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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?

#981

Post by thewebcount »

mtm7 wrote: post #751
lloydatkinson wrote: post #370

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

Glad to hear someone feels the same way about Git. I understand why some people love it, but I think it’s overly complex for most workflows.

Yeah, I've used a lot of different version control systems (RCS, CVS, SourceSafe, Perforce, svn, git), and by far the most confusing and infuriating is git with it's made-up words, bizarre naming, and the extra work it makes you do. Terrible to use. It does the thing it was designed to do, but good luck not screwing up because of its byzantine commands.

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

#982

Post by djinnandtonic »

crazygringo wrote: post #548
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.

Curious why? I rely almost exclusively on search within Drive and it works pretty flawlessly. What's the use case for you that's failing?

I recognize this is totally anecdotal, but about three times a week I have to ping the team asking "where is this doc that I know exists, but can't find?"

Usually I'm searching by filename or for keywords that should be in text. I believe it's an issue with how documents are ordered in folders; Some documents (in personal folders?) never come up in search, etc.

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

#983

Post by 4midori »

Dragon Pro, voice recognition software. Awful UI, known bugs that never get fixed, incompatible with critical applications like web browsers. Why? It's my understanding that they have no real competition. If you need to "drive" your computer with your voice, Dragon is all there is. In fact, it is pretty limited without the addition of Voice Computer, which allows you to command Windows to do certain things, like switch programs, etc.

Dragon is so important to my workflow, while so shitty a program, that I would pay three or four times its cost for a competing product that actually worked well.

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

#985

Post by neop1x »

musicale wrote: post #657
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #63

Docker. I use it and love it every day in both dev and prod, but I also really kind of hate it. I'll keep my complaints short. There should not be a system-wide daemon. (Or any daemon). It should not require root at all (no setuid either). From outside the container, the container and its processes should be a single process (with threads). (Like glueing a bunch of processes together.) The containers should be nest-a…

Yeah, docker is an anti-pattern in so many ways. Linux is partially to blame as well, since the container/isolation APIs can be hard to use correctly, and many people have latched on to docker as something that sort of works. It also seems to me that the failed security and isolation designs, and painful management and administration designs, of every mainstream operating system have been primary factors in pushing u…

You are probably forgetting about dependency hell, reproducible builds and automated testing. Waaaay tooo often some software won't compile because a bad version of the library is installed in the system or an incompatible compiler is used. Or two perl/python apps require different dependency version. All those problems are quickly solved by Docker. There were no better way to solve it, other than packing and versioning everything like in Chrome build process...

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

#986

Post by tandr »

cel1ne wrote: post #823
lloydatkinson wrote: post #370

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

If you have a mac, look into GitUp. It's a great git-client and it creates a timelined snapshot-backup after every action, so you can undo whatever you did.

I tried GitUp, but I found Fork (https://fork.dev/home) to be user friendly (IMHO, YMMV)

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

#990

Post by hendrick_neues »

KMail. It hangs so frequently that I have a shortcut-key combination to kill -9 akonadi (ctrl+alt+k), which then respawns and fetches mail again.

At the end of every startup it used to present a dialog 'Mail has encountered a fatal error and will now close'. If you clicked 'OK' the programme would terminate.

Fortunately the dialog wasn't modal, so you could carefully tuck it into an unused corner of the screen and continue as normal. Eventually I did some googling and deleted ~/.local/share/local-mail/templates which got rid of it (but I lost the templates)

That said, I still find the UI much less fiddly than gmail, which is why I use both.

In fact I'm writing this comment while I wait for Kmail to re-load it's mailbox, so I can reply to an email.

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