
Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday? - guu
Subversion was created because the authors were frustrated with problems in CVS[0].<p>What&#x27;s a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could replace or rewrite?<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;svnbook.red-bean.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;1.7&#x2F;svn.intro.whatis.html#svn.intro.history" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;svnbook.red-bean.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;1.7&#x2F;svn.intro.whatis.html#svn...</a>
======
busyant
Sorry, but everything listed here is rank amateur stuff when compared to
Blackboard Learn
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn)).

First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were incentivized
to maximize the number of clicks required to get anywhere.

Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift.

Third, editing and formatting text is an exercise in torture. When I want to
delete text that I am writing, half of the time, the delete key won't work
(I'm exaggerating, but not joking). Formatting of text is quasi-random. Want
red-colored text? That works about 90% of the time for me. The other 10% will
give me gray text (This time, not exaggerating). If you are brave, you can
edit your text as raw HTML, but, my God, you'd better bring the anti-
hypertension pills, because the HTML will blast you with a tsunami of <span>
elements. Sometimes the <span> elements (unnecessarily) surround individual
characters, sometimes they surround _parts_ of words.

Third, it is nigh impossible to set useful defaults. Why can't the due dates
for assignments be defaulted to the end of the day instead of the current hour
and minute? Do you honestly think that I would ever want my assignment to be
due at 4:33 PM?

Fourth, it tries to do too many things. I already have email. I don't need
Blackboard's email functionality getting in the way.

I could go on (for a while), but it's time for those blood pressure meds.

~~~
paulgb
There was an enlightening tweetstorm last year from a Princeton prof about the
institutional reasons why Blackboard is so widely used despite being so bad:
[https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182637292869115904](https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182637292869115904)

~~~
closeparen
IIRC Blackboard is also pretty aggressive about acquiring and/or enforcing
patents against competitors.

~~~
blackrock
What patents do they have?

A patent for a black chalkboard?

~~~
closeparen
[http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,988,138.PN.&OS=PN/6,988,138&RS=PN/6,988,138)

Successfully enforced against Desire2Learn.

~~~
blackrock
Oh my god. WTF has the US Patent Office done to itself?

They must have been asleep at the wheel, and granted them this patent. They
must have gotten starry eyed with all the wizardry of a web browser back in
2000, that they thought, this was a new and compelling technology.

The description of this patent, is just for a web site application, that will
distribute assignments to students. The idea behind it is really not any more
different than the GUI programs that were written on Windows 95 like the AOL
program. They just splashed some fancy new words like "Uniform Resource
Locator" and "World Wide Web".

This is another valid reason why software patents should be abolished. This is
pure insanity. This is government and bureaucratic corruption of the highest
order.

~~~
imtringued
I think the patent office has absolved itself from all responsibility and
shifted it to the courts. This mostly hurts small businesses that want to
avoid court as much as possible.

------
lloydatkinson
Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use,
poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however.

AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in
a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and
resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension
which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understand just to be
able to change roles. It is literally years behind Azure.

Git. It’s purposely archaic commands and syntax leads to too many accidents
far too often. I recently started using Gitkraken which allows you to pull
changes WITHOUT needing to commit locally first because it uses stashes. It
basically does the same option. Why can’t git be smart like that?

Linux. It’s great, but it’s so easy to run into configuration problems or poor
documentation.

Docker. Again it’s great but for whatever reason it just works poorly on ARM
and the whole ecosystem is geared to x86 and it just goes and pulls the x86
images and then fails to run them. Come on.

~~~
dasil003
Disagree strongly on git. On the surface the syntax is ugly, but the data
model is brilliant.

Once you wrap your mind around what commits, heads and remotes are and learn
to rebase you get an incredibly simple and fine-grained control. I never use
stash because it's trivial to create a WIP commit and rebase later into the
chunks I want to ship to permanent history.

Git is like a chef's knife: extremely powerful tool that's dangerous in
untrained hands.

~~~
millimeterman
I think the best argument against git is to use mercurial for a few months. It
has exactly the same functionality but a nicer and more streamlined interface,
especially when it comes to branch management.

~~~
dreamcompiler
I love mercurial but since I've gotten used to git I miss the lack of the
staging area and stash in mercurial. I have to grudgingly admit they're very
useful.

~~~
ptx
In some cases (all my usecases, but perhaps yours are different) the staging
area can be replaced by some combination of "hg commit --amend" and "hg commit
--interactive" \- or in older versions "hg rollback" and "hg record".

------
Someone1234
Microsoft Teams.

I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic features that
messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-Talk, real multi-window (even
with the recent "pop-out" functionality), and its UI is all the worst modern
trends. You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS
styles, etc).

Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and every time my
computer sleeps/wakes it sits in offline until you open the main window from
the system tray. Those are year+ old bugs.

While it is often updated[0], the Team's priorities leave a lot to be desired.
Adding new gimmicks and tie-ins while ignoring the dilapidated state of the
core software itself for two+ years now.

[0] [https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-
mic...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-microsoft-
teams-d7092a6d-c896-424c-b362-a472d5f105de)

~~~
robin_reala
The worst thing about Teams is that for no reason they’ve decided to roll
their own notifications framework on macOS that doesn’t respect Do Not Disturb
settings. That’s the absolute minimum a notifications system should do: stop
appearing when told to.

~~~
kingnight
There isn't anything that gets me so flustered throughout the day than this.

I would turn these banners off, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to
get badges to show up on the icon (only other cue to remind me people want to
talk to me) without these banners.

I really wish there was a 3rd party client that was all native that I could
use. Teams is definitely the worst part of my software stack.

~~~
vladvasiliu
On MacOS there is. I've remove teams from my mac so can't verify the exact
setup, but in the notification settings (in teams) you can disable the banners
but not the notifications altogether. I think the badge in the dock icon will
be the number of new items in the activity panel.

But yeah, notification management is basically a pain in Teams. Not sure if
it's still the case, but even on Windows 10 it would use its own notification
window instead of the system one...

------
etaioinshrdlu
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-able to arbitrary depth without performance loss
(at least to say, hundreds of nestings deep.)

Docker-compose should not exist, instead it should be replaced by nesting of
containers.

Basically, I think it needs to follow the UNIX philosophy better by providing
simple abstractions that can be combined easily. The containers would visually
look a bit more like an old virtual machine (single process) than our current
containers.

These changes probably require a bunch of kernel hacking, but I think it would
be worth it long-term for a cleaner architecture.

It appears there are some movements into this direction thanks to podman, but
it's really not there yet, especially with nesting.

Also, it wouldn't really be a product at all but just a built-in tool on Linux
systems.

~~~
btilly
If you want more complaints, and well informed ones at that, read
[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/containers-future-ian-
eyberg/](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/containers-future-ian-eyberg/).

I particularly love the quote, _The kernel developers view of the docker
community is that in the rare case they can actually formulate the question
correctly they usually don 't understand the answer._

There is only so much that you can say to clarify things to someone who is
thinking about everything wrong and doesn't realize it. :-(

~~~
aloer
That article seems overly critical about young developers _that don 't know it
any better_ because they grew up on containers.

I guess I am one of those so I got to ask, is the proposed solution of
unikernels something we had before but lost in favor of containers, or is it
something completely new anyways?

It does look like it might be the latter so why blame developers for using
containers due to lack of choice? If unikernels are better and just as easy to
use then I am sure people will convert.

He blames a lot on marketing and marketing lies but his company
([https://nanovms.com/](https://nanovms.com/)) seems to make it just as hard
to figure out what's going on with the apparently only option being a
_schedule a demo_ button.

Come on, I remember Docker being that fancy new thing that people at
university taught themselves and to each other around ~2014/2015\. That hype
was well deserved and if you want to compete with that you can't just decide
to brush it off as wrong and misguided.

At the risk of pointing out that I also might be one of those that the quote
above is referring to, I gotta ask:

Is there a technical reason why I shouldn't be able to eventually just replace
Docker with a micro or unikernel? Same or similar style of image definition,
completely different runtime technology?

Isn't it up to the kernel and platform developers to build the tools to make
that happen comfortably for all of us naive container users?

~~~
kubanczyk
> Is there a technical reason why I shouldn't be able to eventually just
> replace Docker with a micro or unikernel?

Many legacy pre-docker apps were able to run inside docker without any dev
work.

Very few apps would run on unikernel without dev work (porting). It's a
different kernel after all.

------
ordu
Android. Truly horrible platform where I cannot even find a clock app that
just works. I mean there is one shipped with a phone, but it has inconvenient
timer and I do not like how time selection is done -- a lots of movements to
scroll numbers to find one I need, -- but I cannot configure it to my
convenience and I cannot find another clock app that works.

And all this "Google phone wants to have an access to calendar" after each
call. I do not know why it needs an access to calendar, I'm not going to give
it one, so just stop pecking me. But it will never stop, it seems.

And a lots of useless stuff I cannot delete. I stopped it from popping up with
stupid messages, but I cannot delete them. It seems that I will be forced to
replace Android with PostmarketOS.

~~~
aasasd
> _how time selection is done -- a lots of movements to scroll numbers to find
> one I need_

That's the worst way to pick a time that I've seen and used. It requires a lot
of swiping, combined with looking for the precise moment to stop the scrolling
and not overshoot.

Thankfully in some Android variants it's replaced with much better
alternatives. Google Pixel's stock apps in Android 9 and 10 use a round watch
face for time points—where you pick first the hour, then the minute with one
tap each. However, this still requires rather precise finger work (and has
animation in the middle). The best interface IMO is what Pixel and Philips'
phones use in the timer: you just type the minute and the second (or the hour
and the minute) in four digits, with a huge number pad on the screen. Philips
did better here because its pad occupied most of the screen so the tap targets
are larger. The benefit of this interface is that you easily develop muscle
memory for it, practically no aiming is required.

‘Simple Mobile Tools’ make pretty good apps which are open-source and are
present in F-Droid
([https://www.simplemobiletools.com](https://www.simplemobiletools.com)). Alas
their ‘Simple Clock’ uses scroll spinners in the timer, but perhaps you could
ask them to reconsider. I can help with screens from the better interfaces.

~~~
bennettfeely
Microwaves have a perfectly usable and quick timer input method. Is there
anyone who thinks swiping and scrolling up and down to pick a time makes
things easier? I have no idea why they think a smartphone timer should be any
different.

~~~
smichel17
Tangentially, most microwaves are missing a key feature: a combined `start`
and `minute plus` (or +30s, whatever) button.

It's the kind of thing that seems trivial, but once you've used it, is so
blindingly obvious that it's the Right Way To Do Things that you'll wonder why
every microwave doesn't do it.

I'll never buy a microwave without it again.

------
zxcvbn4038
Microsoft Outlook - decade after decade the icons change but the suckage does
not, its 1987 every day when you use Outlook.

Microsoft Teams - drains my battery 1% every two minutes

Slack - the original “let’s forget everything we’ve learned about
communications and try to discover it again”. From the threads feature nobody
wants to the inability to silence bots or plugins, Slack never fails to
disappoint. They pitch it as a knowledge archiving tool but unless you know
exactly where, when, and who said something good luck finding it.

G-Suite has been awesome for almost five years now, though it can be
problematic when you need to communicate with people outside your org that
don’t use g-suite for work. Hangouts drains my battery fairly aggressively
also but not as much as Teams, so I’ve switched to Zoom for video - plus it
works seamlessly reguardless of which email program people use.

~~~
pavel_lishin
For what it's worth, I love threads. Prior to threads, channels would be pure
noise, often intertwining multiple conversations at once.

~~~
Trasmatta
Threads are good, the Slack implementation is still lacking though. They
really need the ability to subscribe to a thread without commenting in it.

~~~
woobar
They have "Follow Thread" (You'll be notified about new replies)

~~~
Trasmatta
Ahh I never noticed that. Not sure if it's new or if I've just been blind.

------
d_burfoot
The Apache big data suite (Hadoop/Spark/Yarn/Hive/HDFS/etc).

In several years of big data engineering work, I've believe I've seen only one
application that couldn't be refactored into a simple multi-instance
framework-free program. People use the big data frameworks as glorified
distributed-job management tools, and the resulting systems are more fragile,
more complex, more vulnerable to weird version compatibility errors, and less
efficient.

~~~
theptip
> People use the big data frameworks as glorified distributed-job management
> tools

Do you have any tools you like for job management without all the distributed-
systems baggage?

I've heard folks advocate for Make for this kind of thing, perhaps that or
some other orchestration tool that deals with job dependency graphs would be
the unix way? (Having a nice way to visualize failed step would of course be a
plus; a common use-case is "re-run the intermediate pipeline, and everything
downstream".)

~~~
lixtra
Have a look at airflow.

However, so far I didn’t switch from rundeck & make.

~~~
ForHackernews
Airflow is really limiting in some non-obvious ways: [https://medium.com/the-
prefect-blog/why-not-airflow-4cfa4232...](https://medium.com/the-prefect-
blog/why-not-airflow-4cfa423299c4)

------
doomrobo
I hate to say it, but Signal.

Signal has consistently been a pain to use for my moderately sized (<15)
friend group chat and for 1-on-1 threads too.

Messages sometimes don't arrive or arrive out of ordered and appear in the
wrong order, scrolling up has random jumping behavior, opening the chat in iOS
causes my audio to stop playing, there is explicitly no way to back up any of
the chat, copying multiple messages is broken on desktop, search is super slow
and search result previews have been corrupted for as long as I can remember,
sharing links through the iOS share menu causes the app to behave super weird
or just crash (my mom can't share links with me through Signal), you can't
mute conversations on desktop (IIRC there have been two PRs implementing this
feature in the last 2 years; both not pulled), mutual verification is so
frustrating that I literally got yelled at when trying to explain it to my
parents, I sometimes can't take pictures from within the app, when I can take
pictures the viewfinder is half the resolution of the actual camera and
everything looks blurry, the most recent app update causes a several second
lag whenever I open the group chat, and I am throughly convinced that every
issue I've mentioned is so low priority for the people running the show that
they won't get fixed for a very long time. At least we have stickers now.

Seriously though I believe in what Signal is doing and will probably continue
to use and suggest the app. But it will hurt every time I do it.

~~~
nikisweeting
Yes, I've given up trying to report these issues as it's been years since my
initial reports and I've never seen the things I reported fixed.

Signal desktop has been broken for almost a year for me "Error handling
incoming message" is shown instead of each message. Theres no easy way to
transfer messages between devices out-of-band when migrating to a new device
(e.g. via encrypted binary backup blob). Messages constantly fail to arrive
when they're sent, I often get them days after the person sent them. etc. I
could go on...

~~~
jcrawfordor
Signal desktop "works" for me in the sense that I _usually_ receive messages,
but probably about once a day one of my conversations suddenly displays
somewhere from 20 to 70 lines of "Error handling incoming message." In talking
to people this doesn't seem to be in response to any actual activity by the
person on the other end.

I feel like I've seen Signal problems appear and get fixed, like for a couple
months the desktop client just wouldn't get half or so of the messages I
received, and then one day it seemed fine again. But the long deluges of
"Error handling incoming message" have been present, as far as I can tell, for
the entire time that I have used Signal Desktop, perhaps 3 years. I guess I
consider it a feature now. :/

------
ufmace
Scrolling through the top few dozen posts here, I see a bunch of commonly used
development software. IMO, all of those do have some issues, but none are
remotely comparable to the horror show that is internal software at medium-
large corporations. I've used a bunch of these, actually worked on improving a
few, witnessed the development process for others. There's no point in naming
them, because people outside the company will never use them.

These types of programs are uniquely terrible for reasons described in other
posts - the people doing the development, and setting the priorities for
development, have no connection to the people who need to use it day to day.
Different offices, rare personnel crossover, systems specifically designed to
discourage direct communication. They're usually big and complex enough that a
ground-up redesign is either impossible, or will inevitably gather enough poor
management decisions to be about as bad as before by the time it becomes
remotely practical to use.

I recall one place where a critical application required to record data and
deliver it to clients in a realtime application was based on an X-Windows
application running in Windows XP using the one X-Windows manager that sort of
worked there. Yes, really. I know it's a super weird combo, but it's what we
had. I ended up moving into a related software department, and got some behind
the scenes info. Turned out that there was just one guy left who was still
actively coding for it, already past retirement age, but kept on anyways out
of desperation, because nobody else was willing to touch that codebase. There
was a project to build a more modern replacement application, with all of the
usual corporate bloat and ever-slipping deadlines. It wasn't great, but at
least it ran natively on Windows 7 and had a better UI. I think they moved
over to it entirely after a while, but I left that place before that move was
finished.

~~~
Rapzid
This is spot on. One of the worst internal tools I had to use was actually
created for the company by Thoughtworks..

------
superasn
Anything which requires me to use a Google captcha or hcaptcha. I generally
don't get annoyed very easily but spotting fire hydrants and traffic lights
just to login into a site to which you are a paying customer is plain
nonsense.

I've actually decided to move my entire infrastructure from Digital ocean to
AWS because of this captcha before login nonsense (thankfully DO reverted it
just in time)

~~~
ColanR
I've started intentionally making my answers subtly wrong. E.g., if something
might look like a fire hydrant, but isn't, I mark it positive. I usually have
to do it a few times anyway, and it makes me feel better to think Google's AI
datasets are inaccurate.

~~~
mastazi
In my experience, when I do it slightly wrong it actually takes less steps to
get through. I guess in the age of Yolo v4 and such, doing it “too well”
actually makes you look like a robot?

