Which software do you use frequently and are unable to replace (either at home or your company) despite thoroughly disliking it?<p>What makes it so bad? Are there alternatives? Why can't you replace it?
MS Teams:<p>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 <i>hate</i>, if an application does not look native on my GNOME Desktop and does not follow any HIG.<p>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.<p>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)<p>I can't replace it, as my university uses it.
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.<p>Discord for gaming ramblings and chitchat may be okay, but I hate when software projects misuse it as a support channel.<p>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).<p>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.
Teams. It's an abomination. Slow, clunky, polluted UI, consumes memory like it's breakfast, terrible ignominious Linux support, useless "user voice".<p>Can't change because I trapped myself in a company that is MS partner, and have all the Microsoft's suite.<p>I can expand on some points:<p>- 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;<p>- 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;<p>- it's slow, every action you try, hover, focus, text,etc just feels slow and unfinished;<p>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.
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.<p>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...
Jira, for sure, and it seems hard to run away from, almost everyone use it<p>It seems like the only alternative is to fund my own startup, with me as a sole shareholder, just to forbid Jira forever
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Hate is too Sterling for these gripes, but this is relatively the best fit:<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Honestly they could probably just save a lot of development time by just having a dumb monitor / audio setup that you’re plugging into.<p>EDIT: Oh, and the Messages.app on macOS makes me pine for the days of iChat.
Adobe suite. After effects, illustrator, inDesign etc<p>Adobe in the above fields of design are industry leaders, and have the features & functions we’ve come to rely on.<p>Adobe’s pricing model has become very aggressive, and quite unaffordable for lots.
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.<p>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.<p>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..<p>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.
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.
Outlook - Slow, buggy, cluttered UI. It loses mail, especially with shared mailboxes. The search function is slow and fails to find some mails.<p>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?
Android.<p>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.<p>Can't find any options in the seeing to fix this issue.<p>My wife has exactly the same problem despite using a different make of phone.<p>How can Android fail at the most fundamental task?<p>The alternative of Apple is too expensive for me... More than I'm willing to spend on a phone at least.
Xcode without a doubt, it's mandatory to build my flutter apps for apple devices.<p>It's slow as hell, takes 12GB to download, has a 50% failure rate at uploading apps...<p>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.
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.<p>The “stacked” option when displaying multiple series is a super dangerous footgun; it will show you numbers that aren’t actually occurring.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
For me it’s Azure DevOps.<p>We’re required to use it for the project I’m working on.<p>Some things I hate:<p>* 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.<p>* Reviewing large pull requests is very laggy performance-wise.<p>* Compare branches is broken - I have to start to create a PR, then cancel it, if I just want to compare two branches.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>There are probably more things, but these are some that come to mind right away.
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.
GIMP. If it didn't exist someone would probably have started a fresh effort for an OSS Photoshop alternative which doesn't suck.<p>I've tried soooo hard for decades to become comfortable in GIMP but I can never get close.
Quicken (tracking personal finances). Has all the functionality I need, viewing individual transactions, reports (spending by category/account), tracking investments etc., and is local.
When I bought it in 2008 it supported integration with financial institutions (e.g., I could download transactions for my credit card/bank account into Quicken installed on my local). Then they forced customers to pay for this feature every year, I refused and its stopped working. I enter transactions by hand now, once a week or so.
Now they force users to buy license annually, otherwise software (installed locally) stops recording transactions (you can still open your data and see historical data though). My old 2008 version still runs for now. I looked into the options (local, I don't want to put my finances in "the cloud") and couldn't find much :(
Async Rust.<p>It separates Rust ecosystem.<p>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.
At work we are limited by whatever is in the enterprise catalog offering (very old school traditional public sector environment). So I end up hating a lot of software simply because we are forced to use it beyond its design parameters / intended usage. I.e. We took a quality management / testing scenario tool and repurposed it into a general knowledge management AND ticketing tool. So I can hardly blame it but dislike is there nonetheless.<p>At home, Light room and photoshop. I swear they are getting slower and more bloated all the time and they keep changing UI for no reason. The subscription model is what rises my hate though.<p>There are alternatives of course but<p>I have 15 years of catalogues<p>I have limited faith anything else will read is own catalogues 15 years from now. How do you pick stable software now (and one does need updates as cameras change etc)
1Password. I hate it because Agile Bits are so user-hostile now. I can't replace it because the alternatives, if they meet our requirements, are even worse.
C programming language for arduino.<p>I could switch to AVR8 assembly but I want a better macro assembly plus the code would not be portable to more capable boards. I guess I could run a soft AVR8 on an fpga board and offload the heavy lifting to the fpga but talk about frying pan to the fire.
Awscli. It's not <i>just</i> the complexity or inconsistency; that kinda comes with the territory. It's just not discoverable. Constantly have to be googling stuff.<p>Boto is in a similar vein. Stupid capital letter arguments. No type information, no autocomplete.
Slack.<p>It's idiotic handling of direct messages history with its enforced uneditable limit of number of conversations shown, previous conversations disappear and become unsearchable cost me waste time, wasted nerves and wasted communications.
