Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

Friend of mine has had great success blocking the ads with pi-hole.

I use Teams on Mac, and frankly while I started off just disliking it because of the Electron lagginess, over time that's been overshadowed by a bunch of other stuff:

- 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.

Problems with gmeet:

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.

While I detest Jira, I find Confluence to be quite good for writing documentation. It's full featured and mostly just works. For our customer facing documentation at work we use Zendesk and while it's good it's nowhere near as good as Confluence.

Lack of granular settings for notifications, wonky integration with the desktop client, groups, your id is your phone number.

There isn't much that's wrong per se, but when compared to e.g. Telegram it's much worse.