~~~
robotnikman
I've noticed this too. If you do the captchas too quickly you get more of them
as well. If I 'dumb' myself down a little I usually only just get one of them

------
pachico
Jira is my daily nightmare. I guess the "no CTO was ever fired for choosing
SAP" applies to Jira too. It just does the opposite of that it tries to do,
which is making development tracking easy (not to mention those silly ideas
coming from agile coaches to use Jira to measure wrong things, which makes of
it a horrible combo).

~~~
ivalm
So what is like Jira but good?

I use jira at work and I like it.

But our use case is maybe more limited/liberal. For us it is:

1) list tasks to do and how tasks are linked

2) archive discussion about issues and integrates with butbucket (so in commit
it will link to ticket to read about why something was done; similarly from
issue discussion I can see the relevant commits; this also goes well with
history either by looking to linked issues or blaming in git and getting
issues that resulted in the commits)

3) enables pointing other devs to something (I did some partial task, need
help, I assign or cc someone else, they contribute to the issue as appropriate
and then hand it back). Helps ensure all relevant discussion is centralized
and persisted.

What we don’t do is use it as an explicit performance/formal sprint tool...
there is no middle manager questioning me about something I wrote/didn’t write
in jira. is this where people start to hate it?

~~~
jrockway
My experience with bug trackers is that people hate them no matter which one
you choose. The infinite list of stuff you know is broken or sub-optimal
crushes the spirit. (Jira is particularly bad, because it is slow and
complicated, but switching to simpler tools doesn't make that underlying
problem go away.)

When people complain about bug trackers, they probably need a new outlook on
work. They need to aggressively prioritize tasks. They need to be in a mental
state where they're happy working on the highest priority thing, not the most
interesting thing. You can't get there by buying a new tool for $9.99 per user
per month. You probably need a vacation.

At my last job, we switched from Jira to Github Issues to Asana. Each tool had
the same problems -- bugs were filed faster than they were fixed. I am
personally okay with that -- I know that most of these things will never be
done, but it's nice to park the idea somewhere. But to others, it's crushing,
and although people will complain that they don't like Jira's UI, what they
really hate is that realization that they will never "finish".

~~~
Bnshsysjab
Spoken like a true manager.

~~~
mienski
Ah yes the engineering nirvana where no-one is a manager and targets don't
exist..

~~~
nikanj
Aka a well-funded startup with no traction

------
creativeembassy
Dropbox. I've used it for a decade, but now it's slow, bloated, and takes over
CPU and memory like there isn't a single other program I need to run... and I
was paying $20 for the privilege.

But a few weeks ago I switched to Syncthing[0], and it's the best software
transition I've ever made. Opposite of everything Dropbox is now: fast,
simple, and I don't even notice it running in the background. Seamless setup,
and FREE. (So good, you're gonna want to donate anyway.)

[0]: [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

~~~
ajb
I've been looking into a few of these (need to replace keybasefs before zoom
kills it)

\- syncthing does one thing well. However you need to be your own server
admin. Which is great if you are or your company will do it for you, but I
don't want to do it for my personal stuff.

\- syncany is exactly what I want, but it didn't get out of alpha, the team
apparently didn't make money and have stopped maintaining it, and it still has
some scary bugs, although probably my needs are somple enough that they
woulnd't be triggered.

\- cryptomator looks good itself, but you need something else to do the cloud
storage part, which ideally supports webdav. Unfortunately the davfs2 crashes
my linux box and the other alternatives don't seem to be much better.

\- nextcloud and owncloud again want you to be your own server admin

\- the guys benind tahoe-lahfs have a reputation for solid crypto and
reliability, but it is complex to run. privatestorage.io were going to do a
managed version, but it doesn't seem to have materialised yet.

\- There are solutions like internxt and ipfs where everyone stores everyone
else's files. I'm not sure I trust that not to go down without warning.

\- proton are supposed to be coming out with a protondrive, which hopefully
will have an open source client, although locked into them.

\- There are proprietary ones like tresorit and spideroak, which have closed
clients. I may have to grit my teeth and use one of them.

\- A bunch of others I didn't evaluate yet.

What I want is for someone else to do the server admin part (availability and
backups), but without my trusting them with my keys, which I only use with
open-source client code. I don't mind paying a reasonable amount, but
apparently this is hard.

~~~
calt
Syncing doesn't even need a server if the devices you're using are online at
the same time.

I just switched to it from Dropbox.

~~~
ajb
Yeah, I get your point - I'd like someone else to do the backups, though.

------
ceronman
Workplace from Facebook.

The company I work for uses this for internal communication. Workplace is
basically the same Facebook and Messenger, but tweaked for a private group of
people.

The problem is that, because this is basically the same Facebook, it is
designed to keep you "engaged". It uses all kinds of patterns to keep you
addicted to your timeline and search for attention. Rather keeping you
informed with the important topics, it distracts you with a lot of irrelevant
stuff. The algorithm will always show you something that keeps you scrolling.
Huge time waste.

The motto of this software is "Bring your company together". And it works
exactly as Facebook's motto, "Bring the world closer together", in the sense
that it does exactly the opposite. The software has all sorts of mechanisms to
generate controversy. Because controversy is what ultimately drives more
engagement. Reactions, memes, notifications. It makes you fight with your
colleagues about silly things, and it makes it really easy to derail any sort
of constructive conversation.

Imagine having to try a technical conversation in this platform and then
people are allowed to "react" with an angry face or a silly animated GIF. No
argumentation required. And those reactions will bring more reactions. And in
those rare cases when some meaningful discussion actually happens, then the
thread is quickly buried by the constant stream of new things.

If your company is considering this, avoid it like the plague.

~~~
sawyerjhood
+1 to this. I worked at FB for a few years and Workplace is just Facebook re-
skinned. My big gripe with Workplace is similar to what ceronman says, it is
essentially engineered to create meta-work. People end up using it to self-
promote every little thing that they do to get visibility and this leads to it
being incredibly noisy and really filled with information that isn't relevant
and important things get buried under all of the filler. The only real upside
to workplace is that I think it is better for Q/A groups than something like
Slack is, at least for larger companies.

------
1ris
Windows. Not windows applications, but windows itself. Completly incoherent
user interface. Impossible to find anything. The wifi dialog in the systray,
the new windows 10 wifi control and the old style network interfaces dialog
often show conflicting information. Neither of them works. Have trouble with
bluetooth (of course you have, it never works)? Windows is kind enough to hide
anything bluetooth related so you have not chance to do anything about it. The
Start menu. Not only full of ads, but also completely insane. Type word X. add
a character. Press backspace. Get a completely different result. Entering
notepad.exe works. entering notpad does not. Enter "visual", find no results.
Enter "visual studio" et voilat. Ads in the explorer. And the list goes on and
on. It's full of nuisances and inconsistencies.

~~~
marticode
Came here for this. It's a visual mismatch of varying Windows versions, from
modern 10 all the way to some pieces still having a Windows 95 icons and
layout. Why such a wealthy company can't afford to get every part of its OS
updated in 25 years is beyond me.

The file Explorer is sometimes super slow (especially when dealing with media
files, which it insists on analyzing first before displaying their folder),
hangs on some FLAC files and frequently crashes.

It somehow can't handle pretty standard media files (again some standard FLAC
that work everywhere else, variants of H264 or H265, etc.)

The networking works when it wants to - I still struggle to swap files between
two Windows 10 systems on my home networks (one always can't see the other
machine, and when I move files it's slow as molasses despite having blazing
fast Wifi).

------
OliverJones
Atlassian's Jira and Confluence. Why?

Their search capability is just bad. To find something requires a lot of tries
and tricks. I don't want to waste cognition because they re-invented the flat
tire.

Their inbrowser text editors are also just bad. On the level of WordPress
three years ago. Markdown? no. Cut and paste from other apps? OK, if you
remember to "Paste as Plain Text.

~~~
jbay808
Confluence... I was floored when I realized it can't support duplicate page
names in separate page heirarchies.

eg. You can't have a page called Engineering > Electrical > Test Procedure and
another page called Engineering > Mechanical > Test Procedure, because the two
"Test Procedure" pages are considered as occupying the same namespace.

~~~
philipwhiuk
Yeah... this pissed me off. - I end up using prefixes (so "Mech - Test
Procedure"

:@

------
lvass
WhatsApp. The desktop version has very few features, requires constant
connection to a mobile phone and gets out of sync very often. It's practically
irremediable if you're in a crowded wi-fi area and ethernet is the only way to
get a good connection. It's also designed so no conversation is ever private
despite advertising it's E2E encryption. Everyone you talk to has automatic
backups enabled and they're stored unencrypted in Google Drive. And the "two
step verification" password is the one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.
It must be a 6-digit number that requires you to type it constantly in order
to remember it. It basically assumes people are too incompetent to use
password managers or simply writing a password down. Passwords you can
remember are never safe.

~~~
bluedevil2k
The most annoying thing is that you can’t just message a new phone number. You
have to create a contact and then add their phone number to that contact,
close the contact app to go back to WhatsApp, press “+” again, search for the
contact you just made, select it, then start typing. God forbid the phone
number is entered wrong and you have to go back into the contact app. Meeting
someone in a bar/club (outside the US), it’s a 3-4 minute process with a high
error rate. WhatsApp, let me type a phone number in directly into a new
message!

~~~
arp242
You can get around that using a special
"[https://web.whatsapp.com/send?phone=](https://web.whatsapp.com/send?phone=)[..]"
and/or
"[https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone=](https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone=)[..]"
URL. I think the web. URL only works with WhatsApp web and the api. works on
phones, but I'm not 100% sure (I typically use WhatsApp Web myself).

I have a simple form on my website to make that a bit easier:
[https://www.arp242.net/wa.html](https://www.arp242.net/wa.html).

------
djinnandtonic
Google Drive.

I have no idea how a company with a search background produced software where
it is impossible to find something.

~~~
tootie
Everyone one of these cloud storage services (Dropbox, Box, Drive, iCloud, S3,
OneDrive) has adopted the same mental model of file storage that computer
systems from the 80s devised to mimic filing cabinets. Namely: folders. I
think a folder hierarchy has some value but they should really all be using a
tagging system instead. Orgs tend to have multiple hierarchies based or org
charts, projects, disciplines, timelines. Being able to tag documents across
all or multiple would make browsing to the right document less of a maze. And
make search more accurate.

~~~
thombles
> iCloud

Don't forget that Finder has customisable tags which sync perfectly across
iCloud. They are a top-level browsing option on the iOS Files app. Probably
you were thinking of something more tag-first but it does exist. :)

Personally I really like the file/folder model because I can sync the whole
caboodle to my hard drive, copy it to a USB backup, possibly transfer it to
another operating system, knowing that I've captured the whole story.

~~~
nikisweeting
Except iCloud Drive file sync engine itself is not reliable, I lost so many
edits and files in iCloud drive that I had to stop using it entirely and go
back to rsync.

------
puranjay
One of the worst apps I use regularly has to be Google Play Music. The UI is
horrible enough, but it also randomly deletes tracks from my library -
including my _own_ tracks that I recorded under my own name. And sometimes the
tracks will show up again randomly. The worst is when tracks don't show up in
my Songs list, but if I put it on shuffle, these tracks will start playing.

I don't know what's the status now, but Spotify India had too small a library
when it was first launched. Otherwise I would have made the switch

~~~
raffraffraff
YouTube music makes GPM look amazing

~~~
hobofan
What? I very quickly switched to Youtube Music over GPM because its Android
app was much more responsive. In the beginning the UX was also the most
intuitive for me, but it seems that in recent updates they randomly add/remove
some of my most used navigation options like "Go to Artist", which is
annoying.

------
westoque
JIRA.

The most complex simple system I used. Simple in theory (Project Management)
but complex in implementation.

~~~
tootie
JIRA is heavyweight, but I've never been remotely satisfied with any of the
competitors. If your team is more than 5 people or you have multiple teams,
you're absolute going to need all that sophistication from JIRA. If you ask me
what's the worst piece of software I use every day today, it's Asana.

~~~
raun1
ClickUp

~~~
seehafer
Slower than Jira in my experience.

------
thinkingkong
There's this software that one of my customers use called SAP Fieldglass.
Fieldglass was a separate company and sold for $1B and it might be - and I'm
not exaggerating - the worst software I've ever used, pretty much ever. But
the reason is interesting. It's designed as enterprise compliance software and
nobody enjoys using it. The enterprise managers hate it. The vendors hate it.
The contractors hate it. The finance team hates it. I can't imagine anyone
enjoyed _writing_ it. The UI is unintuitive and self-discovery is practically
impossible. It's so bad that companies have resorted to making Youtube videos
on HOW to take repetitive actions inside the tool. The system is so anti-
success that part of me wonders if this is done on purpose; to delay any kind
of payments to vendors / etc.

The best part is it doesn't _do_ anything itself. It's just a workflow system
for dispatching operations to different systems and teams. It will create an
invoice in an existing finance tool. It will issue a ticket to create a
physical badge, etc.

Anyway I think that's a massive opportunity, if that's what you're looking
for.

~~~
gimboland
Oh god yeah — fuck Fieldglass.

------
XCSme
Android on my TV: (keeps crashing, internet sometimes not working, sound
volume usually is wrong, etc.)

Nvidia GeForce Experience: I don't actually use it daily, because it doesn't
work. I have not been able to start it for the last 6 months without getting a
startup error. I contacted Nvidia support, reinstalled, downgraded, updated,
problem is still there. The tray icon always shows when there's a new update,
but I have to manually download it.

Google Chrome: Whenever I ALT+TAB back to Chrome it freezes for 1 second. It
could be one of the extensions I use, but never found the cause. Google's own
note-taking app, Google Keep, was crashing the browser on Google Chrome:
[https://support.google.com/docs/thread/9482426?hl=en](https://support.google.com/docs/thread/9482426?hl=en)

~~~
millimeterman
I disagree about Chrome. It's absolutely not perfect, but considering its
sheer complexity - browsers are probably comparable to an operating system at
this point - bugs are fairly rare and performance is quite good.

~~~
frank2
Considering its sheer complexity its is indeed well-executed. I just wish I
didn't need something that complex to read a document on the internet.

~~~
minerjoe
You don't! I switched to using links on the linux framebuffer and it rocks.
Yea, there are a few sites that I have to pop over to X and Firefox, but for
the vast majority of web sites that I visit, including this one, it works like
a charm.

And it's lighting fast. Trully stunning. 10-20ms to render on a circa 2008
thinkpad.

And it's pretty good straight C, and very hackable, and only around 70,000
LOC. First thing I did was join it with guile and write a bit of glue code and
I'm now adding features to it faster than you could git clone firefox, let
alone begin to read its code.

~~~
frank2
A large fraction of HN stories are articles on nytimes.com. How readable is a
typical page on nytimes.com in links?

~~~
minerjoe
It's great. Loads in less than a second. Text and images. Never have to worry
about popups.

------
elviejo
\- GitHub \+ why do we centralize issues, documents for a _distributed_
version control? \+ why do we use a a closed source, walled garden to develop
free software?

\- Git \+ it's a leaky abstraction. \+ why do we need to know about the stash?
\+ why is it that changing to a different branch doesn't give any visual clue,
even worst it keeps the files I'm working on that are not part of the
repository yet.

for an academic treatment of the defects in Git read: What's Wrong with Git? A
Conceptual Design Analysis S. Perez De Rosso and D. Jackson. In Proceedings of
the 2013 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and
Reflections on Programming & Software (Onward! 2013)

~~~
recursive
99% of git usage seems to involve one or fewer remotes. Maybe multiple remotes
is just not that useful.

~~~
zenhack
Fwiw, my usual work flow involves 2 remotes, one for the project's mainline
repo and one for my fork.

~~~
ufmace
I frequently have 3+. Github/Bitbucket if it's shared there, maybe a original
repo if it's a fork I'm submitting PRs too. My server if it's something I'm
running an instance of - I like to deploy my personal services via Git pushes.
Sometimes a copy of the same codebase on another personal computer or two - if
I don't feel like pushing it to Github, sometimes I'll push and pull between
computers directly.

------
frank2
Google Chrome. (I use Chrome because all of the other browsers are even more
annoying to me.)

Technically speaking most of the code that seriously annoys me runs _inside_
my browser, but IMO it was never realistic to hope that the myriad creators of
individual web pages or web sites would collectively create a good experience
for me: my only hope was for the makers of browsers to make choices different
from the choices they actually made.

Clarification: the web browser makes a pretty good framework for creating user
interfaces, IMO, but it is a bad way for an end user with preferences
sufficiently similar to mine to access writing on the internet. Sadly it is
the _only_ way to access most of the writings on the internet.

Written documents can be extremely simple: just a sequence of characters in
some well-known encoding, but most of the actual documents of interest to me
on the internet are essentially programs that require execution in what is
essentially a "virtual machine" as complex as any general-purpose operating
system.