Whatsapp. By FAR.<p>First, it doesn't let me create a userID & password. I cannot create an account on my tablet or computer. I cannot start using it anonymously. I cannot have multiple accounts for multiple purposes/groups. It insists on being installed and tied to my phone with my phone number - how ANYbody can talk "blah blah encryption blah blah privacy" when it's tied to my private protected hard-to-change personally-identifiable phone number right at the beginning is beyond me to the level I feel I'm in a twilight zone.<p>Second, it is completely unusable unless I give it full and privileged access to my contact list. WHY? I want to chat with 3 specific people. I want to give you address/userID/token of those 3 specific people. But no - it won't work at all. This is where discussion of "yada yada privacy yada yada encryption" further loses all possible meaning.<p>Third, I cannot easily use it on multiple devices. I have two phones, Galaxy Note 8, and half a dozen laptops and computers and tablets I use daily for various purposes in various locations. I have taken it as granted for the last 30 years that I can check my email/ICQ/AIM/MSN/Hangouts/FB/WHATever on any of those that I choose to. But nooooo... not Whatsapp. Why? Because Privacy & Encryption. L-O-L.<p>It is the most regressive piece of code I've had the privilege to have forced upon my by both techie and non-techie friends and family alike, and it makes me livid every time.
My Windows Vista VM that runs on my homelab, for the sole purpose of keeping my HP LaserJet 3390’s scanner working with modern software.<p>I got this thing for free on Freecycle and it works amazingly well mechanically, and the printer worked out of the box. No matter what I tried though, getting the scanner to show up as a device and be interfaced with any modern hardware required me to set up this virtual machine to be shared with the local network.<p>(Yes I tried CUPS which worked great for the printer but not the scanner.)
Apple and the App Store and generally the walled garden that Apple has is complete anti competitive bullshit. Hope every government tears them to shreds this year.
Windows.<p>Straight up hostile to power users since 7.<p>Too much of a pain to migrate to Linux completely and would have to keep a copy of it for work anyway.
MacOS. Project scripts and software are hardcoded for Mac. The alternative is Windows, but making the project dev environment cross-platform takes time. I dislike non-standard keyboard shortcuts for everything, lack of FAR Manager (using Midnight Commander has the same problem as all the different keyboard shortcuts), its constant annoying notification popups that covert part of my windows, its problem with handling non-Apple mice (have to jump through many hoops to make mouse movements sensible, put mouse wheel in the proper direction etc), its windows rounded corners that cut at the application's view area (run Alacritty without status bar, the rounded corners at the left bottom corner will obscure part of the shell prompt), its support for Linux that is significantly worse than in Windows and probably more that I cba to remember.<p>The other thing that I dislike but can't get rid of is JVM. Mind you, Python, Go, Javascript and so on is worse, but JVM is what I have to work with, unlike the rest of them.
Android Studio (I have a recent macbook pro), I still have trouble running it fluently. it's so slow.<p>Confluence (slow and the awkward editor. I often need to directly modify the raw html to get the page rendered correctly. for example when needing to add long paragraphs under one bullet point.)<p>Jira, so slow and complex.<p>Gimp, its usability is the worst. but no other alternatives under linux.
Mathematica. Clunky interface on Linux, requires that you use the Notebook interface for most things, terrible to run headlessly on a server, need to be happy with the defaults that Wolfram provides, etc. However, it's still the best CAS around and open-source alternatives e.g., Sage, have a long way to catch up.
Gchat, gdocs, gsheet, gmeet. These are the worst apps of their respective categories, ever to exist. But I am helpless, because I've to use what my company has bought.<p>The number one reason why they're bad is that they are not native apps. They need a tab in the browser, or a fake browser window.<p>The second reason they're bad is because Google does not care about the user experience. Each of these is probably assigned to a random intern every three months and she just does whatever she likes with it.<p>The third reason is that I know how good each of these category of apps can be. I've used slack, zoom, excel and word. Each one of those is lovingly crafted to satisfy the users every need, comparatively. Knowing that such apps exist makes it even more painful to use Google's half baked knock offs.
Lastpass.<p>I can't replace it because it is the corporate standard at work.<p>The UI seems to work against me. Search? Don't even bother, better off with just your eyeballs. Refresh? No, try logging out and back in.<p>There are better alternatives, both when it was chosen and now, but it wasn't my decision to make.
Everything from Microsoft.<p>I don't use anything from them myself, but I cannot avoid dealing with it because relatives and working colleagues still use MS stuff. Recently our school introduced MS Teams and it is terrible. ICQ was a better messenger than this abomination.
Given that programming languages are also software products, C and JavaScript, I am unable to replace UNIX and Web platforms, which are the reason they exist at all, so there you go.<p>As for other software, anything Electron based that could be a plain Web application or a background process using the user's already installed Web browser or system Web widgets.<p>On that note anything that takes ages to start on Android or iOS, which are clearly not native, and I can replace them because they are key apps without alternative from the companies, like e.g. banks.
Gods, Enterprise Architect. Such a generic UML app that tries to do so much that it's impossible to find what you want to do.<p>And then you look for alternatives and find that it's years ahead of the rest.
