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Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#71

gimp

It’s come a long way and slowly keeps getting better. Hopefully it’ll exit this list someday :-)

I wish I knew how to get design feedback to the GIMP team in a way that would be appreciated & that people might take action on. I also wish they’d rename it something like “Image Lab” so it would be easier to promote at work.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#72
I'd say basically half the software I use on a fairly regular basis is usually pretty much garbage. Corsair Link is a clunky, laggy mess. It takes like 10 seconds to open it, every single time, even if it's running in the background. I have yet to use good software for "peripherals". Google home devices are cool when they work, but I've gotten frustrated with them too many times that I barely use them. I could go on.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#74

Have you ever worked with SAP?

SAP was the one that first popped into my head, quickly followed by Teams.

The SAP UI and UX are utterly ghastly - tiny buttons everywhere, hundreds of options, menus and pathways at every screen, and slow on top. It's just horrible to use. Even stuff like printing is ridiculously complex, way more than in a standard Windows app.

It gets a bit more bearable once you're familiar with whatever your area is - for example, you can type in a cryptic code to jump straight to the screen you want, and you eventually learn to somehow ignore the dozens of UI elements you don't need and focus on those you do.

On the dev side, you need to use ABAP, which is absolutely horrible - consultants can make a lot of money tho.

I should add as well, I've never used SAP HANA, so that might be more bearable.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#75

macOS Finder. It is hard to fathom how bad a file explorer could be if you have used only windows and linux file explorers. Finder is astonishingly bad. Default search is global, it means searching while you are in a folder will search across all documents. This can be changed, but search is even then far worse compared to windows or linux. Sometimes Finder simply won't show certain files, and you need to do a mv fro…

This is a very good answer, even getting to your user root directory is a pain in finder, I have usually go to terminal and run 'open .' to get anywhere.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#76

Jira. Its WYSIWYG editor is goddamn awful. Runner-up goes to its sibling product, Confluence, for the same reason.

Anything that includes WYSIWYG with no opt-out is shit. Slack also tried to pull off this crap but thankfully backtracked after the complaints.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#77

`git`. I mean, its so popular that you get used to it eventually but the commands never make sense or map well to the mental model of what you're doing. And "getting used to it" is a seriously low bar for software IMHO.

Haha - I've used mercurial almost exclusively for maybe ten years, and the biggest share of my points on Stack Overflow is from a question I answered about a confusing part of git.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#78

Docker. I use it and love it every day in both dev and prod, but I also really kind of hate it. I'll keep my complaints short. There should not be a system-wide daemon. (Or any daemon). It should not require root at all (no setuid either). From outside the container, the container and its processes should be a single process (with threads). (Like glueing a bunch of processes together.) The containers should be nest-a…

I agree about the daemon. Podman is a daemonless alternative, though I've never used it myself.

Strongly disagree about Docker Compose though - I actually really like the ability to compose a stack of different containers together with some simple yaml.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#79

`git`. I mean, its so popular that you get used to it eventually but the commands never make sense or map well to the mental model of what you're doing. And "getting used to it" is a seriously low bar for software IMHO.

People who criticise git fall into two categories:

- Those who have never used Clearcase, Perforce, or any other enterprise monstrosity.

- Those who have and suffer from Stockholm syndrome.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#80
post #17

Android I have a computer in my pocket but I am not allowed to do even the most basic stuff I would like to do with it. Like using a shell to work on my files, use git for version control and to sync to other machines, use vim to edit text ... the list goes on forever. Heck, I cannot even easily backup all of my data. Like the contacts for example. No way to read the files in which they are stored.

> Like using a shell to work on my files

As others have mentioned, Termux is Free and Open-Source. You mentioned trust, but considering Termux is already open source, I'm not sure how the author could gain your trust.

> use git for version control and to sync to other machines

You got me with git, but Syncthing might solve the same problem for #2 - there's a FLOSS client available on F-Droid as well :)

> use vim to edit text

I'd assume Termux has a vim package, meaning you can stay open source for the entire stack. If it doesn't, then my mistake.

> I cannot even easily backup all my data. Like the contacts

Ignoring using a carddav server for to have them backed up all the time, you can easily back them all up in vcard format via Simple Contacts - an open source app availble on F-Droid.

Hell, for the most part you can completely disable whatever you want, root or no. ADB can disable everything you don't want to run, including all the way down to Google Play Services. I can verify that, as I've done it myself on my BlackBerry KeyOne.

It (mostly) can all be done, it just takes a little bit of looking. Like anything else with modern computing, the fun stuff is hidden away, and all we're presented with is the glossiest interface the OEM can shove in front of us.

If there's anything that actually cannot be done via FLOSS software, I'd honestly love to hear it, because I'm drawing a blank at the moment.

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