app for Windows 8.1 and up to scan with HP scanners. I love it because it just works, which has never been my experience with scanning[0]. You press a button, it scans whatever's on the tray. You can tweak resolution if you want. And at the end you save it as a PDF. Simplicity is something that I think tends to be forgotten when it comes to GUI software.

[0] Except for a commercial scanner I used once where you put in your email address at the beginning and for every scanned page it sent you an email with an attached PDF. Although that has its own issues.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#359

Post by rsoto »

Firefox. And it has been for years, I remember when I downloaded a zip file with the Phoenix browser, you had to manually enable flash, and even with such an early version, it was magic. If I remember correctly, it even had tabs.

Then the add-ons and extensions, which enabled you to do something entirelly different or bring back an old behaviour. I still use oldbar since the «awesome bar» might be too awesome for me. Also, the tabs groups, if you are like me, a hoarder of to-read articles, and leaving things for later, you can have a clean slate without losing those tabs.

And if you want to look behind the scenes, you have about:config in which you can bring behind some of the old features.

And it's everything open source! I know Firefox has suffered a lot because it's seen as slow, but I open Firefox once a day and never have complained about it.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#360

Post by rsync »

aerovistae wrote: post #328
audleman wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or for folks like me: I just want to play my video files no fuss, no muss. Something other major media players seem to have more trouble with than they should. But not VLC! 100% of the time it works every time!

Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like magic. I have never missed Windows Media Player for even a moment.

"Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like magic."

Does it play DVD ISO files ?

Can you use the menus, etc. ?

Just curious ... XBMC back in 2004 could do this (navigate and use DVD menus in a DVD ISO) but then that feature actually went away in the following years, never to return ...

Post reply on HN