Everything's broken and nobody's upset

Your title is broken and i'm upset about it.

Very much relate to this. Some days, especially in the corporate environment where I work, I genuinely wonder if we are missing the point completely with all the innovation and advancements in OS' and software instead of focussing on cleaning up what is already there. It always feels like there's more time spent developing all of this than there is dogfooding it.

One thing to add to the gripes re iOS - I've found that it works beautifully when it does, and horribly when it doesn't. His point on notification clearing reminded me of the Mail app when you have connection failures: I had 5 accounts tied into it, and when the networking failed it would throw 2 modal dialogues for each account. The amount of time I spent glued on the spot hammering away at notifications so I could move on felt staggering after a while.

I had a glut of other misc. quirks and persistent crashes that cut through the gloss on the device, this in combination with a string of Windows 7 bad behaviour (started python development, started hating python development) led me to switch onto linux (started loving python development) and a droid handset. Guaranteed they will have just as many warts and bad behaviours, but it feels more reasonable because I'm expecting them, and on linux, have an opportunity to fix them.

There's two aspects to being a "power user" (not entirely but I try) that I could never take for granted - this capacity to fix things that don't work, but also the opportunity to work with the more atomic tools. There's nothing more soothing than stringing commands together, writing a script, or organising things in a text file or database: mostly because if something breaks, I broke it, I can see the breakage, I can fix the breakage. Minor bliss!

Addendum / edit to this to provide context - I think coming from a control systems background has coloured a lot of my opinions in regards to innovation. I've seen fistfuls more value delivered (in this field, potentially applicable to others), by creating small, clean, highly polished, iterative and well integrated systems as opposed to large, sprawling and constantly evolving...messes. The sometimes popular fail first / fail fast / iterate like crazy mantra makes me itch. I've seen successful lean / agile approaches executed that focus on quick delivery without being so flippant about quality.

This is one of the things that really upsets me. I hate how nothing ever works. We spend our money on things that don't do as they say, or companies that don't do as they should. I guess it's inherit a problem with a profit driven world where more features will always trump actually working.

"Guaranteed they will have just as many warts and bad behaviours"

Absolutely!

But you are not alone on Linux, and in the 'everyone sees this' scenario, be assured someone will be working on it somewhere, or something slightly similar...

Ubuntu actually run a 'papercuts' bug fixing programme designed to get new people interested in developing...

Honestly, there'S just too many things to fix. It's easy to believe with just a little better management or a little more attention to detail or more XP or whatever all these problems would go way but the truth is it's just too damn complicated.

Each of the products mentioned are huge HUGE projects layered on top of hundreds of other projects. A browser has a various networking stacks themselves built on OS stacks themselves built on device drivers etc etc. Pick any part and it's literally counting on millions of lines of code to be flawless. Interact across the net and now you need the software on all parts of that network to be flawless as well

Can you name anything with so many parts that just works?

It's possible it could get better but it seems unlikely. Each year the new stuff is built on top of the old stuff making the hole deeper and deeper as we go. That's why a 1.6ghz atom with a gig of ram sometimes feels slower than my Atari 800