231–240 of 261 posts
Without a blink, McAfee. This abomination has the ability to put more than decent computer into a miserable slug. I cannot imagine how much my client would have saved in productivity from all its employees and contractors if that thing was uninstalled.
In addition to the already mentioned MS Office pieces: • Android programming. Tried it once, wasted many days trying to make sure the app works on all phone models ranging from $10 to $1000. There were some hardware-related parts that are poorly standardized and abused by the manufacturers a lot. And yeah, the $10-$1000 range coverage is a bit too much for such a poorly designed platform. • Inkscape: if you are a per…
> Android programming. Android Studio and Gradle can both die in a fire - how anyone manages to actually write a decent app with those two, is completely beyond me.
Desktop Linux. Always something needs to be set up, always something breaking, always something needed to be fixed, always had a problem to solve.
For example, HiDPI scaling works great on GNOME, but KDE doesn't scale a lot of margins, which makes it look cramped. GNOME's window snapping stopped working for me in a recent update. It's made me contemplate running WSL on Windows many times, but at the end of the day I'm still on Linux because I prefer the overall experience.
Perforce. The more I learned of it, the worse it got. Take the worst parts of CVS and Subversion, and then toss them in the bin, because they're too good to be in Perforce.
Factorio? More seriously, the absolute worst developer experience I've ever had was a weird proprietary environment called "OpenAT" for a mobile module system. Admittely we were in the beta programme because we needed features, but every new firmware update would fix some features of the operating system and break others . At one point while trying to debug terrible sound we noticed that the volume control wasn't at…
The other 900 hours were great though!
:D
Skype for Business - I really hate this shit. Random disconnects, errors, no offline message support, idiotic message history in Outlook, random errors "Text is too long" etc.
Heroku. It just isn't good. I tried it way back and most of the time it turned into a struggle that wasted hours. I recently went back to it, thinking that it should be good now; it isn't. My typical environment for a site is supervisor + nginx. Nothing crazy, super simple. For whatever reason, the heroku instance refused to take in my config (set with `heroku config` and it was showing up in the Heroku console... bu…
sshd on Synology NAS [1]. It took me two weeks of troubleshooting, cross-compiling binaries and reverse engineering the source code, until I figured out that I wasn't doing anything wrong - Synology had actually changed their version of sshd to add all sorts of proprietary crap [2]. Another one was the "Mouse battery low" alerts on Gnome under Ubuntu [3]. The root cause was in upowerd, but Gnome developers could have…
Would you mind sharing your overall experience with synology? I'm planning on purchasing one for my home and all the reviews are positive, but I'm always eager to hear the bad side.
You may need to jump through some hoops to get the GPL code, but their product is (or was? it has been a while since I last played with their source code) reasonably open and full-featured, and works nicely out of the box. They also release frequent updates, have a decent set of options for backup / logging / media sharing out of the box, alerts are effective, and you also have an appstore-like for 3P apps.
Also, they use Linux as the base, and in some models you can even get access to the serial console with some effort, so you're not totally locked in on a proprietary system, should something go really bad [3][4].
I have a RS815+ and an old DS212+, and both are very reliable. Not terribly fast, but wouldn't expect much more from spinning disks anyway.
[1] https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology-openssh/
[2] https://wrgms.com/synologys-secret-telnet-password/
[3] https://wrgms.com/recovering-a-failed-synology-diskstation-d...
[4] https://wrgms.com/entering-single-user-mode-on-a-synology/
Windows as a porting target for desktop applications. I've written a few for work (using PyQt5), and about 10% of my effort typically goes into getting the application working on Linux. The other 90% goes into wrestling with Windows doing everything in its power to fucking ruin my week. Fman Build System (fbs) helps quite a bit, I've found, but there are still more often than not some really annoying rough edges (not…
fbs author here. Thank you for the mention :-)