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Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#451

Post by peteri »

nateabele wrote: post #19

Workday. There's not even a close second.

Stuff that you'd expect to be a lot better like objectives and reviews seem to involve a lot of scrolling and very little of it feels natural. You can sort of smell whatever the internal framework is leaking through into the UI.

We've been moved onto Workday and I hate it and I suspect I'm going to hate it even more as I've just picked up a people management role so I will be spending more of my life dealing with it.

Reminds me of K2 process automation which while it has a lot of value[1] forces the UI down particular routes which can be very sub-optimal for the end user.

[1] Whenever I used it I felt like I could have written the small bit I was interested in less time using lots of alternative technologies, but the amount of time to add all the other bits and pieces like reporting and retrying of process steps would kill you longer term.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#452

Post by encom »

creativeembassy wrote: post #220

Dropbox. I've used it for a decade, but now it's slow, bloated, and takes over CPU and memory like there isn't a single other program I need to run... and I was paying $20 for the privilege. But a few weeks ago I switched to Syncthing[0], and it's the best software transition I've ever made. Opposite of everything Dropbox is now: fast, simple, and I don't even notice it running in the background. Seamless setup, and…

I hate Dropbox for different reasons, and switched to ownCloud about 4-5 years ago now, I think. Running it on Digital Ocean, and backing up to Tarsnap. Absolutely love it. I get that it's not for everyone, but it's really not that hard either.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#453

Post by ack210 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #35

Microsoft Teams. I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic features that messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-Talk, real multi-window (even with the recent "pop-out" functionality), and its UI is all the worst modern trends. You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS styles, etc). Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and every time my computer…

I've never felt that anything has captured the essence of what it's like to use Microsoft's software better than the URLs Teams generates for meetings scheduled via Outlook. Why use something like Zoom's 9 digit meeting numbers when you can have a 250+ character url complete with long seemingly random strings and a url-encoded JSON object?

The plugin will try to hide this behind a "Join Teams Meeting" hyperlink, but on more than one occasion I've had the link converted to plaintext, leaving the recipient with no idea what they're supposed to do. So every time before sending a teams meeting from Outlook I have to extract the mess of a URL and manually paste into the location field.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#454

Post by ScottFree »

perceptronas wrote: post #320

Any modern OS: MacOS, Windows or Linux. All have major problems. _Works out of the box_ vs _is actually fast_ vs _is good UX_ and so on. All of them lack some kind of functionality: mail calendar apps are buggy (win and mac), GPU suspend problems (linux for me), can't replace hardware parts(macos), weird finder problems, weird "explorer.exe" problems, weird nautilus problems. Why can't OS'es just work? Why is UX gett…

It's not just Desktop OS's. Mobile, TV and Car OS's are mostly terrible as well. Are OS's really that hard to do well?

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#455

Post by AsyncAwait »

rvz wrote: post #107

Desktop GNU/Linux. Too much of a cost to test for and to set up CIs for the distros I'm targeting. There is little to no paying users there because of the fragmentation. But again, "paid support" will have lots of choices, versions, combinations and edge cases to cover. So I listed it as "unsupported: use at your own risk." Windows and macOS have a much sainer desktop for GUI apps to test against.

Except I use GNU/Linux precisely because what Windows/macOS offer is neither sane nor productive for me.

I don't know why people insist that billions of people on this planet have to be satisfied with 3 interfaces but it doesn't work that way.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#457

Post by pavel_lishin »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #315

Microsoft Outlook - decade after decade the icons change but the suckage does not, its 1987 every day when you use Outlook. Microsoft Teams - drains my battery 1% every two minutes Slack - the original “let’s forget everything we’ve learned about communications and try to discover it again”. From the threads feature nobody wants to the inability to silence bots or plugins, Slack never fails to disappoint. They pitch…

For what it's worth, I love threads. Prior to threads, channels would be pure noise, often intertwining multiple conversations at once.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#458

Post by pavel_lishin »

everdrive wrote: post #336
puranjay wrote: post #324

One of the worst apps I use regularly has to be Google Play Music. The UI is horrible enough, but it also randomly deletes tracks from my library - including my own tracks that I recorded under my own name. And sometimes the tracks will show up again randomly. The worst is when tracks don't show up in my Songs list, but if I put it on shuffle, these tracks will start playing. I don't know what's the status now, but S…

I tried briefly to put all my music in Google play (years ago, now) and had a similar experience. It was terrible, and I felt like I couldn't find certain tracks very easily. I wasn't sure if this was accidental, or not. Do you know why tracks are deleted from your library?

I had no issues with disappearing tracks, but Google did helpfully replace much of my uploaded music with the "censored" versions, asking me to re-upload songs it threw away. Thanks, I'll go dig up that hard drive any day now.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#460

Post by thombles »

tootie wrote: post #140
djinnandtonic wrote: post #105

Google Drive. I have no idea how a company with a search background produced software where it is impossible to find something.

Everyone one of these cloud storage services (Dropbox, Box, Drive, iCloud, S3, OneDrive) has adopted the same mental model of file storage that computer systems from the 80s devised to mimic filing cabinets. Namely: folders. I think a folder hierarchy has some value but they should really all be using a tagging system instead. Orgs tend to have multiple hierarchies based or org charts, projects, disciplines, timeline…

> iCloud

Don't forget that Finder has customisable tags which sync perfectly across iCloud. They are a top-level browsing option on the iOS Files app. Probably you were thinking of something more tag-first but it does exist. :)

Personally I really like the file/folder model because I can sync the whole caboodle to my hard drive, copy it to a USB backup, possibly transfer it to another operating system, knowing that I've captured the whole story.

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