~~~
adventurer
Google Chrome is constantly creating temp. files that eventually take 40GB+ of
one of my drives until it is completely full. Every few months I needed to
manually remove a ton of files. It drove me back to Edge, which I thought
would never happen.

~~~
bloody-crow
I do not believe I'm typing this, but I've recently made a switch from Firefox
to Microsoft Edge as my primary browser on Mac OS X.

Edge is very similar to Chrome in performance and features while seemingly
being slightly better on memory. It also doesn't have the Google's creepiness,
as Microsoft appears to be the modern day underdog.

It also supports chromecast, a feature I missed the most in Firefox.

Overall it's a surprisingly competent browser.

------
daviddaviddavid
ServiceNow.

Perfect storm of abysmal design/UX used to represent a bloated and confusing
underlying information architecture. It's possible that I'm using an poorly
configured version/instance of the product, but good lord, I'll do anything I
can to avoid using it at work.

~~~
b00palicious
Hi! Designer at ServiceNow. Would love to know a bit more about what you’re
going through. Specifically what products you’re having a hard time with and
maybe a perspective on what we could do to improve. I’d be more than happy to
take it back to the team(s).

~~~
Macha
Background: I work at a company where engineers use JIRA and support uses
service now.

I find basic tasks challenging in your app. A support agent escalates to
developers (i.e. me). "Hey, can you look at INC123456". The ticket is not yet
assigned to me. How do I find and open this ticket? The support agent can send
me a direct link, but there's no apparent relation between any of the query
params and the ticket number, and also no obvious UI element in which I can
put a ticket number and navigate there. When I navigate to the ticket,
comments are mixed in with audit entries. The frame based navigation also
means I get questions from junior devs on tickets and they copy links into
slack messages that just send me to the homepage.

~~~
mynegation
You can put INC123456 into the search field at top right and it should take
you directly to the incident page.

But yeah ServiceNow is insane. Not sure how much of this is product itself or
gajillion of customizations.

~~~
Macha
Top right is a settings gear and help icon for me, no search box. The only
search box on the homepage is "filter navigator" which filters the left nav.

------
mister_hn
Maven, since the dependency hell and that __every__ single project requires
the same ugly boilerplate and yak shaving tasks, worsened if the infamous
release plugin is used.

Jira, because it's too slow and bloated from features you never use anyway.

IntelliJ, because it freezes on every 6-7 autosuggestions, on projects of
50-80K LOCs.

~~~
caffeine
Surprised to hear this about IntelliJ, have used it for many years without
issue on substantially larger projects. Can't say for sure, but your freezes
might be a solvable artifact of your setup.

~~~
necubi
A common reason for IntelliJ to freeze is not giving it enough memory, which
causes frequent GC stalls. You can try increasing the max heap by following
the instructions here: [https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/increasing-memory-
heap.h...](https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/increasing-memory-heap.html).

~~~
mister_hn
I gave IntelliJ over 8GB Ram (on a 32GB laptop) but keeps freezing because
they say it's a Linux kernel problem in the 5.4 (shipped with Ubuntu
20.04/Mint 20)

------
jimnotgym
OSX/MacOS

This should be popular

It seems so aimed at the consumer market, with everything set up to help with
integrating with Apple services.

But what about the enterprise features? It is very common for companies to be
running Active Directory networks, why do macs work so hard not to fit in? Why
not have some kind of AD support for mapping print queues, network drives that
kind of thing? Maybe respecting password policies? Authentication via Azure AD
would be really helpful too. But the real killer is forwards/ backwards
compatibility. Enterprises have long software life cycles which are respected
by Windows. You can run VB6 applications from 1999 on Windows 10.

I get so many service desk issues for macs that are resolved by a reboot, and
why don't they reboot?.. because they worry that the updates will take 20
minutes.

I hate MacOS. It causes me so much more aggravation than my main Windows user
base. I'm currently having to work on printer deployments and MDM's (solved
problems on Windows) just so marketing people can look cool in meetings.

I just gave one of them a Windows laptop to try and they noted how nice the PC
Office apps are, and how fast their computer was (processor being 2 gen ahead
of the current macbook pro)

We have one coder who still uses mac (he supports some old desktop apps that
incidentally are all broken by Catalina), and since he mainly targets Linux
nowadays he is currently looking at moving to Windows and WSL.

Great home computers, great for individuals, terrible for enterprise use.

~~~
philipwhiuk
> It is very common for companies to be running Active Directory networks, why
> do macs work so hard not to fit in?

Active Directory is licensed and patented.

You're literally complaining that someone isn't signing up to vendor lock in.

~~~
jimnotgym
You can write your own app today that authorises via Azure AD for free.

The code replying to you is proprietary, yes, but you are just talking to it
over a network not recompiling it!

Since you can choose not to use AD authentication you are not locked in at
all. I'm afraid your comment has rather lost me.

------
nprateem
Finder on Macs. I've used a Mac for over 5 years and it still amazes me how
unintuitive it is for basic tasks like copying and pasting files, creating new
directories, etc.

~~~
oneplane
I've been using it for 25 years but don't seem to have the same problem.
Across macOS Finder, Windows Explorer and the likes of KDE and Gnome's file
managers most of those tasks are identical.

Copying and pasting are universally hotkey+c and hotkey+v as an example.
Creating a directory is context->new in all cases.

Some changes were weird for a small period of a few days, like when moving
from Classic Finder to Mac OS X Finder where the priority of hotkeys for new
windows vs. new directories changed. Or when in Windows the address bar got a
lower priority than filesystem abstraction of user directories (at which point
the purpose got mixed). Same with Gnome2 to Gnome3.

I'm curious to see if it's "hard" as-is, or "hard" when you come from one
single environment with a lot of experience that is hard to adapt to something
that is not visually identical.

~~~
cryptoz
Is it possible to cut and paste files/ folders in Finder?

I feel like I try every few years and am unable to do it.

~~~
g_airborne
Instead of using Cmd+V to paste, use Cmd+Option+V to cut from the original
location and paste. I like it because it lets me postpone the decision to copy
or cut until the very end :)

~~~
nprateem
It should be possible from the right click menu like in every other OS, but
for some reason it's not. Same for creating directories.

~~~
antipaul
To create new folder, right click in the window (not on a file nor a folder).

Copy paste also works with right click. To move (a la cut), hold option key.

Also hold option key to see "move" menu option under Edit - Paste (Move)

------
SirensOfTitan
Slack: their web UI is ridiculously slow, and I hate how it creates this
expectation that I’m online 24/7.

GitHub: we mainly use phabricator now at my day job (which I love love love),
but I don’t really derive any joy from using this product anymore. I think
great tools are also fun to use, perhaps controversially. I can’t quite put my
finger on it, but I find GitHub sort of a drag for some reason.

NodeJS: I absolutely hate dealing with node_modules. My node-based docker
images are huge, and that’s after a lot of hand-held optimizations.

Additionally, we definitely avoid a lot of defects from using TypeScript, but
its compile time is awful for large projects. I also don’t particularly like
the edges: often I’ll hit odd typing inconsistencies from undocumented
limitations of TS.

After years of working in the JS ecosystem I sort of hate the complexity in
general.

~~~
cure
> Slack: their web UI is ridiculously slow, and I hate how it creates this
> expectation that I’m online 24/7.

Or 'little' annoyances like it being impossible to mute notifications on one
device (say, your phone) and not another (say, your web browser).

~~~
literallycancer
Or having to go into every single room and its settings to mute @everyone.

~~~
hedora
Or how the mute @everyone dialog box disables itself it if you’ve disabled
browser notifications.

------
axegon_
* Jira - over-engineered, unnecessarily complex and utterly slow.

* Zoom - worst video conference product __EVER__. Can't say a single good word about it.

* AWS admin console - same as jira, at least it's not slow.

* VPNs in general annoy me beyond reason too. At this point I use a raspberry pi to connect to the vpn and I use it as an SSH access server (and tunnel respectively).

~~~
Retardo_88
What do you not like about Zoom, and which video conference product would you
recommend instead?

~~~
arrayjumper
My experience with zoom has been on linux.

I hate the fact that it requires you to install the client for it to work.

The client randomly spikes in cpu usage while running in the background.
Multiple times I've also had this issue where I'll try to right click the zoom
icon in the system tray and quit zoom, causing it to hang and reach 100% cpu
usage on one core.

I also don't like that on clicking on a zoom video call link sometimes the
browser to client redirect works but sometimes it doesn't and you need to then
go back and click the link again.

For me, Google meet works much better.

~~~
errnoh
I was planning on mentioning Zoom as well. The Linux client especially is
insanely bad, iirc it also drew itself on top of everything.

My suggestion on Linux at least is to use the web client. Just get the url, do
a 's#/j/#/wc/join/#' to it and open it in browser of your choice. You'll need
to copy the password manually, sometimes it might require captcha etc, but at
least it's somewhat usable.

~~~
mr_toad
This works on MacOS as well (in Firefox or Chrome). No way in hell I’m
installing Zoom on a Mac.

------
sershe
I thankfully don't use it everyday, but Mac and literally everything on Mac
(even the terminal started crashing on resize towards the end of the time I
used it every day). Over time, I started keeping a note where I put every bug,
missing feature, malicious feature, performance issue, driver issue I had with
my 2 different MacBooks day to day, and it's loooong. I'll probably never
organize it unless I'm forced to use Mac again.

~~~
jasonv
Something else was probably going on with your Mac. The one example (terminal)
doesn’t happen on any of my Macs. And I have a few.

~~~
sershe
There was a specific thread on Mac whatever, or a bug filed I don't recall,
with dozens or more of comments. Introduced in a specific version, and never
fixed (well, as of 2-3 years ago), terminal would sometimes crash on reflow.
Not sure why it would hit specific machines

------
etaioinshrdlu
CUDA.

The GPU is the new Floating Point Coprocessor. (I think they are likely to be
integrated on CPUs even for high performance use-cases, eventually. Although
this is only happening very slowly...) It should be be programmed with vendor-
neutral CPU instructions and if need be, trapped by the kernel and emulated or
delegated appropriately. But all of this should be totally transparent to the
user application.

~~~
fxtentacle
+1

And when you need to profile something, get ready to set up custom drivers,
custom kernel flags, and recompile 30 GB of libraries and source code for that
custom cupti.so.

------
SamWhited
I agree with the person that says "everything Atlassian", overall it's
probably not the worst, but the Confluence WYSIWYG editor has to be one of the
most irritating pieces of junk I've ever used. Literally nothing it does is
predictable.

Similarly, whomever said Signal has a good point… it never manages to download
MMSs for me (which isn't its fault, signal is bad in my house), but it alerts
me anyways so I get a stupid "this couldn't be downloaded message" that I have
to be distracted by instead of only notifying me when I move into a place
where I have good enough signal to download it. It also then says "tap here to
retry" but does nothing when I do so (not even an indication that it's working
or that I tapped it). Aside from the annoying notifications about messages I
can't even read, it tries to make you spread it to your friends and you have
to manually close the stupid "Tell this person about signal" thing for _every_
_single_ _person_ you open a chat with. I had to just go back to another SMS
app and lose the ability to use their protocol.

The worst though for me is probably pulseaudio (still, after all these years,
even though it's gotten a ton better). People knowledgeable about it love to
tell me that it's obviously a configuration problem on my part, but every time
I start my computer something else is wrong. Every time I plug in my midi
controller and start up a synth I have no idea if it will work or not, but it
also fails in a different way almost every time. If I turn on a bluetooth
device, the device itself mostly connects fine, but then how the audio is
routed just seems random. That one works most of the time, but not always, and
if I turn the device off my audio settings sometimes go back to whatever they
were before, but sometimes I randomly find I no longer have a microphone, etc.
everything about it just feels bad.

~~~
daveyjonezz
Creating a bulleted list in Confluence is like playing Russian roulette.

------
rainforest
Gradle. I appreciate that it is a fast build system, and a lot of it does just
work. When it doesn't just work it's a nightmare. The config language is
completely opaque and undiscoverable (Kotlin might fix this, but I ran out of
patience to understand how Gradle works a while ago) though.

In many respects I think the fact there's a commercial version of it is a sign
that it's lacking in the UX area.

~~~
cdaringe
Preach! Yes yes and yes.

------
maliker
Microsoft office. Unavoidable in a business context. Slow. Hangs. Crashes.
Menu options hard to find in the constantly shape-shifting ribbon.

I actually have fond memories of office circa 1995 when it was a single
platform app. Now it’s some cross-platform monstrosity with horrible
performance.

So many features have been piled on top of each other that I suspect it’s
impossible to debug now. Image inserted in a shape in a table and commented
on? Good luck figuring out why that pauses scrolling for 5 seconds when it’s
encountered. Or explaining to someone non-technical why they shouldn’t do it.

------
overgard
I don't use it anymore luckily, but from a couple years ago: Xcode!! Unstable,
baffling interface decisions, very poor on features and the features that are
there are unreliable. By far the worst IDE I've ever used.

~~~
diego_moita
Agree. On 2020 that thing doesn't even have tabs for the open files.

Xcode is one of the most obvious evidences of Apple's despise and contempt for
programmers (others being crappy documentation, frequently deprecated APIs,
appstore with authoritarian rules, etc).

------
rvz
Desktop GNU/Linux.

Too much of a cost to test for and to set up CIs for the distros I'm
targeting. There is little to no paying users there because of the
fragmentation. But again, "paid support" will have lots of choices, versions,
combinations and edge cases to cover. So I listed it as "unsupported: use at
your own risk."

Windows and macOS have a much sainer desktop for GUI apps to test against.

~~~
sebbyy
> lots of choices, versions, combinations and edge cases to cover

I think Snap[0], Flatpak[1], and AppImage[2] tries to solve this problem.

[0] [https://snapcraft.io/build](https://snapcraft.io/build)

[1] [https://flatpak.org/](https://flatpak.org/)

[2] [https://appimage.org/](https://appimage.org/)

~~~
lorisdev
The irony of course is that you're listing three different systems to solve
the same problem :)

------
jjav
gmail, by so many orders of magnitude.. Email interface designed by people who
seemingly have never tried to read email.

Threading is completely broken, filtering is broken, compose screen is
unusable.

At previous companies I've had to use gmail but was able to use a sane email
client via IMAP so it was almost ok (although still somewhat broken as gmail
doesn't handle IMAP correctly). At current work they disable all access except
via the unusable gmail web interface. So definitely gmail is the worst I have
to put up with everyday.

jira would be a distant second, but no comparison.

~~~
creativeembassy
Gmail was so groundbreaking when it first came out in 2004. AJAX was barely a
thing, and Gmail used it in spades everywhere. I remember it being mindblowing
when you didn't have to wait for full page refreshes for simple actions.

My problem is that it's remained frozen in time for years. Yeah, they tweak
the visual design every few years. But so many other email clients have far
surpassed it, and they've done nothing. Other than create Google Inbox. Which
was amazing. And then Google shut it down. ️

~~~
_1tan
Can you recommend a client that surpassed it?

~~~
azemetre
hey.com

I've only been using it for a few weeks but I like the aspect of the feed and
the hand holding it does when categorizing emails.

It is paid, but it's by the same team that did Basecamp. It's very polished
IMO.

------
FVIIIvWF
I feel the other comments are really first-world problems. As a doctor from a
developed country, the worst piece of software would be my hospital's clinical
portal. Not only it is painful to use, I believe the inefficiency it causes
actually is detrimental to patient's care and the health economy in general.

I happen to know some web development, so here's a few observations from top
of my head:

\- Slow speed. Simple page changes takes at least 1 seconds, others such as
viewing lab results or clinical letter takes around 3-5 seconds, but often
needing repeated clicks to actually work.

\- No form autosave & inconsistent saving behaviour. I have had to re-write
discharge summaries several times because of save failure. This taught me to
write on notepad/Word first and then transfer onto the portal.

\- Many buttons are deeply nested in a navbar. Sometimes the nested buttons
fail to show up at all on very small or large monitors. We have to resize the
window size to find the dropdown button.

\- Front-end CSS framework is based on YUI (discontinued since 2014). It
supports IE quite well, but breaks on current Edge, Firefox and Chrome.

\- The app tries to stop clinicians from opening more than one instance of it,
but this often results in us unable to open any instance of the web app at
all. Fixed with incognito mode.

\- From the occasional server crashes, I can tell from the debug callbacks the
backend is written in Java. The point here is that the debug trails are shown
rather than a 500 error, which is unsettling for a sensitive data platform.

\- Fragmented ecosystem, every part of the portal is an iframe from a
different provider. Lots of inconsistencies and crashes. Even the sidebar is
an iframe.

\- Printing is a nightmare. Whatever sent to the printer often doesn't show
up, but that's a story for another day.

I'm sure there are bigger ones I've missed. Unfortunately, the system we have
is not the worst in comparison (in one rural hospital I worked at shut the web
server for 3 days for a database upgrade). This makes using Outlook, Teams and
other stuff a breeze in comparison - they are actually snappy and stable.

Do we have anyone in the community that can enlighten me on the root case?

