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

1. It does have calling, but it's integrated with Gmail.

2. Elaborate? The screen sharing in Meet is what Chrome provides in general and I see the same options when using other web-based tools like jitsi. Zoom has a native app which presumably allows it do other things, but given that Chrome can "share entire desktop," "share a window," and "share a tab w/audio" I haven't actually found myself wanting any other behavior. Also, I consider not needing a native app an advantage and Zoom's web-based offering is trash.

3. Agreed, although to be fair I only find myself wanting this when presenting slides and Google Slides does have them.

4. Zoom supports 1080p while Meet does 720p, but if you're using any video features then Zoom apparently drops to 720p as well?

5. No argument there.

6. I've literally never experienced what you're describing. If more than one person is presenting content then the first presenter might be displaced by the second, which might look like "minimizing the presented content." If you have manually pinned anyone that always takes precedence. No option to overlay in Google Meet is a major annoyance.

7. Google Meet's chat is ephemeral unless you are recording the Meet. I think this goes into a bucket of design decisions that can all be lumped together as "No one is using Google Meet as their only communication tool." I've never needed things like Zoom's DMs that are inside a call. When I'm trying to have side conversations with coworkers I just use our normal chat tools. Google Chat is probably only better than Microsoft Teams among the "real chat apps," but it's definitely better than Zoom's built-in messaging.

Two things that have made it so that I cannot stand every over video calling product is that Google Meet does automatic video brightness adjustment, which helps a lot when you don't have a great set up at home, and the audio noise cancelling is insanely good. It is hard to overemphasize how good it is. You can whistle and clap and play music and type on your obnoxious self-indulgent clackity keyboard and other people will only hear your voice, plucked cleanly out of the mess as if everything had been mic'd separately. It's by far Meet's best feature and so far no one else has come anywhere close.

This is something my team is struggling with at the moment. Gitlab issues (and Github issues, and similar) are fine if what you're doing is only software development. The problem is that Jira works really well for tracking all the things, not just 'bugs in our current software', and having something that keeps track of all the work in one place makes life a lot easier.

Right now, my team uses Jira for tracking bugs and features and whatnot in our custom software development. We also use it for tracking issues and work related to our infrastructure, access requests to our various data centers, budget requests from the team, software and change management planning, site audits, and probably a couple other things I'm forgetting off the top of my head. And yes, there are likely better products for each of those things individually, but then you wind up in the hell of "oh wait, audits go over here in Freebly, but software releases are over there in FrobniTZr", and if you run those tools it's suddenly fifty-leven more hosts and apps to support and keep patched.

Much like Excel, Jira might not be the best tool for all our use cases, but it's pretty good at several of them and good enough at the rest that having everything in one bucket outweighs the potential benefits of a better tool.

On the other hand, if someone would like to fire up a start-up to develop a similarly flexible on-premises work management product to replace it, you'll absolutely find me in line with my wallet open...

We're having this struggle right now trying to replace Confluence thanks to Atlassian's "no more Server licenses" foot-gun. The other wiki software that's out there just hasn't impressed me so far. This one is painful to set up and keep running, that one is awful to edit anything in (especially if you're non-technical), most of them don't support collaborative editing or inclusion of Office doc content on pages, and that's before the fun places where we've integrated Jira and Confluence to make workflows easier. I keep hoping to find something under a rock that really wows me (or that one of the existing competitors will really step their game up to pick up the people exiting Atlassian).

The thing that drives me up a wall with Teams is that when someone shares a screenshot with me, I can only expand the thumbnail in the chat to the full-size image maybe 5% of the time successfully. Most of the time I just go into a blank tab that never renders anything.

I think part of this is the fucked up way that Teams handles storing content, because it uses a mishmash of SharePoint sometimes for real file attachments, and some ephemeral blob storage for pasted images.

But it's infuriating because there is no error message, or any way to force reload; you just have to keep trying and hope it works, or go into your AppData folder, nuke the cache, and restart Teams.

The biggest problem with the web version of Outlook is that it doesn't have a global Unread Messages filter like the desktop version does.

I have a plethora of folders and rules set up for each customer, and it is impossible to keep up with incoming items without that Unread filter.