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

[andrecarini]

Which software do you use frequently and are unable to replace (either at home or your company) despite thoroughly disliking it?

What makes it so bad? Are there alternatives? Why can't you replace it?

[JCWasmx86]

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 alternative would either be Jitsi or Matrix, although both have just electron clients they atleast attempt to have a usable GUI. (Except this one thing in Element: The search button is next to the "Start Videocall"-Button)

I can't replace it, as my university uses it.

[riidom]

Discord. I basically don't use it, avery few months I'd say, but I still hate it, because it drains all the good Q&A's from the internet and puts it into its chatlogs, with a mediocre search ontop.

Discord for gaming ramblings and chitchat may be okay, but I hate when software projects misuse it as a support channel.

Give me some forum instead, I know many ppl here on HN dislike discourse, I don't get it though, for me it's a great way to do a forum in a modern way. Can't perceive any UX issues with it (I do know the arguments, I just think they are not true, or much less of a hassle than claimed).

Maybe we need something like discord, but it should have a way to group a question and the following conversation including asking back and answers, and send that to a website where it appears like a forum thread. Basically just select it with mouse, right-click, pick some option, select some keywords for taxonomy and good to go. Should be 5 seconds of work after the person with the problem is satisfied. Yea that is something I would not hate I guess.

[rickstanley]

Teams. It's an abomination. Slow, clunky, polluted UI, consumes memory like it's breakfast, terrible ignominious Linux support, useless "user voice".

Can't change because I trapped myself in a company that is MS partner, and have all the Microsoft's suite.

I can expand on some points:

- useless user voice: just go to feedback hub and see it for yourself, years old (now "renewed" because of the migration from User Voice) requests, with default response from the developers "hey! We hear you..." No, you don't;

- terrible Linux support: the current version of Teams for Linux is months old, from October 2021, and I think it's just a wrapper for the web version, but worse, because it uses an electron version that doesn't support screen share on Wayland;

- it's slow, every action you try, hover, focus, text,etc just feels slow and unfinished;

There's still some fight internally between people that like teams (those who has an RTX 3090, that can run teams without sweating) and people that don't, the latter created a channel/group/whatever is called, to change from Teams ("Teams alternatives"), but I think it's a lost cause.

[64bit_xombie]

Signal. I dont like having to tie it to a phone number. I would much rather use email (eg wire) if I need to pick one or the other, but a random session id (eg session, torchat) is much better. I also dont want to be limited to only using it on a mobile device. (Yes I know theres a "desktop client" but it has to be linked to your phone anyway, so it defeats half the point of having a desktop version and it also uses electron, which imo is trash.) I also am put off by the fact that they work so closely with Facebook and other Big Tech companies. Call me paranoid but it raises red flags.

The alternatives I've explored include session, and wire. Session probably would be a great alternative, or at least it seems so superficially. But the user base is extremly small, it still uses electron and they dont seem to release updates very often. It's also essentially just a fork of signal, so you might as well just use that for a few reasons that I'll omit for brevity. As for wire, theres a lot to be desired. But the main complaint I have is that theres no way to put a lock on your session the way there is with signal. I emailed them about it, and they told me they had "no plans to implement such a lock out at this time". I also have issues with it not sending and receiving messages properly. And so on, as such...

[Trias11]

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.

[rchaves]

Jira, for sure, and it seems hard to run away from, almost everyone use it

It seems like the only alternative is to fund my own startup, with me as a sole shareholder, just to forbid Jira forever

[hadrien01]

Non-cloud Jira as a workflow manager is pretty good. It’s intuitive, powerful, quite fast (again, on-premises version only). But my current company uses the cloud version as an agile project management tool, and it’s awful just because it is soooo slow. And they keep changing the UI, sometimes with good ideas, sometimes not, but because it is so slow nobody wants to use it to update their progress. For example I update my times once a month because it’s an awful experience, and just use a spreadsheet the rest of the time.

[bsuvc]

I know Jira is difficult to get rid of once it is entrenched, but I’ve found Shortcut to be a great alternative.

https://shortcut.com

[nickysielicki]

Jira, bitbucket, and confluence are complete abominations. I hate Jira so much that it will be among the first questions I ask when I interview for my next job. I miss gitlab so much.