~~~
_-___________-_
> Do we have anyone in the community that can enlighten me on the root case?

The technical root causes are pretty boring really. The root cause is the way
that software purchasing happens in sectors like healthcare, education,
government.

Your portal software undoubtedly cost an eye-watering amount of money, almost
all of which went to middlemen while the actual software was built by an
outsourcing company probably in a market with very cheap low-skill programming
labour, who have probably developed a specialty in taking advantage of unclear
requirements to get paid even while delivering a turd.

The middlemen have great LinkedIn profiles and many contacts in the healthcare
industry, and the software works (the only people complaining about it are the
people who actually have to use it, but thankfully none of the people
responsible for buying this software actually have to use it!) so the work
keeps rolling in.

~~~
alecthomas
This is an astoundingly accurate comment.

------
a_zaydak
Windows 10 Home: Ignoring all of the typical complaints about windows like
bloat wear and Cortana... I would be happy is just basic things worked. For
example, I often have to switch between wireless networks for my job and the
wifi icon in the bottom tray just randomly disappears about 80% of the time so
I have to go through the full settings menu to get to it. Also, searching for
applications or documents from the search bar will also search the internet??
I could go on forever.

~~~
was8309
I'll second Windows 10 home. Focus changes from the app I'm working on to
Windows itself - but the screen still shows that the app I was working on. I
hit Alt+F4 to close the app (that I'm seeing and so think still has focus) and
get the Windows Shutdown prompt.

------
akshaydeshraj
Slack. Hands down.

No issues with the actual product per se, which is quite nice. But the
experience while using Slack goes bad exponentially as the team scales if
certain usage guidelines are not put in place.

~~~
omosubi
What usage guidelines need to be put into place for it to be successful?

~~~
sakisv
Not a guideline, but a feature I'd like to have:

Allow me to disable any kind of indication that someone is talking, not just
to me (red dot) but anywhere (blue dot). Not everything needs my attention and
having the tray icon change its state is distracting.

You can mute the channels, sure but why not make that as an option in the
notifications settings?

~~~
glerk
You can disable the notification badge: [https://slack.com/intl/en-
ca/help/articles/201355156-Guide-t...](https://slack.com/intl/en-
ca/help/articles/201355156-Guide-to-desktop-notifications#mac-1)

------
nknealk
Surprised not to see this here, but doing data engineering against any Adobe
product in creative cloud.

Specifically: AEM, AAM, Omniture, among others. My favorite is AAM’s “only
Adobe could come up with such a stupid data integration” file format:
[https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/audience-
manager/user...](https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/audience-manager/user-
guide/implementation-integration-guides/sending-audience-data/batch-data-
transfer-process/inbound-file-contents.html)

The omniture S3 feed comes as a 1004 column TSV. And for fields that capture
user inputs, they don’t escape backslashes. But the escape backslashes
everywhere else. I filed a ticket on this over a year ago but still no fix.

~~~
rmccue
We’re building a competitor to AEM (and in the process, parts of Omniture);
would love to hear more about your gripes with that. (Email’s on my profile.)

One of the things we’ve seen is similar to some of the sentiments expressed
about Blackboard: the decision makers often aren’t the users, so feature lists
and meta issues tend to win out. Adobe seems to target that market pretty well
with their whole experience suite.

------
gradschool
The Intel Management Engine (IME).

The most oppressive piece of software ever written makes suckers out of all of
us. No amount of campaigning to Intel cuts any ice. Nobody is big enough or
powerful enough to get rid of it.

~~~
fsflover
Exactly. Everyone is using it without realizing. More info:
[https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel](https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel)

------
keb_
Skype for Business. Everyone I've spoken to in my company has had connection,
audio, or screen-sharing issues. Personally, I consistantly have issues with
what I've listed plus instances where Skype just flat out refuses to launch,
or it crashes, or messages are randomly dropped or fail to send, or file/image
transfers that just __do not work __. It is truly baffling.

I noticed another comment thread about Microsoft Teams, but for me, Teams is a
godsend compared to Skype for Business.

~~~
jesterson
And Skype in general.

Does anyone have skype working on ios? No, it does launch and even works, but
messages are delayed, calls are delayed.

------
arnath
The answer is certainly Microsoft Teams but since there's already a large
section on that, I'll say Visual Studio.

VS is largely a wonderful piece of software but sometimes just stops working
in inexplicable ways. Sometimes I have to build 5 times without changing
anything to get it to succeed. Sometimes my build fails but the only error in
the error list is about projects that couldn't be loaded (because they failed
to compile for some mystery reason). Sometimes it just randomly freezes doing
basic tasks. My recent favorite is this endless string of banner errors at the
top of the screen saying that there's an error with my projects that I can't
dismiss or hide. VS is great, but also sometimes the worst.

------
anonymoushn
At a previous company, I used Google Hangouts Chat daily. This is a business-
focussed chat app that takes seconds to load any change to the UI (e.g.
changing the channel you are viewing). If you are atmentioned in a channel,
there's no way to find out what message thread you were atmentioned in except
by scrolling up until you see the highlighted text. Every message sent to a
channel other than a reply to a thread creates a new thread, and threads are
displayed sorted by most recently bumped, except that your messages do not
bump threads on your UI. If you wanted to avoid all these things, you could
use the API to make your own client, except that you can't, because there's no
API. (Technically there is an API, but because it is designed only for making
bots it is not allowed to do things like read messages from a channel you are
in that do not atmention you)

If I recall correctly, one of the company's public incident reports explicitly
mentioned Google Hangouts Chat as a reason that the incident was not fixed
much more quickly. I could not find this incident report when searching just
now though.

Edit: This product is apparently now called "Google Chat"

------
GlenTheMachine
Unless your answer is “ERP”, you haven’t actually seen how bad software UX can
be.

~~~
jhot
I work in "document capture" (OCR, data extraction, and process automation)
and every ERP I've had to integrate with has been a terrible experience. I was
on a screen share with a consultant for one trying to get my service about the
correct permissions and he was scrolling through a list of, what seemed like,
two hundred possible roles. Let's not even talk about the atrocity that is
their rest API, but at least they have an API as many don't and require RPA
(ewww) or similar to input data.

------
tnsittpsif
* BMC Remedy (Oh my god. Utterly disgusting experience.)

* Atlassian JIRA (never really got the hang of it. Overcomplicated.)

* Workday (the web app is sloooooow.)

* MRemoteNG (The best SSH client on Windows. Also the worst. Alt + Tab navigation annoys me to hell!)

* iTunes on Windows (Why is it like the way it is even in 2020!?)

~~~
non-entity
> Why is it like the way it is even in 2020!?

Isnt apple trying to kill iTunes in general?

------
sershe
Microsoft Teams, hands down. It is utterly atrocious.

I've never seen an app that uses 40-80% CPU on a modern laptop non-stop to do
not much more than ICQ/AIM/mIRC used to do in 1999 on a thing that's probably
less powerful that my alarm clock.

------
balls187
I guess the beauty of being old is that I have experienced how software has
gotten so much better.

It's interesting seeing negative comments about things like AWS, Git, JIRA,
etc, and compare to what my career was like BEFORE those were mainstays.

It's cool that so many people aren't satisfied with the status quo, and will
continue to push the to make things better.

To throw in my answer, G-Suite (as an IT Administrator).

------
gravypod
From worst to slightly less worst: Helm, Istio, and everything Atlassian (Jira
& confluence).

Helm: go templates aren't a robust, or even remotely sensible, way to define
the configuration changes someone will need on a day to day basis for
deploying applications to multiple environments. Some metaconfig language as
used in kubecfg and tanka is the way to go but every single time I work with a
team on kube they say something like "Helm is fine. Everyone uses helm." It's
at times like this that I remember there was a period in human history where
bloodletting was an established medical practice and that's the point the
software engineering industry is currently at.

Istio: someone had a great idea, implemented it poorly, and just kept hacking
at it. Obvious features are missing (setting QPS & bandwidth limits per
service-to-service). Configuration is disgusting. Documentation is somehow
worse than k8s' docs but, unlike k8s, the code is a mess. There's absolutely
no reason why it has to be implemented as a side car, it's just a hack that
baloons the resource usage of the entire system and reduces effectiveness of
things like edge redis caching. There's so many obvious ways to implement
similar functionality to istio except do so in a transparent way. Maesh is one
example but it'd also be far simpler to implement it as a combination CNI and
DNS system.

Atlassian: nothing further needs to be said. The problem space is so simple
and somehow it was implemented so poorly but juuuuuuuuuust enough management
features look pretty and it fools people into buying the software.

If I ever get the opportunity to retire I would love to take a crack at fixing
all of these.

~~~
jpgvm
If you don't need to use externally supplied Helm charts consider Jsonnet
instead. You can roll your own tooling around it and end up a much nicer place
customised for your environment and problems.

~~~
dqpb
Cuelang is far better than jsonnet.

~~~
gravypod
Cuelang is not simple or well documented. It's the "right solution" but it's
not polished currently. There needs to be a lot more examples to pull from.

There's a dramatic difference between:
[https://cuelang.org/](https://cuelang.org/) and
[https://jsonnet.org/](https://jsonnet.org/)

I have a feeling that cuelang is still in the R&D phase. Once it's finished
that I'll probably move everything I write to it. It'll probably focus more on
UX and tooling and simplicity after it moves out of the R&D phase.

------
_____s
Mail.app on macOS. Some macOS apps are really great (Notes or Safari for
example), but the average quality is poor. Mail, for example, is slow, search
almost never works, etc.

~~~
DenseComet
I'm also using Mail.app right now and I've been having similar issues with
search and stuff. Does anyone have any recommendations for good desktop email
apps on macOS?

~~~
dnh44
Interesting I’ve always thought mail.app has had amazingly good search. I
recently moved away from it though because I wanted a more flexible workflow
and tried a quite a few other clients. The “pretty” macOS mail apps had not
very good search functionality so they were unusable for me.

In the end I went with Mailmate and I’m extremely happy with it.

------
andrei_says_
Windows file explorer

OSX file explorer

Both are unavoidable and horrible.

Where did I save that file? What was it named? Where did that piece of
software save its file without asking me? Do I have to click 10 levels deep to
find a file?

Yes, it is a human problem, too, but maybe make things a bit easier for
humans? I know johnny.decimal exists but good luck getting people to use it.

Pretty much any email client And email as a primary mode of business
communication. Who said what in which message, then changed their mind as an
aside in an unrelated email thread and where’s my source of truth about
anything? People use their email like a chat sorted by most recent.

My mom uses zoom on android tablet and every time I call her I spend 25 min on
the phone trying to guide you through to initiating or receiving a meeting

I paid $300 for capture one but can’t use it because I can’t figure out where
it puts my images and why.

------
eddiegroves
Atlassian's Confluence (Cloud). A showcase for the decline in web based
software forced by the move to make everything a SPA. A terrible new editor
experience. Slow JavaScript heavy page loads. No persisted markup editing.

------
axaxs
Anything by Atlassian, but specifically Jira and Confluence.

------
SurgeonCoder
Trakcare [0] electronic medical record system.

As far as I can tell this is a demo EMS from Intersystems, they provide Cache
[1] to companies developing _real_ EMS with modern user interfaces. They don't
sell this product in the USA (so not to upset their customers), but have
dumped it on the rest of the English speaking world.

I suspect here is some sort of NDA with those unfortunate Hospitals taking
this pile of stinking £%^£" as I have never found a user group or trustworthy
review.

I get to use it at ground level (talk about poor UI), at management level (no
coherent db integrity, very poor reporting) and have seen a complete inability
to reconfigure the system to cope with COVID.

When ever we see demos for new clinical system I always ask "Would those
coding this system accept this level of quality/usability in their daily
software tools?". The marketing guys look at me like I'm from another planet.

I know "you get what you pay for", but for something hundreds of thousands of
Hospital staff will be using for patient care (we don't bill in the UK), there
should be a floor below which no company should offer half-baked dangerous
products. Trakcare is in the sub-basement.

[0]:
[https://www.intersystems.com/au/products/trakcare/](https://www.intersystems.com/au/products/trakcare/)

[1]:
[https://www.intersystems.com/products/cache/](https://www.intersystems.com/products/cache/)

~~~
MapleWalnut
Intersystems purchased Trakcare, which was developed by an Australian company.
They'd love to sell it in the US, but Epic is Intersystems largest customer
and they have an agreement to not compete in the US.

Cache is the most archaic and least usable programming environment I've ever
experienced. Unit tests are not a thing. MUMPS, which underlies the whole
system, is stringly typed. The entire stack is junk, so it's no surprise that
Trackcare is either.

------
pagade
Google Chat (enterprise G Suite offering):

\- No way to set status (essential in current remote work situation)

\- No way to reorder the rooms

\- No nested comments.

\- Cannot mark conversation unread or have some way to remember to come back
to the conversation later.

\- If you lose your notification you are lost. Cannot figure out which room
you were tagged in.

\- Cannot message to self. This is not a big problem but a good to have.

~~~
peteri
I agree soooo much with this. Like a lot of google products it feels half
finished.

------
gitowiec
Confluence by Atlassian. It is very slow, it gets stuck with bigger documents,
or has no useful editor tools (eg marker) and it constantly had issues and
bugs. Sincerely Jira is another piece of crap.

------
tex0
GnuPG

I'm surprised that it hasn't come up, yet. But it's CLI interface as well as
it's data model are truly archaic. It's near impossible to properly invoke
from other programs or scripts and most users don't even understand half of
it's "web of trust" concepts.

This is especially bad since small mistakes can easily break your security
model.

I don't want to rewrite GnuPG, I want a fresh start without all the cruft.

~~~
Rapzid
Love their baffling new client/daemon model making it super hard to run in a
serverless pipeline..

------
skytreader
Jenkins.

Has a UI that was cool when the Internet was first switched on. They made
Jenkins Blue, to be fair, but for all that it eats an ungodly amount of memory
(at least when I was using it, dunno if that's changed).

Needing to configure Jenkins to work with other services means I won't be
productive for a while; this yak has a hell lot of fur. I have to write
extremely detailed notes for myself on what and where to click just so I can
do something again (i.e., if something breaks and I need to
reconfigure/migrate/etc.).

There was this scene in HBO's Silicon Valley S1, in that episode where they
hired this leet hacker kid who turned out to be no more than a skiddie. The
kid broke their work and Richard Hendricks had to fix everything and the scene
where everything got fixed featured Richard watching his Jenkins build go
green. I find it very amusing that to achieve verisimilitude, they had to
eschew years of Hollywood "hacker" portrayal, and have Richard stare at the
iconically ugly UI of Jenkins. Real life can be cooler than Jenkins but other
tools just won't feel legitimate, no?

------
haolez
OneDrive for Business. You can't move folders with more than 5000 files in it
(including subfolders). This is by design. The Windows 10 app is atrocious. It
fails more often that not. It's built on top of SharePoint, which brings a lot
of confusing features and configurations that makes no sense to someone just
looking for a way to store the company's files.

------
nateabele
Workday. There's not even a close second.

~~~
politelemon
I don't know how true this is, but I once complained about how unintuitive and
difficult to use workday is. I was told, as bad as it is, it's considered best
in its class.

I'm not knowledgeable enough, but are there alternatives to workday and are
they actually worse?

~~~
nateabele
Yeah, great question. Netflix, as you might already know, are sort of famous
for being progressive in lots of ways, including & especially HR.

I asked a couple friends who work there what they use, and sure enough, the
answer was Workday.

While there are definitely better alternatives at smaller scale (i.e.
Zenefits), at that scale, the only ones I know of are Oracle, SAP, and TriNet,
which all sound even worse.

~~~
user5994461
Workday was fine in my opinion the couple times I had to use. The localization
was actually really great!

Was able to fill addresses and contact information in the UK and Western
Europe and it accepted the local formats and documents. I wouldn't be
surprised if most competing tools are plain broken, for example requiring an
address with a state which is nonsense outside of the US.

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

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

~~~
tootie
JIRA can do markdown.

~~~
andrekandre
its their own strsnge version of markdown though, which just adds to the flame
of hatred imo

if you were ever so unfortunate to have perfectly marked up content and
previewed in the visual mode, only to save it and loose a ton of formatting
(seems in visual mode the actual data source isnt the same as markup) upon
save...

------
vegetablepotpie
Cmsynergy

The worst version control software known to man.

It is a bloated IBM tool from the 90s, takes 10 minutes copy a repo that would
take git 5 seconds. It has a lock modify unlock paradigm, so if your coworker
forgets about a file they were working on and they get promoted, you can
forget about working on your project ever again.

The paradigms are backwards. The project doesn’t branch, the files do. You
make your commits before you do any work.

It’s slowly being phased out at my company, but it can’t seem to die fast
enough. A lot of people have built their careers on this tool so it’s hard to
kill.

