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

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81–90 of 328 posts

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

#81
Android.

When holding my phone up to me ear after answering a call, the screen won't switch off and random buttons will then get pressed because you know, I'm holding it against my ear.

Can't find any options in the seeing to fix this issue.

My wife has exactly the same problem despite using a different make of phone.

How can Android fail at the most fundamental task?

The alternative of Apple is too expensive for me... More than I'm willing to spend on a phone at least.

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

#83
Rockwell Automation's Factory Talk software. It is used for developing GUIs for screens on industrial machines. Horribly expensive, laggy and broken. Versioning is a nightmare with crappy backwards compatibility (if it even decides to open the old project at all without crashing or locking up). God help you if it decides it doesn't want to deploy the screen programs over the network because then it becomes a song and dance to get it working over a USB key. Don't let windows update either as it seems like updates constantly break it. Sometimes it breaks itself and more often than not their (very expensive) support says to nuke everything and reinstall.

There are alternatives, some worse but most better and cheaper. But Rockwell is the industry standard in North America. So their screens get spec'd.

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

#84

Rockwell Automation's Factory Talk software. It is used for developing GUIs for screens on industrial machines. Horribly expensive, laggy and broken. Versioning is a nightmare with crappy backwards compatibility (if it even decides to open the old project at all without crashing or locking up). God help you if it decides it doesn't want to deploy the screen programs over the network because then it becomes a song and…

I'll add "everything B&R" to this.

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

#85

MS Teams: What makes it bad: First of all, it uses Electron, thus it is laggy and wastes too much resources. Maybe it is just a pet peeve of mine, but I hate , if an application does not look native on my GNOME Desktop and does not follow any HIG. Another factor is the proprietary nature of MS Teams. If it was open, there would probably be some other client/some way to have a real native client. My preferred alternat…

Lately, my Teams has been popping up a purple bar that says, "other people may not be able to hear you". Yeah, duh - I wasn't talking!

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

#86
Mathematica. Clunky interface on Linux, requires that you use the Notebook interface for most things, terrible to run headlessly on a server, need to be happy with the defaults that Wolfram provides, etc. However, it's still the best CAS around and open-source alternatives e.g., Sage, have a long way to catch up.

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

#87

MS Teams: What makes it bad: First of all, it uses Electron, thus it is laggy and wastes too much resources. Maybe it is just a pet peeve of mine, but I hate , if an application does not look native on my GNOME Desktop and does not follow any HIG. Another factor is the proprietary nature of MS Teams. If it was open, there would probably be some other client/some way to have a real native client. My preferred alternat…

> it uses Electron Teams v2 won't use Electron[1]; but for now you can get a small performance boost by just opening Teams using a modern web browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox) at https://teams.microsoft.com/ -- you can even set up a PWA-type app shortcut. You can uninstall the client after that. I think there's maybe one feature (popout chat windows) that the client has which you can't get in the browser. [1] https://t…

Temas refuses(ed?) to let you hear voice calls if you use Firefox. It's the only reason I have Chromium installed too.

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

#88
post #28
post #12

Whatsapp. It's a garbage app, made by a garbage company running like garbage on a garbage protocol. There is no realistic alternative because friends and family expect you to have it.

Out of interest what do you not like about the whatsapp app? The core functionality seems pretty solid to me.

That it binds to your cell phone number, and that I can't run the web client on an Android tablet (at least the last time I tried).

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

#89

MS Teams: What makes it bad: First of all, it uses Electron, thus it is laggy and wastes too much resources. Maybe it is just a pet peeve of mine, but I hate , if an application does not look native on my GNOME Desktop and does not follow any HIG. Another factor is the proprietary nature of MS Teams. If it was open, there would probably be some other client/some way to have a real native client. My preferred alternat…

To add to what others said, another crap piece of Teams' UI is the file manager: it plays very badly with the browser (can't middle click a file to open it in another browser, pressing the back button is broken) and it has a shitty pdf viewer (why the hell does it need an integrated viewer anyway?).

My university pays for Google Meet too, and has a server running Moodle, so I have no idea why professors prefer Teams over Meet+Moodle. And don't get me started on Google Classroom...

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

#90
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be good reasons why your ID can be your phone number but I've never heard a good reason why your ID must be your phone number. Do you have any?

It majorly cuts down on spam, by a huge amount.

Is that a thing?

Outside of SMS, I only use Skype, Slack and Whatsapp for instant messaging, and in terms of spam, SMS, which is bound to my number, gets the most spam, which is already quite rare.

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