[theduemmer]

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.

[airbreather]

Rockwell has been pushing out superflakey software that I have encountered going back 25+ years. Starting with "pyramid integrators" back in the early 90's, daily updates to the software from the US overnight, generally three steps backwards and one forwards, if you were lucky.

On the other hand, I did a project with Schneider Unity Pro, similar PLC prog type software and it only crashed once in a whole year, and I blame windows for that crash.

Rockwell, if you go a day wihout a crash, then you start to feel like checking your files to check it hasnt corrupted some shit on the down low.

In more recent times GE royally screwed the pooch with the prog software for their new PAC range.

I don't understand how one or two automation companies can get it so right, and others so wrong.

[daybyday]

Hey, I'm a software test engineer in Factory Talk. Let me see if I can act on your feedback, can we chat? You can find my email address in my profile. Cheers

[comprev]

Siemens software was also notoriously flakey and required patching workstations to involve a shamanistic ritual to improve the success rate.

[joslk]

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

[vidanay]

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

[bjourne]

Latex. The document object model is stupid. The Latex language's syntax and semantics are weird and idiosyncratic. Every Latex package uses its own weird conventions. It's slow. But there are thousands of packages out there for almost any conceivable problem you might have. And that makes Latex very very useful. But it is not well-designed software.

[hanche]

I have used LaTeX “forever”, basically since it was first created. As so many longtime LaTeX users, I have a love-hate relationship to it: I love it for what it allows me to do. Nothing else comes close. And yet, the number of hours wasted swearing at it while debugging something or other is beyond count.

There is an interesting ongoing project to replace it, though: Namely, finl (“finl is not LaTeX”) by Don Hosek, himself a longtime TeX/LaTeX user and developer.

That is a very ambitious project though, and not one finished in an afternoon. Se we will be stuck with LaTeX for years to come.

https://www.finl.xyz

[giomasce]

There's not DOM outright: each command is just a macro that is designed to expand to "the right thing". More or less.

More in general, I tend to hate all macro languages, like LaTeX, M4 and the C/C++ preprocessor (fortunately in the latter case the impact is usually more limited, because the C/C++ preprocessor layer is thinner than, e.g., a LaTeX document). They tend to require a lot of shenanigans even to make easy things, so the source quickly become a tangled unmaintainable mess, when each time you touch something, you make seemingly unrelated errors appear.

For a trivial example, consider in C:

    #define IDENTITY(x) x

In any reasonable language you would expect that if you see `IDENTITY(y)` you could replace it with `y`. Of course not with macro languages.

[da39a3ee]

Yes, I spent several months lovingly creating an open source LaTeX tool in the last few years. And yet... yes, you're right of course. I hate those stupid PDF "manuals" that each package has -- they have to be one of the least successful media for teaching anyone how to use anything!

[KolenCh]

I agree. I can never work effectively in LaTeX deal to the global namespace and in general very stateful behavior.

LuaLaTeX is quite fast nowadays though. Unless you need special glyph support, it’s better than XeLaTeX speed wise.

[more_corn]

Confluence is absolute garbage. Atlassian uses the interrupt early and often design philosophy. It’s next to impossible to just write in flow with confluence. Formatting never works, it’s actively worse than simply composing in notepad. Also discovery is laughable. Confluence is where documentation goes to die. I’ve often found myself knowing that a document exists, some key words and what team owns it and I’m still utterly unable to find it. Documentation discovery is like thing two after “get out of my way and let me write” Confluence is a perfect example of failure 100% in implementation. What they do is exactly right, how they do it is wrong in every way. I’ve used a dozen documentation tools and I tell you confluence is worse than nothing. I’d you have nothing at least you didn’t waste time writing something nobody can ever find.

It’s bundled with jira though and jira is how most companies do scrum or agile or whatever planning work in sprints is called these days. Jira isn’t so bad but it brings brother confluence to the party so don’t let it in.

I use Notion these days. At least it gets out of my way and lets me write. The todo template is mostly sufficient for sprint planning.