~~~
welcome_dragon
Thanks for reminding me of this piece of garbage. Wasn't it called Continuus
at some point? If not, that that was even worse than CM Synergy

------
johnwalkr
MS Office and it’s UI inconsistencies (where’s the button I need?). While Word
and PowerPoint technically have good tools for managing styles, the interfaces
steer users to use manual tweaking to the point where I don’t think I’ve ever
seen a clean document. And after a few copies and pastes between documents,
you now have 100 styles that will never be managed again.

Shared folders are a nightmare for version control, share point is
inconvenient and slow. One Drive works OK and finally allows collaboration.
Azure is good for some other use case (probably, never used it). So for a
typical company, MS should guide companies to transition to use OneDrive and
keep things in one system? No, single sign on, IT gets sold on how easy it is
to manage all tools, everyone gets every tool. And for good measure everyone
gets teams, surprise you’re using share point even if you don’t know it and
now all your confusing v2_final files are spread out in 5 places.

~~~
pintxo
I fear the problems with Word and PowerPoint are mainly on the users, most
simply have never heard about paragraph styles!

My personal hate object is the Windows10 client for OneDrive/Sharepoint. I
have had it on multiple occasions remove locally created files from my laptop
so that I could not access a file created a couple hours earlier on the same
computer. Had to sync it back from the cloud, how is this a feature?

------
Razengan
If websites count: YouTube.

It's appalling how such a powerful company can keep so many things so bad for
so long.

~~~
PostPlummer
Straight from the heart! Only yesterday I rented my first ever item on YT. An
English movie, found with an English search query.

"Based on my location" they gave me a French dubbed version of it. No
alternative sound track, heck not even subtitles.

I live in Switzerland, we have 4 official languages. I speak one of them:
German. Not a word French. The proposed solution: go to apple and ask for your
money back. Very poor experience.

Do not even get me going on the "want to use Premium for a month"? I've
declined that offer at least 48 times. Did not want it then, do not want it
today. Really a pity since there is a lot of cool (not sponsored or monitized)
content.

~~~
tootie
I assume you mean to ask Google for your money back?

It's funny because I have a client right now asking for some advice on how to
design a localizable website that can guess default language and I'm realizing
that no one has really solved this very well.

~~~
Razengan
> _localizable website that can guess default language and I 'm realizing that
> no one has really solved this very well._

The first and most important step is to offer a very very big option up front
and center for reverting to English.

This is an extremely annoying thing when traveling.

~~~
tootie
I've been trying to not assume an Anglo-centric audience, but it seems like
this is a popular choice. Almost every major international site, just has
English or region-specific English as the fallback.

~~~
kortilla
Some little British or US flag in the corner works well in my euro experience.
I learned to look for that pretty quickly spending time in Austria/Germany.

------
majkinetor
cmd.exe on Windows - trully horrible shell.

bash on *nix - less horrible then cmd.exe but still trurlly horrible anyway.

I want to kill myself any time I enter any of those. PowerShell cross platform
made all my cells rejoice.

~~~
sandyarmstrong
The new terminal with PowerShell is quite lovely. I recently had to move my
work from macOS to Windows and am pretty happy after setting it up like this:
[https://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToMakeAPrettyPromptInWindo...](https://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToMakeAPrettyPromptInWindowsTerminalWithPowerlineNerdFontsCascadiaCodeWSLAndOhmyposh.aspx)

~~~
majkinetor
Yeah, lovely. Still, ConEmu is atm far better. If I have to install manually
stuff, I will always chose ConEmu until Windows Terminal comes OTB.

You can get similar stuff only in powershell - this is what I use:

[https://github.com/majkinetor/powershell_profile.d/blob/mast...](https://github.com/majkinetor/powershell_profile.d/blob/master/10_prompt.ps1)

It isn't that artistic but functinality is the same without any dependency.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
Basically most web apps. They are a clunky, laggy imitation of native apps.
For a couple of historical reasons we are all using them, but still there is
an enormous abyss between web apps and real native apps.

~~~
teleforce
This.

Not sure how the harmless and cute "Gizmo" web Netscape Navigator becomes the
Gremlin monsters of today's web applications.

Perhaps the innocent desire of the developers to make their applications
usable in different platforms but because of the laziness or budget
constraints make them feed the cute Gremlins after midnight.

Hopefully the likes of cross platform native applications, e.g. Flutter will
flourish in the near future and vanish the Gremlin monsters forever.

------
mectors
Windows, usability is worse than MacOS, installing software is more complex
than Android and iOS, code is worse than any flavor of Linux but still somehow
it is default for most people with a 9x5 job.

------
whiskeymikey
Skype. Ever since Microsoft made it that it no longer saves your chats
locally, search has become so unusable it's really quite amazing how awful it
is. Whenever I need to search text in a thread it does so in the cloud??? And
it never finds anything. There are times when I literally have had to manually
scroll back several months back in a thread to find what I was looking for. I
absolutely hate it.

------
codegeek
Not anymore but until 2012, it was Lotus Notes at my work. Hands down the
worst piece of garbage I have worked with.

~~~
topkai22
I consult to a company that uses Notes to this day. It pains me every time in
see it opened up.

~~~
codegeek
My jaw dropped. Unbelievable.

------
rhn_mk1
Bash/POSIX shell. It's necessary because it's the standard, and you can't
expect computers to have a better shell by default. It's good enough for
simple things that scripts for it grow complex enough to warrant something
better. It's only bearable because it's familiar after years of experience.

It's terrible because it does everything to make it hard to write scripts.
Three syntaxes for using variables, and only one will not cause breakage.
Stringly typed. Killer spaces when looping. Arcane syntax for conditionals,
where despite 10 years of coding I can't write a simple if/else without
looking at references.

And it's widespread enough that it won't die.

~~~
nsl73
Not only is sh so widespread that it won’t die, but my own backlog of sh
scripts, code snippets, config, and muscle memory is so deep that I refuse to
use anything that doesn’t have good compatibility with sh.

I also hate it. It’s not the worst piece of software I use everyday, but every
time I need to do something more complex than completely routine I find myself
fiddling much more than I should have to.

------
mancerayder
Outlook for Mac.

The menu options are a mix of redundant 'possibilities' from where you find
things, 'icons' that don't seem to be obvious in what they represent, the GAL
is broken (w/ Office 360 cloud), the Outlook connectivity becomes disabled
when I disconnect from VPN and I have to click on "Send/Receive" under I think
"Tools" once to re-enable it, the list goes on.

Over 15 years ago a senior dev I worked with walked up to our (Sys Admin)
communal bookshelf, and noticed a book called Outlook Annoyances. He remarked,
"Hm. That looks like it's way too short of a book", something I've found
hilarious to think about ever since.

------
rainyMammoth
Slack. It has become the ultimate annoying piece of software that I feel I
always need to check and keep an eye on. There is an untold expectation to
always be online. It's using the same mechanism as Facebook to keep you hooked
with dopamine.

------
CM30
Either Adobe Target or VWO. Both have their upsides sure, but both are also an
absolute quagmire of terrible design decisions that aren't consistent in the
slightest, and that are prone to break an A/B test if you even look at them
wrong.

In Target's case, this means stuff like 'install a browser extension when our
software doesn't work, so it can load the code that browser security settings
will often block', and 'log in via an Incognito window if the editor doesn't
work properly, since some setting is now incompatible with your current API
version and the interface to disable said setting breaks along with the entire
editor'.

------
mint2
Sas hands down. And it isn’t just that The software is bad. It’s terrible, and
seems to train users into bad programming habits. But what makes it the worst
is the ecosystem around it.

For example the help and forum posts are just agonizing. They are verbose to
the extreme, Often including paragraphs on what the author was thinking the
first time they encounter the problem, and manage to sound patronizing and
naive at the same time.

The official docs and forums being naive and patronizing makes it annoying to
find the right syntax, as it’s not my primary language. But Every simple thing
requiring a 13 page white paper full of irrelevant digressions makes sas
agonizing to use.

~~~
antipaul
Totally! And often, they're PDFs!

------
heatm
Epic EMR (electronic charting/medical software)... -Ubiquitous defiance of UI
conventions. -Inconsistent behavior of buttons, forms, etc -Irrationally
composed deeply nested menus. -Very slow log in via Citrix, and you have to
log in many times per day. -Terrible distraction from providing care. -Was
really painful during COVID.

------
runjake
Whatever the OS I am using is, be it macOS, Windows, or Linux.

It always feels like I'm working against the OS now that the OS philosophy has
shifted to being all things to all people.

If it's Windows or macOS, it wants to advertise to me, or prevent me from
launching certain apps or features.

If it's Linux, it's trying to shift me into some ill-thought out use pattern.
This is fixable, but at a significant time cost customizing things. Actually,
I'm being unfair to Linux, environments like XFCE pretty much stay out of your
way. But I don't like where the mainstream DEs are going.

~~~
jkartchner
This is why I don’t use DEs anymore. If you go to the trouble of automating a
base install with a preferred wm, you don’t have much to configure but you
have a stable and usable system straight away. Still doesn’t change the fact
that Unix computing is changing a ton and can’t be fixed, but you can still
get some consistency with it

------
billysielu
Android because 2-3 years of updates is far shorter than the lifespan of the
hardware.

------
stakkur
Microsoft Windows. Followed closely by Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams,
and...god help me...SharePoint.

------
cocoa19
There's a lot of essential software that I would improve, but I wouldn't
replace or rewrite:

\- Nautilus. Serious usability/UX problems.

\- Audio in linux. Ubuntu often selects the wrong audio devices (microphone,
headphones, speakers)

\- Linux sleep/hibernation. System hangs are common.

\- GRUB. The interface is dated, why is it so ugly?

~~~
m01
Re: GRUB: Have you looked at rEFInd, assuming you can use UEFI?
[http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind](http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind) has a
screenshot and docs, although you may also wish to refer to your distro's docs
(e.g.
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/REFInd](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/REFInd))

------
odiroot
That would be German mobile banking apps (websites are just slightly better).

My current bank just wrapped a mobile website in Android app. Logging-in with
a fingerprint, though supported, takes 3 or 4 attempts.

The app is also very slow and fails miserably on slow mobile connection (very
common in Germany).

Finally the app doesn't do the 2FA feature, it's offered by another, even
worse app from the same bank. They're too cheap to offer SMS option.

The 2FA app can only be registered using snail mail confirmation.

~~~
literallycancer
SMS leaks info to anyone who cares to listen.

------
mroll
Emacs.

I'm responding to the prompt in the OP, not the title.

> What's a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could
> replace or rewrite?

Emacs is the most essential piece of software in my workflow. It's probably
not the worst, but it's the one where I see the most room for improvement. I
lean heavily on org-mode for tracking what I'm working on, it's like my
command center. I keep two emacs frames open at all times, one dedicated to
org-mode.

Supported by an assortment of magical packages like helm, projectile and
magit, I write code and anything else more efficiently than any other editor
I've used. I was a vim user for ~5 years, and now use evil mode for modal
editing in emacs.

So yeah, my opinion is that emacs is the best editor out there. But honestly
it takes too much time to configure and maintain. I spend that time, because I
don't feel like taking the productivity hit that I would by switching to
another editor, but I wish I didn't have to.

I have a vision for a SaaS app that hosts my emacs config and provides me a
nice graphical, discoverable interface for managing my configuration. It would
have simple, intuitive flows for setting up the essential packages. Like maybe
I could scroll through a list of the most popular packages (helm, projectile,
hydra, magit, etc), and click to install.

The current state of the art in managing emacs config is googling the name of
the package you are trying to configure, and trying to find someone's blog or
github from which to copy/paste code from. There has to be a better way.

~~~
edye
Any thoughts on [https://www.spacemacs.org/](https://www.spacemacs.org/) ?

It improves discoverability of hotkeys and packages for me.

~~~
bananaface
I use Spacemacs. It's horrible. It's:

\- Bloated

\- Slow

\- Encourages you to lock your personal configuration into the Spacemacs
ecosystem, rather than writing it in generic Elisp so you can easily extract
it (why I still use it).

\- Introduces ridiculous abstractions that aren't necessary, just so they can
put "spacemacs" in front of the variable name.

\- Hasn't released to the master branch in 2 or 3 years (!)

\- Consequenty breaks regularly when you use the rolling release (which you
pretty much have to do)

\- Has an unresponsive owner who doesn't want to hand the project off to
someone else (or hasn't found someone)

\- Sets up weird default behaviour that's very difficult to disable

\- Has awful defaults for most languages anyway. Their Python layer is
terrible, the features are extremely limited and it often doesn't work.

Doom is a much better starter pack.

------
caffeine
Bank apps (eg. HSBC's consumer app). For the most part they are buggy, crashy,
slow, lacking in features, and fail to do useful things (like support copy
paste, export transactions to CSV, email transaction, etc)

~~~
mightyscouse
HSBC app _shudder_ , I rage quit the bank because of it, transferred
everything over to Monzo. Truly infuriating and I think it's the only bad app
review I've ever left.

------
di4na
Git. The UX and design is broken af, nothing work, noone get it.

AWS. I don't know where to begin. Nothing make sense. Nothing works.

Docker. This thing is basically backward at every step. We should have never
packaged different things on linux as a single "container". It does not work
that way and that has created more pain than solve anything.

K8s: same Go: same

Venv. Goddamnit this never worked well and same as git, noone gets it.

~~~
NateEag
As an ardent git user who has converted multiple teams to using it, I could
not agree more.

Git has an absolutely atrocious interface, at every level.

The power it gives you once you've mastered it is probably worth it, but I'm
not sure of that, and I think a much better UI that still retains a lot of the
power (and adds more horsepower, even) is very possible.

~~~
di4na
I never said that it was not useful or that it was not better than any of the
competitor solutions.

Just that it was bad. It can be quite bad in itself and totally better than
every other solution.

~~~
NateEag
Uh, I was agreeing with you.

"Quite bad and totally better than every other solution" sounds about right to
me.

With the caveat that it's apparently a worse option than Perforce and
Mercurial for huge monorepos a la Facebook and Google.

------
Havoc
Twitter iphone app.

The home screen stream is this weird mix of people you follow, suggested
streams, things your followed people liked and ads.

Each swipe down involves "OK I'm looking at something here it's a
surprise...what is it..an ad? someone I follow? Some other gibberish?".

I can totally understand why people just delete the app. It's worse than FB
imo - which is setting the bar really high already

~~~
treebornfrog
Try using fenix, it's a fantastic mobile twitter client.

------
Spooky23
Peoplesoft Financials.

I travel once a quarter on average for work. I probably spend about 6 hours on
vouchers afterward, between account resets, etc. My employers rules are pretty
brutal, but the system is impossible.

------
XCSme
Probably no one will say Stadia. And it's not because it's good.

~~~
tclancy
I’m definitely disappointed as well. I want to love it, but too often it
undercuts it’s own value proposition by being pixilated, jaggy and slow. And
we have a gigabit connection plus Google WiFi, so there’s not much excuse.

------
rapind
The privacy invasive, security nightmare, resource hog, commonly referred to
as the web browser.

~~~
randompwd
JavaScript has way too much access to everything. It's absolutely insane.

------
quelsolaar
IOS Podcast App. Its absolutely terrible. Stops playing in the middle of
episodes, forgets what episode it is playing, episodes disappear, and it
throws up a spinning wheel again and again...

~~~
topkai22
I moved to Spotify in order to get my feeds synced across devices. It’s mostly
been a better experience, but for some insane reason you can’t add a proper
feed to Spotify.

------
randcraw
Mac Finder

\- It hangs at least every other day -- the pinwheel of death.

\- It sorts files in some sort of weird non-alphanumeric order.

\- There's no way to cut and paste a set of files. You have to copy them
TWICE, once to an intermediate destination, then again to your endpoint.

\- Right mousing on a file takes WAY too long to pop up a list of appropriate
apps. This lookup should take a second at most. Adding a new app or removing
an old one should update of the hash for affected files IMMEDIATELY when added
and never again. This idiot check should NEVER occur on user time every time
you right mouse.

\- Finder should be rejiggered to publish a simple API so anyone can readily
access all its constituent services. That way it'd be trivial for any power
user to easily clone, reorganize, revise, and extend any/all of this obsolete
malfunction-riddled 35 year old app, bringing the integration and performance
of those services into the current century.

Finder has long overstayed its welcome.

~~~
villgax
You can hold command & drag to move files, not cut-paste but still better than
having delete source destination files manually.

------
Mekantis
Probably Linux. I don't understand how people put up with things like
PulseAudio. If I use Windows, the audio sinks behave like I expect them to.
They use the device I expect them to. They don't mysteriously set the volume
to some bizarre level that has nothing to do with anything when I start a new
program, or change the video I'm watching on YouTube, or open a new video in
VLC. Whenever I use any audio-capable application, it's like I'm rolling dice
as to which device it'll choose to use and what volume it thinks I want it to
be at, and none of it has anything to do with previous usage or what I want it
to do. What is this crap? Also, if you want to configure _anything_ , have fun
trying to figure out what magical command-line incantations will do what you
want it to do. Because the GUI tools are all utter crap and don't do anything
useful.

