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

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

#251

Post by anthk »

JCWasmx86 wrote: post #7

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…

I could use 80% of whatever does Teams do with just an AMD Athlon an 256 MB of RAM. With inline image, Latex and video previewing, video calls and so on.

That with Kopete and KDE3.

MS could write a multiplatform QT5 client perfectly by using 1/10 of the resources.

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

#252

Post by anthk »

nicbou wrote: post #235
Johnythree wrote: post #191

My pet hate is M/S Excel. It's ancient now, but still essential for some users. The problem with Excel is that it was written before the M/S GUI became standard, and so nearly all of the keystrokes are count-intuitive. I use it rarely these days, but when I do, I spend hours swearing at its clumsy non standard GUI interface.

The worst part is that many shortcuts in the office suite are localized.

And functions. And maybe, VBA. A turd.

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

#253

Post by anthk »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #67

Every website with cookie tracking. Which is every website. Anything electron: massive hog of resources and will never be rewritten on a nonbloated platform. Every single package manager and scheme still seems fundamentally broken and are bad compromises. But there's no money in fixing it so it will always be broken. I salute people doing the thankless work of packaging OSS and language libraries. You are fighting th…

Perl is still alive at OpenBSD's base and it rocks. If awk+sh is cumbersome for some tools with more than 10 lines, you can pretty much do all the advenced exercises of The AWK Programming Language in Perl in record time.

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

#254

Post by anthk »

t0bia_s wrote: post #206
andrecarini wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unavoidable fate of those working with computers long enough!

So true. There will be great tech work resignation. Oh wait... Isn't that happening?

After that you'll embrace Gopher, C, Perl, TCL and maybe Gemini happily, discarding even web browsing for the daily news reading.

It happened to me, I don't even start X to watch movies, music or chat/IM.

Even gaming, then. Roguelikes and IF have amazing playability and stores, and Mednafen has an SDL2 backend, so running it under the framebuffer/KMS does everything faster.

There's no ads, no notifications, no social media bullshit with mental manipulation, no Electron turds eating half of your RAM.

Wordgrinder and sc-im plus Gnuplot do magic in the CLI/TUI.

It's like the old K.Mandla/Inconsolation's blog but with a step taken further.

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

#255

Post by yeahman »

cyberei wrote: post #219
Trias11 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Stop using word "security" or "end to end" encryption and then enforcing me to disclose my phone number to use your "secure" app. This is scam.

Wow, that's interesting. I didn't expect to see Signal listed here. Disclaimer; Signal is probably my favorite app in in the world. As someone that doesn't use any Facebook owned services, there wouldn't be any other way for me to chat with my friends and family. But I'd really like to understand what you mean and if I am falling for a scam. How does disclosing my phone number make it insecure and not end-to-end encr…

In a lot of countries your phone number is tied to your passport.

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

#256

Post by seedless-sensat »

closeparen wrote: post #149

Grafana. Most of our dashboards are parameterized and half the time, using the dropdown to select a different value for a variable doesn’t work. The menu just closes and the variable doesn’t update. The “stacked” option when displaying multiple series is a super dangerous footgun; it will show you numbers that aren’t actually occurring. If you accidentally make a too-heavy metrics query the entire page becomes sluggi…

I have found Datadog pretty nice

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

#257

Post by vidanay »

speedgoose wrote: post #193
vidanay wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It’s not because it detects sound on your audio input while you are muted ? Maybe from your breathing or your keyboard.

Nope, not muted. The popup in that situation is a black box in the center of the screen.

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

#258

Post by joslk »

theduemmer wrote: post #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…

automation industry is horrible. but there's beckhoff with open protocol, integration to visual studio, few open source projects and growing community... i even work for inxton.com where we developed ST to C# transpiler - makes it easy to do high level stuff.

it still sucks, but other solutions suck even more

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

#259

Post by jhugo »

k4ch0w wrote: post #144
EugeneOZ wrote: post #69

Async Rust. It separates Rust ecosystem. Can’t be replaced because your code is either async from the beginning, or not. You are using either async libs, or some outdated libs because all modern versions have to support async Rust.

Amen to this one. It’s a shame you have to choose between tokio or async std too. Why hasn’t Rust standardized a single engine?

Standardisation is a commitment, and rust's stdlib is deliberately lean to allow that commitment to be very strong (long-term stability).

If in doubt, just use Tokio. It's much more widely used, has been around longer, has a history of solid engineering, didn't choose to put "std" in its name and race to 1.0 to fool people into thinking it was mature, ...

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

#260

Post by benjamir »

aledue wrote: post #87
signal11 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Until recently Firefox releases had all kind of problems (e.g. hardware enumeration) That's why we recommended Chromium/Chrome for at our faculty for Jitsi usage

I'm a Firefox (beta) user myself, but I would rather try another browser before blaming a webapp -- many issues.

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