[meristohm]

Hate is too Sterling for these gripes, but this is relatively the best fit:

Windows 10, useful for some games with friends, because of the “nudges” to change my behavior, like asking if I really want to keep using that program, the magic-fingers messages on installation (suggesting I just blindly trust), and the difficulty to install without an online account, among other things. I can’t replace it yet, but the day will come, one way or another.

[nicbou]

I'm astonished by how user-hostile Windows is. I'm excited when there's a new MacOS or iOS update with new features, but I only trust Windows updates to jam my computer for an hour or two without asking, break a few things, and sneak in unwanted changes against my best interest.

I would be wary of dating a Microsoft employee, because they don't seem to understand what consent means.

[Tajnymag]

One of the things that keep me from switching to Linux on my gaming machine is Game Pass.

[andrecarini]

If you can get a copy of the LTSC or Education distros, they're leagues ahead of the common Win 10 experience: much less clutter and nagging, being able to defer content updates, less tracking.

[twalichiewicz]

I noticed most of the replies in this thread refer to mobile / desktop software, but nothing compares to the hell that is car infotainment system for me.

Using the Audi MMI is painfully clunky, inconsistent, and riddled with subscription-locked features. At this point I just immediately wait for CarPlay and avoid touching anything in the car’s native OS.

Honestly they could probably just save a lot of development time by just having a dumb monitor / audio setup that you’re plugging into.

EDIT: Oh, and the Messages.app on macOS makes me pine for the days of iChat.

[nicbou]

I never had a car with an LCD. However after having tried a few, I decided that a phone on the dashboard does a better job.

Tacking ephemeral technology to a long-lasting appliance is a weird idea.

[stonewareslord]

I just recently did this. The radio was $89 and had the fewest features I could find: CD, USB, aux, am/FM and NO Bluetooth or touch screen which exactly fit my requirements. It's replaced my terrible touchscreen system and given me 2 single din slots of storage space. Replacement was relatively easy and as long as you have a headphone jack on your phone, there are no issues. Just need a soldering iron, removal kit, car-specific mounting kit, and model-specific wiring harness.

Of course, it's much easier to find one with Bluetooth; there are tons of other ones with "smart" features that are the same price.

[nunez]

VAG has THE WORST infotainment systems out there, right below Nissan and Toyota

[oz]

For some reason, I can't get wireless CarPlay to work on my '21 Q5. Only wired.

[adamleithp]

Adobe suite. After effects, illustrator, inDesign etc

Adobe in the above fields of design are industry leaders, and have the features & functions we’ve come to rely on.

Adobe’s pricing model has become very aggressive, and quite unaffordable for lots.

[kingnothing]

Photopea is a decent alternative for light personal / hobby use if anyone is interested.

[KolenCh]

This is something I hate to love and love to hate. I can avoid MS Office, but I can’t avoid Adobe like Lightroom that is my 2nd nature and hard to completely replace (too much is tangled together.)

[smrtinsert]

It's so true. I'm using affinity for image editing these days but it's just a shadow of photoshops ease of use and power. Fuck paying for ps though.

[t0bia_s]

Adobe is good SW for pro work. It is terrible in pricing and terms of use. Worst is that it is not for Linux.

[YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo]

Don't forget that they basically want to you to install a rootkit (Adobe Genuine Service) now because even with cloud activation they still have a growing pirating problem.

[porcoda]

iTunes/Apple Music. I use it to manage a huge collection, and the Ui is terrible. Examples: some file I can’t find has a bogus header or something, so every time the program opens or if I add something it spends 10 minutes doing some gapless playback analysis. None of the fixes suggested online address it. When it’s doing something like that or ripping/converting music, you can’t scroll around your collection since every time it moves to the next song it snaps the UI back to whatever you had selected before: this can be infuriating. Editing large amounts of metadata is awkward: way more clicking than should be necessary. The metadata editing is song focused, and which makes it awkward when editing albums/multi-disc shows.

I admit: my complaints are likely a side effect of being a niche user. I don’t think people curating their own collection of 60,000+ tracks is a use case they worry about.