~~~
_-___________-_
Heavy PulseAudio user here, and occasional developer on the project. Pulse is
very unlikely to be doing what you describe itself, it is probably something
further up the stack in your desktop environment or whatever that is helpfully
trying to manage Pulse for you, or alternatively some plugin that your distro
added. This sort of demonstrates one problem with Linux - the fragmentation.

OTOH, my Windows 10 computer displays almost exactly the behaviour you
describe - when plugging headphones in, some applications will inexplicably
continue using the speakers. Volume levels change without any obvious reason
between different connections of the same device. Sometimes I have to select
the speaker output and then the headphone output and it will magically start
working. All of that would be fine, except for the real problem: there is
basically no way for me to properly debug and solve this problem, whereas
solving your problem on Linux would be relatively trivial for anyone with a
bit of experience, even if it is in fact a bug in Pulse.

~~~
Mekantis
> there is basically no way for me to properly debug and solve this problem,
> whereas solving your problem on Linux would be relatively trivial for anyone
> with a bit of experience, even if it is in fact a bug in Pulse.

I've never been able to debug any of this. I think "a bit of experience" is
putting it lightly. I have no idea how to fix any of this and none of the
documentation helps. Imo, between "being configurable but being impossible to
configure" and "not configurable except for the most important bits, but at
least you get a GUI that makes sense and does what you want and expect", I
prefer the latter. I don't want to become a PA developer before I'm able to
make it do what I want.

Also, if you dive into the Windows 10 sound settings, you can set the default
device and the volume for every application and it'll never deviate from that
unless you explicitly change it again. This is how it should be, and I don't
understand why PA isn't capable of this as far as I can see.

And if a program deviates from that setting for any reason, the _only other
reason_ why it could deviate is because the program itself has changed it, and
you just need to check that program's settings. There's two places to check.
On Linux? No idea. Infinite possibilities.

~~~
_-___________-_
> Also, if you dive into the Windows 10 sound settings, you can set the
> default device and the volume for every application and it'll never deviate
> from that unless you explicitly change it again.

Yes, I've dug deep in the Windows 10 sound settings many times. I promise you,
it regularly deviates from it, in ways that don't seem at all deterministic.
Your solid belief in Windows 10's sound system not containing any bugs doesn't
jibe with my experience of it :)

As mentioned in my previous comment, I suspect there's something other than
PulseAudio causing your issues, like some external tool (possibly bundled as
part of a desktop environment) trying to manage the sources/sinks/volume.
Because of that hunch I'd probably suggest your distribution's bug tracker as
the appropriate place to report the issue, as it's likely an issue of
integration.

------
tzury
Most frustrating first:

    
    
        01) Atlassian entirely. 
            nearly broekn, far from elegant and far too many times broken.
    
        02) Slack. using it since communication is a must. 
            Yet, noisy, using search too many times (left menu poor performace)
    
        03) npm. oh lord. miss the old plain vanilla Javascript days.

------
simantel
Concur, ADP, and Workday are all really bad.

~~~
tomashertus
ADP is unbelievably bad. That’s 2k software. I’m genuinely scared about their
security and hate it that my most personal information are in a system like
that.

~~~
pnutjam
I haven't supported ADP in at least a decade, but I figured it wasn't any
better. I was astounded by how many SOP assumptions I had to throw out the
window when setting it up.

No, ADP does it this (incredibly stupid) way.

------
jimbob45
Snipping Tool. I will _never_ want to replace a file with an identical name.
Just add a “(1)” please.

------
KyleBerezin
Waves MaxAudio Pro, a thousand times over. It comes preinstalled on Dell XPS
laptops. It is used to control the combo audio jack, and it is used to control
the speakers. Without it the speakers on windows are quiet and sounds like tin
cans.

When you plug in a headset, after a 4 second pause, it pops up a dialog asking
what type of device you connected. After the dialog you have another 4 seconds
pause while it mounts the device. An 8 second wait while an incoming call is
waiting is an eternity.

And god forbid you accidentally unplug your audio device in a call, it goes to
the internal mic, and after restoring the device, MaxXAudio wont pop up the
dialog until you leave the call.

It is so bad, my next laptop will not be another XPS, even though nearly
everything else is great about it.

------
artembugara
Have you ever worked with SAP?

~~~
darcys22
Agreed, accounting software in general is pretty disappointing.

Thats why i started building my own open source system.

[https://godbledger.com/](https://godbledger.com/)

~~~
gamblor956
Your software isn't any better. In many ways, it's far worse than SAP or
Oracle/Netsuite, since it doesn't even provide a UI (and the issues most
people have with SAP and Oracle is _how_ their custom UI was configured. It
can be as painful or as painless as your Integrations team makes it.)

------
billysielu
Windows because of Windows Updates.

------
ju-st
Kodi on Raspberry Pi: slow loading menu, random hangs & crashes, getting
bluetooth LE working was a adventure, BLE remote key presses are only
recognized after pressing them several times when waking up, SMB file access
not reliable (mounting a smb drive and then accessing it works much better),
plugins are flaky at best (youtube needs api keys, youtube cast with extra
plugin works mostly (when it does not crash), amazon video stutters on SD
video, satellite TV is much less reliable than VLC on Windows)

I'm still using it because the alternatives come with their own drawbacks
(usually high price but still having enough quirks).

~~~
Bnshsysjab
I moved from Kodi to Plex and haven’t looked back. Granted I don’t use Pi
devices (my tv supports plex natively) it works much better than I ever found
Kodi to

------
wlj
I feel like I should post here as a sort of public service announcement.

If anyone reading this is considering trying or moving to HubSpot, I urge you
to take our experience as a warning and seriously reconsider.

We moved to their sales CRM 2 years ago and have been filled with remorse ever
since.

It’s hands down the most poorly thought out software package I’ve ever had the
misfortune of using.

Aside from our sales performance taking a nosedive, it’s painful to use in a
multitude of ways, and everywhere you turn is frustration, inefficiencies and
dead ends.

Such was the frequency of our frustration with nearly all aspects of HubSpot,
the phrase “fucking HubSpot” even became a meme in our office.

Run. Don’t look back.

------
michele_f
CISCO WebEx: the worst.

------
ashconnor
1Password.

Core of the product hasn't seen any noticeable features in a while.

1PasswordX was launched without the feature set of the desktop version. Dumb
stuff that hasn't been fixed in forever like not being able to delete a single
item from the trash, password formulae are rigid - words with no digits or
symbols or random mess of all characters, no TouchID/FaceID, Apple Watch
unlock support, can't selectively sync a single vault to say my work laptop.

There should be some open standard data-attribute on password fields so the
app can read in the required formula to create the perfect password without me
fiddling the settings.

~~~
stblack
1Password supports FaceId and, before that, I used FaceId on my iPhone. But
I'm using an old version. Has this changed?

~~~
ashconnor
Desktop sorry. It does support Face/TouchID on iOS.

------
TheOtherHobbes
Office 365.

Word processors and spreadsheets shouldn't be rocket science, but the updater
seems to have been designed by Satan's "I wrote some Python in school once"
nephew [1], and many versions [2] seem to have rather obvious UI bugs.

Word still doesn't do some very basic things it should, and it probably never
will now.

[1] Updated recently. Still bad, but not quite as bad. The really hilarious
part is that I also have updaters for various music packages from Arturia, NI,
and so on, and _all_ of them are far more streamlined and professional.

[2] The number does seem to be decreasing. But it's still higher than it
should be.

------
phreack
Whatsapp, absolutely. Every single night it does a forced backup of everything
that I do not want and hangs for about 10 minutes.

And if it fails for reasons such as storage getting full, it gets corrupted
and then it's half an hour until it restores an old backup, losing the day's
messages. And it also stores a week of backups, so that's 7x of the size which
on many phones is untenable.

And this can't be turned off! I hate it with a passion but literally everyone
I know is on it. There's even no way to hide a conversation from view without
blocking it forever.

Awful.

------
jsrcout
Anything with the word "Enterprise" in its name or description. Any
"Enterprise" search system will be useless or unusable [0]. Any "Enterprise"
file/document management system will be a nightmare in any possible way.

[0] I once had a page-long note file on literally _how to search for a
document by title_ in $HUGECO's search application. Because it took me 3 hours
to figure it out the first time. Not exaggerating. It would probably be easier
to operate a DNA editing machine than this thing.

------
paganel
I've still havent't figure it out how to open an email in a new tab with just
a single click when inside GMail. It. used to be possible, of course, like all
HTML links (by clicking the middle button on my mouse, for example), but since
3 or 4 years (at least) that feature disappeared. I'm still upset about it and
that is why I consider GMail "the worst" piece of software I use everyday
(it's also because I don't use that much "different" pieces of software).

~~~
Recursing
What about ctrl+click ?

I use that often, my only complaint is that it you close the main window, for
some mystical reason it decides to also close all the other tabs opened that
way

~~~
paganel
Thanks for that, sincerely. Still looks a little bit awkward because it only
opens the email message in sort of its own thing (no menus like in the "main"
tab) but it works.

------
js2
Slack. I've got two or three people DM'ing me, threads going in more than one
channel, and four other channel's @here'ing me. So I mute all the channels
except for when I'm directly @'d, but why isn't that the damn default. I can't
view more than one conversation at a time because the stupid client is a
single window that doesn't even have tabs.

When I paste a link, I don't want it to attach what's at the link because that
takes up like half the window.

Lately the client has tried to auto-format things. Bulleted lists. Code. When
I type ''' to start a code block, sometimes Slack automatically terminates the
code block for me and sends my message before I'm done and sometimes not. I
think you continue bulleted lists with the return key but code blocks with
ctrl-return, I can't remember, it seems inconsistent though.

Somehow the Slack client doesn't register for links to my company's slack
domain so links to channels end up opening in my default browser then bouncing
back to the client.

God I hate Slack so fucking much.

I want my IRC client back.

Jira's not great either but I've never used a bug tracker that didn't suck in
one way or another and it doesn't suck any better or worse than others. At
least I can open issues in more than one browser window/tab.

~~~
texasbigdata
Why can't I parallel multiple workspaces on one of many cheap monitors.

------
aasasd
Toggl the time tracker somehow went to complete shit in terms of performance.
Its workflow is great, the Mac app worked splendidly until the redesign of a
couple years ago. The redesign changed nothing drastically, pretty much only
polished things, but somehow everything became much slower and gets slower
still. Doing _any single change_ requires you to wait. It feels like they do
synchronous network requests on every action (which they quite possibly do,
judging by the interaction with the mobile client). Sometimes CPU usage spins
up too, for good measure. Even completion in text-dropdowns is hella laggy.
Just switching to the app is often ‘app is not responding’ territory.

It's productivity software that I need to touch every half-hour or so.
Productivity software has to be _snappy_. Toggl is the opposite of snappy now.

On top of that, the app forcibly updates itself and has no option to disable
that—while I'm using Homebrew for all other updates. The Android app is also
half-baked compared to the Mac one, which is no surprise by this point.

Toggl's workflow fit me almost like a glove: no automagic guesswork, just
manual entry and tracking of me being AFK. No alternative app has that same
model, from what I've seen, and/or the interfaces are meh.

Somewhat ironically, Toggl's client apps are open-source and I've cloned the
desktop one right after seeing the redesign. But fiddling with them would
likely require coming up with my own storage method. I might as well redo the
app in Lua with Qt or whatnot, as Lua is hella fast—but the state of GUI libs
for non-native languages fills me with endless dread.

------
javajosh
`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.

~~~
yewenjie
People who champion git, how do you counter this?

~~~
x0x0
I assume that people who find git extremely difficult are unwilling or
incapable of learning the internal data model. I think if you want to have
distributed source control, there is a minimal complexity that exists. I also
previously used cvs, svn, and perforce, so maybe that affects my opinions; I
strongly believe git is a huge improvement over all of the aforementioned.

Note I think git could definitely be easier to use, and the reuse of eg
checkout to switch branches and revert a dirty file to either staging or the
most recent commit is a bit strange. But calling it uniquely bad is silly, imo
obviously.

For working software engineers, I both think -- and recommend to juniors --
they must invest the effort to learn an editor, git, and at least one language
+ toolkit deeply.

~~~
pedasmith
I think that the most important goal of our profession is to find and
implement high-level concepts so that our users don't need to worry about tiny
details.

As an example: when I buy a back-up hard drive from a typical brick store like
Costco, the "back up hard drive" is abstracted away: I don't need to study the
USB timing diagrams, or worry about the details of how the magnetic domains
are imprinted on the spinning disks, or really any of the chemical details of
the surface coating.

This abstracting away of details is AWESOME. I can buy a $150 disk drive after
spending less than a minute considering the purchase.

Git, on the other hand...

Let me give a real-life example of where real-life git and real-life published
work flows don't work: you can go into GitHub.com, and make a project. And you
can write code in Visual Studio, and save it up to your new git project.

Unless, of course, when GitHub.com recommended that you add a license. The
instant you add a license, the project isn't "empty", and once the project
isn't "empty", you can't trivially push your new Visual Studio project up.

The fix for this is to delete your GitHub.com repo.

I bet you'll reply and say, "that's just real-world problem! I only want to
hear about theoretical problems!" \-- which, IMHO, is one of the problems my
profession faces. Real-world problems are ignored in favor of theoretical
ones.

~~~
x0x0
> _I bet you 'll reply and say_

Maybe don't imagineer what I would say based on poor evidence.

Because (1) github doing that is kind of dumb (though (1a) how often do we
make new projects?), and (2) we're discussing _git_ as used for source
control, particularly the commands. That's distinct from using github as a
remote.

------
kfogel
(Question for OP)

Just curious:

Were you inspired to ask this question by the recent CoRecursive Podcast
interview with Jim Blandy ([https://corecursive.com/054-software-that-doesnt-
suck/](https://corecursive.com/054-software-that-doesnt-suck/)) in which he
talks about how the motivation to design a CVS replacement come from the
question "What's the worst software that you use every day?"

~~~
guu
I was! Thanks for being a part of creating Subversion.

------
theriddlr
Webflow. The menus go 10 levels deep to interact with an element. As a dev,
even I can't understand it. Raw HTML is better than their menu-driven WYSIWYG

------
jeanlucneptune
Literally any electronic medical record system ever built.

HUNDREDS of different systems on the market. Some with maybe a handful of
doctor's offices using a particular system.

Worst UIs you could ever imagine. Limited interoperability.

In even well-established systems with large numbers of installs you'll see
multiple bugs in production code that don't get fixed.

Switching costs are essentially infinity so doctors get locked into a system
no matter how bad it is.

------
AlchemistCamp
iTunes because it adds indirection I don't want and yet somehow is required
for a variety of tasks I'd rather do from my file system or browser.

------
DerekRobot
I accidentally bought a gaming laptop that can't run Linux, so I'm stuck with
Windows 10 exclusively. Although it really isn't that bad now.

My workplace uses SmartCAM, an ancient CAM package for manufacturing. It's
probably not that bad, but I couldn't wrap my head around it compared to other
CAM software. It turns solid geometry into low-poly mesh, and nothing is
intuitive like Autodesk HSM.

------
asddubs
for me it's phpmyadmin. I guess I should just find another tool that does the
same, but I don't use it that much, just for quickly changing things around
when building prototypes or just looking at things. I've been using it for
over a decade and 10 years ago, I loved it. now I hate it. it's inexplicably
slow when doing nothing at all, it uses frames for the sidebar so your list of
tables goes out of sync constantly (presumably so it doesn't have to reload
all dbs/tables on every request, but then why is it still so slow? it takes
like 10 seconds to load sometimes when I'm not even doing anything with any
data involved). every change they make to the interface makes it worse and
more cumbersome to use. the default settings paginate your sidebar after like
40 tables or something ridiculously low. so you have to wait for the slow-ass
frame based sidebar to load 3 times before the table you wanted to look at is
even in your list. you can change it by modifying some php file somewhere, but
it didn't use to have this problem.

------
RedRoverRunner
I worked at a company that made financial planning software called Xplan. What
a user could see on screen for their client was a combination of _over 1k user
capability controls_ users group membership, which was hierarchical so you
used your parent group settings of your primary group unless they were
overridden (primary group.. yes you could be in any and all groups, all with
their own settings throughout) _clients group membership_ page settings, with
every page AND field showing controlled by conditional rules that could be
based on any of the thousands of fields of the current user or client _country
set for user_ module allowed product lists that could be applied at user,
group or global level, and group hierarchy applied

Client portal could display information using the above rules, and more rules

Thousands of site settings were in an admin area which was grouped by major
module, or just placed on which page the developer picked at the time (some
pages dedicated to a couple of settings, other general ones full of unrelated
random settings)

------
indit
Calibre eBook reader. Wonder why no competition from other in ebook reader
apps.

------
dive
Apple Xcode. Not because it is bad-bad or worst. Just because all other
software I use is better. Firefox, Things, Emacs, etc. Perhaps, this is what
is happen when there are no alternatives. I know about AppCode from JetBrains,
but in many cases (like, build system, dependency management, etc.) it behaves
just like a wrapper on top of the Xcode or requires to launch Xcode itself.

------
Xelbair
Firebird, and by extension the industry specific application which utilizes
it.

This applications is absolutely usability nightmare, created in 90s, and it
hadn't undergone any change since then. It's database design is also
absolutely horrible.. yet it is faster, and more comfortable to just use plain
SQL to work with it than bother with UI.

Then there is that piece of shit known as firebird. It has all downsides of
file based databases, while also having all downsides of service based
databases.

It also has its own way of doing things, and it doesn't even have
services/systemctl service by default. Prior to version 2.5 you couldn't drop
connections, and guess what - that PoS application set it to a week.

File itself wont update if there is any live connection.

That piece of shit app uses legacy client dll for firebird, so you can either
connect to firebird 3, or to firebird 1/2\. but not both.

And then there is firebird documentation, which is horrible, and fragmented.

I could rewrite that piece of shit, and design a better database but we won't
ever compete with that company for political reasons.

------
econcon
1\. Gimp (not natural to use it, so UX/UI sucks)

2\. Freecad (difficult, weird UI)

3\. WordPress+WooCommerce (they charge you for as basic as simple shipment
tracking plugin)

------
zachrose
Google? It captures me with its convenience and illusion of transparency but
is probably also selling a window into my deepest curiosities.

------
jabroni_salad
Managed Workplace. It is an RMM tool so it does monitoring, automation, and
facilitates remote access to client environments.

\- Loading up the client list takes forever ~15 seconds

\- Loading up the asset list for a given client takes even longer.

\- Remote access is hidden behind a 2 layer context menu

\- All URLs are dynamic so you cannot bookmark your favorite assets / jump
boxes. I use a selenium script to automate the page navigation because it can
take ~5 minutes to get to an asset by name due to a combination of needing too
many page loads and not being able to just start from the search page.

\- Terminal experience is way worse than putty. Output formatting is always
jacked up and a command takes ~5 seconds to return output.

\- RDP all goes through a relay and your connections will just die
occasionally.

\- 90% of my work interacts with it in some way.

BUT it makes pretty reports for management so we are stuck with it. I demo'd
some alternatives like apache guacamole or remote desktop services but the
consensus was that we didn't want to take on the risk + we are already paying
for a product that "works".

------
signaru
MS Excel.

It can give you nice plot results, but to get there you need to struggle with
the UI. The UI for adding data series is a pain as while there is a editable
text indicator indicating cell ranges for the data, typing on that indicator
activates cell selection on the background that also modifies the text as you
type.

It is a nightmare if you have many Y-data sharing the same X-axis. The methods
for bringing out dialogs also rely on being able to click parts of the chart,
which is largely hit or miss, especially if you have dense superposed data.

Scroll position changes when I select data (using several methods) so new
charts are often created at the bottom of the long spreadsheet and I have to
manually bring it to a more sensible higher position.

Well, I might be wrong for using Excel in the first place. But I use it for
the same reason I use MS Paint instead of Gimp. Sometimes you just need
something quick and familiar. And for plotting, the alternatives seem to
require some learning.

I'm recently lookeing at SciDavis and hope this solves my nightmares.

------
antipaul
The new google chat

No new user, and rarely an experienced one, starts a new thread. Every reply
just builds on the original.

All this even when the new thread button is _right in front of you_. But the
design is so terrible I don’t blame people for missing it.

(On a separate note, I see no Apple products in main threads. I see a few
google ones, Microsoft, Amazon (AWS) and Facebook (workplace))

------
huseyinkeles
Home Assistant.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love it and it makes my life easier but it just
breaks all the time, especially when I update it.

~~~
jhot
Home Assistant is amazing but you really have to read the release notes for
every release to make sure something you're using isn't going to break. I
appreciate the improvements it has seen over the years but it's definitely not
something you can just update and assume all is well.

~~~
huseyinkeles
I think it’s also lack of manual and automated testing. Few weeks ago one of
the updates just broke the iOS companion app. (For everyone).

I had to rollback to my latest daily snapshot and didn’t update until they
fixed it, which took around a week.

------
hnu0847
Are there any other CPU/GPU designers here? I feel like EDA software in
general is pretty frustrating to work with.

------
NextHendrix
Modelsim

I would hate to rewrite it but I wish someone would. It has the worst and
buggiest UI of anything I've ever used. Everything looks incredibly dated, and
while the backend (the useful bit) does what it's supposed to (though very
slowly unless you're paying for the big boy license) it's just a horrific
place to be.

Coming home from work and working on my own stuff with the tools I like rather
than have to use is like a breath of fresh air.

Vivado is also notoriously a bit of a bloated and buggy pig. For hardware
simulation, Active HDL is probably the least worst thing that I've used that
has all the features. But for just doing simple simulations without all the
bells and whistles, GHDL is by far and away the best experience, and it's the
free one.

[https://github.com/ghdl/ghdl](https://github.com/ghdl/ghdl)

------
EmmEff
I really haven’t had a positive experience with Microsoft Teams

------
dmd
... and why is it Lotus Notes?
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3ilzey/were_a_bunch_o...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3ilzey/were_a_bunch_of_developers_from_ibm_ask_us/cuhp4ej/)

------
hendrick_neues
KMail. It hangs so frequently that I have a shortcut-key combination to kill
-9 akonadi (ctrl+alt+k), which then respawns and fetches mail again.

At the end of every startup it used to present a dialog 'Mail has encountered
a fatal error and will now close'. If you clicked 'OK' the programme would
terminate.

Fortunately the dialog wasn't modal, so you could carefully tuck it into an
unused corner of the screen and continue as normal. Eventually I did some
googling and deleted ~/.local/share/local-mail/templates which got rid of it
(but I lost the templates)

That said, I still find the UI much less fiddly than gmail, which is why I use
both.

In fact I'm writing this comment while I wait for Kmail to re-load it's
mailbox, so I can reply to an email.

------
harrisonjackson
All of my "worst" softwares that I use daily have alternatives that are
equally as bad if not worse IMO or will be a huge pain to switch to, so I
still "love" them by comparison.

Lastpass + Authy - main frustration is helping wife use them - her usage is
less frequent so she needs help each time. Also they don't sync reliably so
adding new accounts can be painful.

Anything that starts automatically on boot by default, slow to launch, or has
a separate "installer/updater" that is constantly annoying me (looking at you
Adobe everything)

Alexa - only listens to me; doesn't cutoff quickly enough when someone tries
to issue a new/improved command or dismiss a response

So many posts on here about X not working on Y system where Y is not a money
maker for X. Yes, you are an afterthought.

------
nabogh
I work as a control systems engineer and ClearSCADA is my biggest pain point.

Crashes all the time on both the front and back end. Bloated mess of user
displays that you have to drag and drop elements on by hand. Oh and let's not
forget that I'm usually interacting over a slow RDP connection.

------
pmontra
The software I run every day on my laptop is ok (Firefox, thunderbird, emacs,
terminal, Ubuntu in general) so it must be something on my phone. Probably the
OS because the phone is as good as my previous laptop but Google limits what
it can do, more and more with each release. And yet any alternative I can
think about is worse. Example: iOS is even more locked up and a Linux phone
won't run some apps I must have so I'll end up with two phones.

Aha! I was about to submit the comment and it came to me that my laptop's
nvidia proprietary device + linux kernel combo is (let's be kind) under
optimal (still better than the open source driver.) The main point: 40 Hz
refresh rate with Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04. It was 60 Hz with 16.04 and earlier.

------
mcswell
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Adobe Acrobat here; maybe techies view/edit
their pdfs in ed.

I have to admit that I don't use it every day--I have PDF-XChange Editor on my
home computer (and a couple other PDF viewers), but when I do have to use it,
I hate it. The UI has gone through lots of changes in the past few years, and
each time it's worse. Most everything is icon-based--tsort of like Microsoft's
Ribbon, except these icons are randomly displayed above, or to one side of,
the doc you're working with, leaving little room for that doc to be displayed.
You can get a menu, but its primary use seems to be to bring up rows or
columns of icons. And the icons are both large and ugly (and often
indecipherable).

------
markpapadakis
Pocket ( [https://getpocket.com/](https://getpocket.com/) ). It’s really bad.
Been using it for years and it’s always been broken. Crashes often, narration
sometimes works most of the time it doesn’t, other times it works if you force
stop the app and restart it. It’s very slow too. I depend on for my long daily
commutes and I only stick to it because InstaPaper is also very broken and
there is no reasonable way to move the stories from pocket to instapaper. I am
convinced the people who build it never really use it for those issues are
otherwise trivial to encounter and I would think trivia to fix as well. I hope
someone will build a better such app and make them irrelevant.

------
pwdisswordfish2
Web browser. It is hands down the most insidious. Complexity by default, no
alternative. No debate.

What is that website "browse happy" or some such? All due respect, I simply
cannot agree. I am not happy with those recommendations. Web should be
friendly to all user agents.

------
yeah986
Windows 10

~~~
aklemm
What do you dislike about it? I enjoyed Linux desktop for many years, and then
spent almost 10 years on OSX enjoying that, and now I've been on Windows 10
for a couple years and find it just fine. It's completely out of my way,
doesn't crash, and so far updates haven't eaten my data.

~~~
eps
It's not better than Windows 8.1 in any dramatic way, but it's chokeful of
junk than no user wants - ads, telemetry, forced updates, the whole OS-as-a-
service angle, etc. You don't feel like you _own_ the machine anymore. It's
like you bought it just to let Microsoft to do as they please with it.

Then, there's also the UI that is just... awful. Touch-oriented white-on-white
macro bullshit for people with poor vision. It's a smaller gripe and easier to
fix, but still.

Windows 10 really feels like something that Microsoft decided to stuff down
everyone's throat just because they were in position to do so. It clearly
shows that MS treats users as a cattle, basically. You can moo all you want,
but that won't change a thing. If you don't think it's true, look at LTSB (or
what it's called now) - that Windows 10 edition for people who are _really_
paying. Can't piss them off, so - no ads, no Windows Store, no Cortana or any
other crap just gushing out mainstream Windows releases. So it is perfectly
possible for MS to release reasonable OS editions _and_ they readily recognize
their bundled junk for what it is, it just they don't give a fuck of what
unwashed grey masses want.

So, yeah, Windows 10 _is_ the worst piece of software. Not because it's
lacking in the tech department, but because of a fundamentally rotten and
disrespectful attitude towards their users on Microsoft's part.

~~~
fxtentacle
What stops you from just buying LTSB? I believe we pay $130 per employe per
month for Windows enterprise and the entire office suite. In my opinion, it's
a pretty good deal.

~~~
listenallyall
>> What stops you from just buying LTSB?

Microsoft -- it doesn't sell those versions to individuals (or even small
companies without Volume Licenses).

------
c-smile
Apple's XCode. In particular its configuration (project and environment)
features. Yet, making distributions and the whole signature magic is, ummm,
something. Seems like it is in principle impossible to generate and build
native UI project outside of XCode...

------
milkers
Evernote, Spotify, Netflix

I am gradually migrating to Notion instead of Evernote but I am stuck with the
other two.

~~~
ScottFree
I switched from Evernote to Notion 6 months ago. Their block-based editing
system drives me up the wall. But, they really nailed their media integration
in a way nobody else has, so I continue to use it.

------
asjo
On every workday: Microsoft Teams. When trying to make a link, it overwrites
the clipboard. When formatting text in the text box, it sometimes randomly
moves the cursor into the previous block.

Unfortunately the company has decided to use it and my colleages have as well.

------
_bxg1
It used to be Jira. Thankfully my current company doesn't use it. Now it's
probably DBeaver, which is hard to complain about because it's free and full-
featured, but it has one of the worst user experiences I've ever encountered.

------
4midori
Dragon Pro, voice recognition software. Awful UI, known bugs that never get
fixed, incompatible with critical applications like web browsers. Why? It's my
understanding that they have no real competition. If you need to "drive" your
computer with your voice, Dragon is all there is. In fact, it is pretty
limited without the addition of Voice Computer, which allows you to command
Windows to do certain things, like switch programs, etc.

Dragon is so important to my workflow, while so shitty a program, that I would
pay three or four times its cost for a competing product that actually worked
well.

------
AdrianB1
Outlook for the search and threads. The search is attrocious, the well known
Ctrl-F means "forward" (why, but why?) and the search does not highlight the
result in the mail, good luck finding it in a 1000 lines email thread.

Email threads are not there; "Find related" works, but it does not help
organize emails, while long emails with embedded history of other 20-30
messages and no capability to identify, expand/colapse messages are a
nightmare.

And the calendar is useful, but a black box. My calendar has about 0.5 GB and
I have no idea what is taking up all that space and how to reduce it.

------
atq2119
The GitHub web UI. It's. So. Damn. Slow.

~~~
nikisweeting
Strange, I find it to be significantly faster & lighter than most other
webapps I interact with daily. I think historically they've had a huge culture
of using as little Javascript as possible, which I really appreciate.

~~~
atq2119
Other web apps probably aren't any better. It's just that other than some Wiki
stuff, where network interactions aren't in the fast path, GitHub is the only
web UI I'm forced to use with any frequency.

------
pagade
Any poor sole here using Google Jamboard? Half cooked product released out
ever!

------
timpark
This was back around 2005, so I imagine the software has improved since then,
but... Sonic Scenarist for DVD authoring.

The thing we hated most about it apart from the slowness (computers were
slower back then too, but anyway) was that it auto-saved after every action
and had _no undo_. If there was an option to turn this off, we couldn't find
it.

It was all too easy to select a bunch of items and accidentally drag them to
the wrong place, and so we ended up just making a backup copy of the project
file from time to time, and before attempting any type of operation that might
mess up.

------
allarm
Cisco Contact Center Express. This is a pure disaster, this damn thing is full
of hilarious bugs that exist there for many years through many major versions.

One of examples: if you click 2 (or more) links in its web interface and open
the links in new tabs, the content of these tabs will be a mix of content from
the links you just clicked. It’s not very obvious and it’s very easy to change
something in the tab A, thinking that you’re changing the call center
configuration for application A, but in fact you’re changing a random piece
from site B or C.

Cisco doesn’t care much about it.

------
ivan_gammel
All calendar and todo list applications, on desktop, on mobile and in cloud.

------
rhizome
All of Google's Android apps, by far.

------
P4wl0w
The new MacOS. When WiFi is active it needs seconds (!) until apps like VLC
open. Normally this just takes miliseconds.

It slowly (haha) steels time from me every day and I was never so frustrated
using a computer.

------
kahlonel
Slack

~~~
coffeefirst
This one burns. Slack is excellent in so many ways, but it really wants to
become a noise machine that drowns you in alerts and simultaneous demands for
your attention.

~~~
xellisx
You can snooze channels.

------
wj
Between Confluence, Salesforce, Azure portal, and Addepar, I am starting to
wonder if I am the one that is insane in expecting web pages to load in under
seven to ten seconds.

Typing in Asana is painful as well.

------
landtuna
tmux. I mean, I know it's better than screen, but I'm a user of emacs for 25
years, and I still can't get used to the tmux keymapping. I'm reluctant to
customize them because I want my fingers to do the right thing on an
unfamiliar system. And so many of the defaults are just bad, like constantly
renaming windows when you run commands (without making a config file change).
Even the command line arguments are different for the same parameter depending
on which sub-command you're using.

~~~
tome
> I'm reluctant to customize them because I want my fingers to do the right
> thing on an unfamiliar system

How often will be be on a system which _does_ have tmux but doesn't allow you
to download your own tmux.conf from GitHub (or wherever)?