3DS Max. It has bugs that have been unfixed for <i>20 years</i>... I make models for Microsoft Flight Simulator where it is the only software that can export models correctly; there is an unsupported Blender exporter, but I'm not enthusiastic about learning that product from scratch; it has many of its own idiosyncrasies.
The software on the Sky Q tv set top boxes, literally can’t replace it. (Sky is a TV service in the UK)<p>It’s clunky to use, particularly with the apps. Things crash all the time and when it decided to do a software update it goes into a spinning loop for hours during which none of the TVs in the house work.<p>Hate it, but the household have decided to keep Sky…
My pet hate is M/S Excel. It's ancient now, but still essential for some users.<p>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.<p>I use it rarely these days, but when I do, I spend hours swearing at its clumsy non standard GUI interface.
This may be too broad, but instant messaging. I only ever use it as a clipboard to share snippets or screenshots with people, but email is so much better to communicate. In person meetings can't be replaced by text, sorry.<p>I use a shared album for pics and video.
The web browser, which is a rather old version of Firefox in my case. The other ones aren't better; they are bad, too. I have ideas how to make a better one (one idea is all file formats and protocols are extensions (implemented in native code) and not built-in, and there are other ideas to make it better for advanced users only, and I have ideas about the C API and "document view" format and other features, etc).<p>There are some recent messages on Usenet about "Web considered harmful" and commentary/discussions about such things, including some of my own comments.
Anything from Red Hat. That includes PolicyKit (basically a backdoored version of "sudo", "su", and other time-honored Unix security tools), SystemD, PulseAudio, DBus, and a bunch of others. They're all 100% garbage, but Red Hat has convinced everyone else to depend on them so getting rid of them means being horribly limited when it comes to what you can run, even on FreeBSD.
Every website with cookie tracking. Which is every website.<p>Anything electron: massive hog of resources and will never be rewritten on a nonbloated platform.<p>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 the good fight, even if it is a losing war.<p>Any and all OTP (time suck, blocks automation, debatable gain over "good passwords").<p>IDEs (every IDE becomes an intense love/hate relationship... Intellij is dragging to a halt on a couple "medium sized" projects... but what would I replace it with? Eclipse hahahahahaha?)<p>Javascript: still an awful language, even with a ton of improvements and typed options. May webassembly kill it, although webassembly is probably another google trojan horse to control the web.<p>Java: should stop "improving" itself and just work on the JVM and migrating people to Kotlin/Scala/Groovy/Clojure.<p>G Suite (well, it's better than outlook, but spying and the sword of Damocles with getting locked out with no recourse)<p>Microsoft Windows (still have an iron grip on games, I hate everything else about it since Windows 7), although a glimmer of hope is that it does eventually have a real unix core.<p>Bash: the number of stackoverflow searches per line of code whenever I have to write bash is like 5:1, as in five stackoverflow searches per line of code written. But what options do you have? Perl is dying, fish/zsh isn't ubiquitous, etc.<p>Installing any software written in python will probably fail, or worse, break all my other python apps. Example: AwsCli<p>AwsCli: again, stackoverflow searches to line of code/command ratio is terrible. options aren't well documented, responses aren't documented or well-exampled, error codes change between releases (seriously, HOW MANY DIFFERENT error messages can expired credentials result in?)<p>Aws: please someone start beating these people. Oh, the options are google and microsoft. Oh well.<p>OH! The AWS CONSOLE: What a piece of shit. How much money does AWS make every minute? Basically enough to actually fund a team for this? This is for ec2/secgrps/r53 aka the bread and butter. And they DID rewrite it, and managed to make it FAR WORSE. Performance is awful. Screens refresh and move items as you try to click on things. Do I have a choice for adhoc stuff? Oh the cli? See above.
Zoom, Chrome.
Zoom is a resource hog and has a terrible UX, but I struggle to find anything better that works well on all OSes.<p>Chrome breaks privacy in many ways, but I can't find a decent alternative, similarly secure, blink based and with Chrome extensions support that doesn't have similar problems (Brave, Vivaldi).
Windows, Linux, Android - I hate them all.<p>None give me capability based security. All are the equivalent of a fortification build out of crates of nitroglycerine. Any inbound inject of control that works turns them into a devastating resource for the enemy.
Not just the app but the whole user experience: Amazon. Specifically, they should have figured out search by now, but no: the mapping from search terms to results is just a stab in the dark.
Trello. It used to be my preferred project tracker, but the introduction of workspaces and their recent insistence on obfuscating posted URLs has broken our workflow and made me keen to move.
HTML - The language that lets you do everything <i>except</i> markup hypertext documents.<p>Seriously, why can't you add a markup layer to a hypertext document without copying it and embedding said markup? This exposes you to the dangers of copyright law, and the trolls that exploit it.<p>Talk about false advertising.
expensify<p>i don’t hate it per se. it’s actually quite good at what it does. but i don’t like paying for something i can implement myself but can’t because making time to do so and justifying it is challenging
Whatsapp.<p>It's a garbage app, made by a garbage company running like garbage on a garbage protocol. There is no realistic alternative because friends and family expect you to have it.