The only reason I use it is I depend on iTunes Match to make my music available on all of my devices. That’s the one thing it does do seamlessly. The collection is too big to copy to all devices, and some devices require streaming anyways. I have searched everywhere and have never found a viable alternative. I can find alternatives for parts of my use case, but not everything. So I’m stuck with this software..

I have this dream that one day I’ll have the patience to figure out how to write my own GUI for it, but I’ve given up every time I wade into the apple developer docs. I’d pay good money to someone to stub out an app for me so I don’t have to figure it out from scratch, and go from there.

[guerrilla]

All search engines. They are all horrible and getting worse by the day. All the results are spam, they ignore words and can't do basic things they used to be able to it.

[throwaway874653]

Whats u r reference point

[captainmuon]

Outlook - Slow, buggy, cluttered UI. It loses mail, especially with shared mailboxes. The search function is slow and fails to find some mails.

There seems to be no real alternative though. All I want is a fast, native email client that supports conversation view and has a good search function. For work, I also require the calendar function, but I don't think implementing that is the hardest part. I know IMAP (or MS Exchange protocol) is a mess, but talking to the server is not the part that is broken for me in Outlook and most other clients. It is search and responsiveness of the UI. But isn't (instant) search basically a solved problem?

[CodeGlitch]

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.

[realusername]

Xcode without a doubt, it's mandatory to build my flutter apps for apple devices.

It's slow as hell, takes 12GB to download, has a 50% failure rate at uploading apps...

Nothing is up to modern standards with it. I'm so fed up with it I'm almost close of building some open source replacement.

[closeparen]

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 sluggish and crashes, and you have to refresh and start from scratch. There’s no way to simply abort the last mistaken change.

If you accidentally make in invalid metrics query (like wrong combination of variables) then the entire dashboard gets into a corrupted state where even if you return to a valid combination of variables, all you get is red. Again, refresh and start over.

I don’t think there’s anything better out there. Perhaps we are a few versions behind, but the last major upgrade we did only made it buggier.

[bsuvc]

For me it’s Azure DevOps.

We’re required to use it for the project I’m working on.

Some things I hate:

* Project backlog is a mess UI-wise. Lots of fields, with little to no explanation of what they drive. Generally a bad UI for working with stories.

* Reviewing large pull requests is very laggy performance-wise.

* Compare branches is broken - I have to start to create a PR, then cancel it, if I just want to compare two branches.

* Release pipeline (not build pipeline) does not allow yaml definition, so you are expected to configure it by point and click, true to form for Microsoft.

* Logging in - I have to bookmark it because there doesn’t seem to be a good direct URL to navigate directly to my repo (as opposed to like a GitHub repo for example). Also the confusing branding with “Azure” probably contributes to this as well.

There are probably more things, but these are some that come to mind right away.

[digianarchist]

Zoom. Sick of this app hijacking the audio channel of my Bose headphones when I'm not in a call.

[drcongo]

As much as they try to hide the fact, it is actually possible to join a Zoom meeting in your browser. That way you don't have to install a sketchy app with root privileges and directory traversal bugs.

[Belphemur]

Don't get me started on zoom...

How about making an app that actually work on Linux ? That doesn't take 200% CPU when you're in a meeting.

The same on windows, it's such a badly optimized application with memory leak all over the place...

I hate it with all my guts.

[landosaari]

I used https://meet.jit.si/ for a language meetup.

I opened one tab for the group which had 10 people some sharing video I then opened 3 more tabs for specific languages (English, German, and Russian)

The quality was still good. It was the same as being in a crowded area a train station, but it worked.

I have had interviews with zoom and teams, these were not as good. With less people.

[slig]

I'm studying guitar remotely and my teacher recorded a small bit of the call so that I can review later. He was playing and talking, I was completely quiet and not moving. Zoom decided to record my camera with his sound. He said that it was like that for all his students that day and couldn't figure out why.

[xzyyyz]

Tesla. Tesla provide service through the phone app only. The app is extremely slow, the fonts are small (almost unreadable). It is hardly fun to print on the phone. The app does not work in chromebook with android support.