~~~
kubanczyk
If you work together with a client on their system using a shared session -
all the time, I guess?

~~~
landtuna
Yeah, I do a lot of sensors work, and we throw tmux on computers hosting the
hardware and share a user account.

------
infinityplus1
MySQL workbench. It's slow, buggy and hangs again and again. I have to force
close it multiple times everyday because it freezes so often. Same experience
on MacOS and Ubuntu.

------
stefan69
Not many marketers perhaps in this thread, so here's mine.

Dynamics 365: millions of unwanted features that bloats the system. Very
complex where it shouldn't be, poor search features... Could go on and on. On
par with Salesforce in my opinion.

Marketo: entreprise software that was probably good 10 years ago. Nothing has
changed since then. UX/UI is shameful. Landing page builder is just a joke.
Not being able to write custom objects from a form defeats the purpose of
using an advanced tool like this.

Also... Concur?

------
vishaltelangre
Messages app on iOS is the most frustrating app I have to use often and Apple
doesn't allow any alternative as well. There is no way to star/pin certain
messages in it. It doesn't allow copy-pasting partial text in a message.
Results of searched query are often not what I am looking for. Finding
historical messages in some date range takes minutes.

Many other Apple-built apps and products (especially those that cannot have
any 3rd-party alternatives) are horrible to use.

------
starky
This really applies to every CAD software I've used, but Solidworks is an
overly heavy, unstable piece of crap that drives me absolutely nuts every day
I have to use it.

------
charlieegan3
I’m not sure it’s the worst but I continually find myself frustrated by how
sluggish slack feels.

Even with the new UI it still seems strange that the site is so slow vs others
I have to use.

------
hinkley
I recall reading the Subversion architectural chapter in Beautiful Code. In
fact it's probably the only chapter that stuck with me (there's another IIRC
but I can't recall which. My brain didn't make an association to the book).

One of my design mental exercises is to try to figure out if you could tweak
the svn architecture into a DVCS, preserving the superior subtree support. I
think it could have been, it's just that theory and execution diverged.

------
ypcx
ConsoleZ on Windows that I use with Cygwin, being on one hand the best
terminal app for Windows, on the other there were things that were driving me
insane. The main project seems to be sort of abandoned, so I eventually fixed
them myself[1].

[1]
[https://github.com/youurayy/console/releases/tag/1.19.0-pers...](https://github.com/youurayy/console/releases/tag/1.19.0-personal)

~~~
mellow2020
Do you know ConEmu? It has pretty extensive configuration and is under active
development. Though I am not that much of a console user so I wouldn't know
the pitfalls, if any, I just love it because it's so configurable, and it's
been very good to me.

[https://conemu.github.io/](https://conemu.github.io/)

~~~
ElMono
Another option worth trying is Microsoft's Windows Terminal.

[https://github.com/microsoft/terminal](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal)

------
bobbean
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.

~~~
daniel-levin
Corsair Link is horrible. If you use Linux you should check out ckb-next which
is really nice.

------
overcast
Sysaid, Jira, the entire oracle software sphere of influence.

------
ratherbefuddled
Jira. How can so simple a concept be implemented with so many unnecessary
lines of code and run so slowly? Despite (because of?) several major
redesigns, that is.

------
gspr
Outlook's webapp email client. Mandatory(1) at work. No IMAP access.

I truly can't think of a single positive aspect of this absolute garbage piece
of software. It's so mindnumbingly bad that most of us just avoid email
whenever possible, even if it means going to physically seek out a person who
may not even be available.

(1) The actual Outlook client is an option if you're willing to forego root on
your computer. To me that's far worse.

------
idkwhoiam
There are no words to describe how much I hate JIRA. Terrible UX & slow as
hell. The mere thought of browsing for my next ticket in JIRA gives me
seizure.

------
brentis
In summary:

Docker: crash o plenty Service now (bloated forms system on .net or slower)
Teams - UI, no sizing of window, spyware (look it up) One Drive/ SharePoint
(ugh - group of us said we would take pay cut to not use) Finder - anything
but. (How is a file in past 30 days and not recent that I made 5 seconds ago?)
Photoshop? Nobody mentioned here. Adobe anything... OSX Mail - particularly
Big Sure flavor Itunes Connect SAP Concur

------
darksaints
Airflow. Hard coupling to their own ecosystem, buggy as hell, and fully tied
into Python's terrible dependency management, ensuring you will fail but only
after you build an entire ecosystem onto it and will face a massive challenge
moving away from it.

Running it in a kubernetes cluster is basically like holding a marathon in a
minefield. You know someone's gonna die, you just don't know when.

~~~
welcome_dragon
Not to mention how "missed SLAs" don't function like you expect them to

------
AtomicOrbital
AWS console set of web pages ... granted any big shop most certainly automates
all their commands so rarely if ever needs to use that site ... evidently AWS
console is a victim of its own success in continuing to have a 1990's look and
feel ... yet being such a cash cow AWS should launch an entire re-write ...
the underlying SDK and cli are great and they deserve a better UI

------
max0563
Apple CarPlay is an absolute piece of garbage. It always hangs on the
“connecting to iPhone” screen. I just want to see my nav. Infuriating.

~~~
michaelwm
In case this helps, my Android Auto went through an infuriating phase where it
refused to connect, and my cars screen would continue to say exactly what
yours said. For about two weeks I was incredibly frustrated, until I
discovered that I just had to clean out my phones charging port with a
toothpick and it immediately began working again. The dust and debris from
repeated connection and disconnection had piled up and prevented certain data
pins from connecting, but once removed, it worked like brand new. I now clean
out my phone’s charging port every month and haven’t run into the issue again.
I was relieved that the issue was this simple to fix, and hope yours is too.

~~~
max0563
This was an issue for me recently, I had a massive hair ball in my charging
port. I was having charging issues and what not. The not connecting issue was
a problem long before and after the hair in my charging port though. It’s
definitely a cause in some cases though.

------
imranq
Bad software usually gets out of my workflow quickly as a software engineer.
Postman's workflow is really confusing to me however.

Also why bad software exists:
[https://twitter.com/jaukia/status/1114044716616753152/photo/...](https://twitter.com/jaukia/status/1114044716616753152/photo/1)

------
heelix
I can't say I've ever seen a time card system that was not hot trash. The more
full of enterprise they get, the worst they are.

------
imtringued
I like FreeCAD but it keeps crashing, slow operations freeze the UI and by
slow I mean for up to a minute, it's a bit ugly, failing operations usually
just give you a cryptic error message when you apply an operation. If you can
get used to the quirks it's a pretty nice tool. I've used worse software but I
don't use truly bad software every day.

------
cs702
The software that powers almost every appliance or device on the "Internet of
Things" that I've ever used.

The manufacturers of those appliances and devices really do NOT know how to
develop usable, secure software.

See
[https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en](https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en)
for egregious examples.

------
tarasmatsyk
Hard to pick between Skype and buggy apple mail client that splits my screen
every few minutes just to fetch new emails (super annoying)

------
hprotagonist
Jira. Slow, clunky, stupid syntax, no integration with source control, idiotic
menus everywhere, and a laggy UI that makes zero sense.

------
klausjensen
Slack - for being unstable (crashes frequently). We have very little noise, so
it is only an interruption when somebody actively needs to interrupt me.

Skype - an absolute trainwreck of instability and messages not syncing between
devices. Always needs to update - and never improves. I only use it because it
is still the de-factor standard for a lot of poeple.

------
TrackerFF
Do websites count? Ebay can be pretty bad at times.

But the winner must be agresso, or whatever it's called now. Just awful in
every sense.

------
cdnsteve
Kijiji. Ebay owned Canadian classifieds site that is absolutely horrid
experience with hundreds of http request and a bazillion ads loading on 1995
web servers. Its still one of the most popular classifieds in Canada. I'm
annoyed to the point of rewriting their UI and entire app and thinking of open
sourcing it.

------
that_girl
Workday. Intentionally misleading design, discouraging anything any user wants
to do in the portal. Absolutely unintuitive.

------
whizzwr
PTC (formerly MKS) Integrity

It's a "product lifecycle management" that is basically version control plus
issues list tracker. It has horrendous 80-90s-era interface and require
clicking for every possible steps. Formatting always involves MS Word style
rich-text button with sans-serif font.

Worst: it has to stay Online just to do version control.

------
classics2
Products “based on Eclipse”. All 15 of them.

------
api
Jira: slow, confusing, ugly, but then again most of its competitors suck too.
All ticketing and PM systems suck.

Xcode: don't use it every day but damn it is unnecessarily weird and
unintuitive. It's clearly something designed for the people who know it and
nobody else.

Mac Mail, but unfortunately the alternatives suck too and I hate web mail.

------
rustybolt
Jira. I freaking hate everything about it. Its task is so simple and yet it
sucks so monumentally at it. If I'm done with a task, it's freaking hard to
find it. I can never get to the overview of tasks for a project, and it's
cumbersome to log my hours for a task I haven't worked on before.

------
rabbitsfoot8
What's more interesting about a lot of these products is that they are widely
used and still highly embedded in workflows. Even though they're shite. Re-
enforces the point that your product can't just be the "best user experience".
You have to have a strategy to dominate as well.

------
d3nigma
Operating systems and browsers in general

------
bluedino
Skype (Windows)

~~~
tpurves
I agree with you, but raise you with Skype for mac.

~~~
Nextgrid
Skype is now shit everywhere because it's the same Electron-based garbage.

Back in the day Skype used to have a beautiful, native Mac client.

------
siliconunit
Confluence/Jira... slow, chaotic, broken search engine... Basic stuff hidden
or not fully functional... I never understood the raison d'etre of confluence
expecially, it's a broken wiki basically... I'd rather pay an intern for an
in-house solution.

------
dynamite-ready
Azure. From blob storage to DevOps. Almost every interface attached to it, UI
or API, is an overcomplicated wedge of grief.

I can navigate it, sure. But I'd also use an elevator caked in dried urine, to
get to the top of a 14 story building, like most people would. So go figure.

------
tonymet
I’ll say web browsers . They’ve taken 30 years to provide desktop GUI
functionality and APIs from The 90s . And they require gbs of ram.

We really should have live reloadable Cocoa apps and the desktop experience
would be 1000 x better , with 10x battery life and better responsiveness

------
hpen
Hey I'm working on an alternative to Jira. If anyone would be willing to try
my website I would appreciate it. I'm looking for product market fit and I
would love to hear feature requests. Check it out at kanception.io. Or just
down vote me if you want :)

------
uselessextras
I have to use it once a week, but since it requires filling daily slots, I
think it qualifies too: NetSuite time tracking. It's just database internal
structures exposed to end user with no business logic layer whatsoever.

ADP is even worse, but I don't use it daily.

------
baryphonic
Microsoft Teams. I can't decide which feature is the worst: lack of native
widgets, including pop-ups (macOS); random crashes it induces (including
kernel panics); or using my machine's CPU and GPU cycles to heat up enough to
cook an omelette.

------
hvass
I do not use it every day, but I’ve found the most difficult to be hands down
DocuSign.

------
jariel
Tuya. They make Wifi chips for everything in the world, and their interface
systems are 1/2 Chinese 1/2 English so that basically nobody can understand.
It's like Monty Python software, I can hardly believe it works.

------
kvgr
Android Auto on my Passat b8... I made it work 2 times. Any other tries it
just restarts again and again... I tried to reset csctory settings on a car.
Uninstalled android auto app... I will be forced to use sygic with mirror
link.

~~~
welcome_dragon
Any chance you're listening to the 99% invisible podcast when it restarts?

~~~
kvgr
Nope :)

------
dk8996
Eclipse Scala IDE. Using Vscode but still the support for Scala isn't good.

------
aritraghosh007
Amazon Alexa and the FireTV. Been around for some time now, several iterations
except that the UX hasn’t changed, quality isn’t any better than couple years
ago and painful/buggy 3rd party app integrations.

~~~
ScottFree
Have you tried any other TV OS? FireTV is the best of a bad bunch.

~~~
aritraghosh007
Passively used a few others, didn’t find them compelling either to switch. Why
is FireTV OS the lesser evil?

------
rustybolt
I really dislike git. After years of using it almost daily, it still trips me
up when I'm doing something that I don't do every day. Want to do X? Here,
remember this random command with some flags!

------
txbuck
Fiserv's Signature UI (their Desktop Teller is also trash but not near as
bad). I don't even know where to start with how bad it is, but I'd need a BAC
of at least .1 to get through it all.

------
smcleod
JIRA - easily the most clunky, slow, confusing app I have to use every day for
work (with my current client), coming from GitLab issues it’s a nightmare
along with just about all other Atlassian software.

------
tonyedgecombe
I remember this question being asked in the Fog Creek forums about a decade
ago and the winner by far was Adobe Acrobat. It's interesting that it doesn't
appear anywhere in todays responses.

------
tylerwince
The Google Productivity Suite (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Mail) apps for iPadOS.

------
Sohcahtoa82
SharePoint.

The site is trying to do absolutely everything and the performance shows.

I already have Outlook and Teams open. There's no need for SharePoint to be
running extra code to notify me of an e-mail or Teams message.

------
larrydag
SAS. I do data analysis everyday and it is just so antiquated to modern data
needs. The organization I'm with is on a path to sunset and move to Python.
Can't happen soon enough for me.

------
nikanj
Outlook. How can a flagship product be so useless, after decades of work?

------
sdussin
Without a doubt: Websphere.

~~~
jt2190
I worked with WebSphere (version 5 maybe?) many, many years ago. The admin
console was seemed like it was designed to increase confusion. Eventually a
consultant I was working with tipped me off that there was a scripting
interface, which came bundled with Python (Jython). This made administration
so much easier once I got the hang of the APIs, since I could just
automate/script things.

I have no idea if this is still possible with modern WS.

------
CawCawCaw
Confluence, SAP, Skype for Business, Discord, Slack, Chrome, Windows 10.

------
baoyu
Spotify on Mac.

It’s Chromium-based, so, of course, it’s slow. Specifically, search is
excruciatingly slow, removing an album from your library redraws the whole
page, and—most frustratingly— as soon as you lose internet connection, your
perfectly nice and readable page get replaced with “Artist pages are not
available offline”. It’s a list of tracks and albums which is updated (at
most, on average) several times a year, why require connection to continue
showing it?

Not Mac-specific, but extremely weird: sometimes Release Radar playlist has
tracks by wrong artists with the same name. I don’t think a recommendation
model would use names instead of IDs, so it probably means that track was
first ascribed to a wrong artist, and that’s... even worse?

~~~
crazygringo
I think you have a problem with your Spotify installation. Maybe try removing
it and re-installing it?

I use Spotify all the time on my 2016 normal-powered Macbook Pro and I don't
experience any of your performance problems. Everything's lightning fast
including search, and I've got 10,000's of tracks saved in 100's of playlists.

------
carc1n0gen
Previous employer transitioned time tracking (and all other hr things) to this
giant all in one SAP thing. It took so many clicks to do anything. Took 3
clicks to just save your hours.

------
znpy
Thank God I don't use lastpass anymore.

It was ugly, confusing and slow as hell.

~~~
samirillian
what do you use instead?

------
jasonhansel
Mac OS X. Apple keeps going out of its way to make life harder for power
users, even though the non-power-users are increasingly moving to
iOS/Android/ChromeOS anyway.

------
ncmncm
Jira is bad, but Google Doc and Google Drive are so, so much worse.

Knowing it is not Jira is what makes Pivot tolerable. Knowing both are coded
in server-side Java, though, is oddly satisfying.

------
jbhouse
at my old company Cherwell sure took the cake my god it was awful

~~~
vermooten
yes! awful p.o.s. I've seen Service Now mentioned but it was wonderful
compared to Cherwell.

------
devn0ll
Checkpoint VPN. It does not run on Linux so I need to run a Windows VM just
for this piece of cr4p software. And it's slow.

Besides that: Jira. (A distant second to Checkpoint though)

------
daneel_w
The platform I'm partly responsible for developing at work.

------
tcbasche
QGIS but sadly I don't think I could come close to creating something that
huge and still free. Doesn't make it less frustrating that it's buggy as shit

------
tqwhite
Oh yeh!! Also, Trac.

There is literally nothing good about that issue management program except
that it is free. It is impossible to understand what you are looking at. It is
just awful.

------
caditinpiscinam
Google Maps on android. It has such a hostile UI: zoom out too far and the
thing you're looking for disappears. Zoom _in_ too far and it disappears
again.

------
tapan_pandita
The AWS management console (Not the AWS services themselves which are great).
Just navigating the console and getting things done is a major source of
frustration.

------
arbuge
I use a free desktop edition of Quickbooks from 2007 or so to keep my
businesses' books. It's clunky but it works and there's no subscription fee.

------
musicale
> What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

Every (space) day? Definitely the spelling/grammar check and autocorrect
software on my phone. ;-)

------
EsotericAlgo
The Oracle eBusiness Suite. Specifically, iProcurement.

------
burnte
Outlook. Hands down, it's utter trash. I quit for the web version at my
company. I'd LOVE to get rid of it, and I'm the damn CIO.

------
evo_9
Google Chat for our teams internal slack replacement.

------
pythonwizz
Wickr (Encrypted chatting).

Bloaded, Slow, Buggy, Unreliable. Unfortunately some customers are too stupid
and/or lazy to use a Jabber/OTR client.

------
etxm
I’m the only one on the planet, but I hate Notion.

It’s a mediocre spreadsheet, half assed database, and infuriating WYSIWYG ...
but all-in-one!!1

And it’s search sucks.

------
ajeshks
I have been using this for last 6 months. Apart from all these issues, search
for a chat in a conversation is not possible.

------
eu
Lawson, but thankfully only a few times a month.

------
Nextgrid
LinkedIn.

~~~
mindhash
Totally agree. LinkedIn is dumbest ux sitting on a gold mine of data

------
wetpaws
Used to be both Windows and Maven, hands down. Now Mac OS has switch the
windows place as the #1 most badly designed software.

------
diNgUrAndI
Can't believe no one mentions Salesforce

------
perceptronas
Any modern OS: MacOS, Windows or Linux. All have major problems. _Works out of
the box_ vs _is actually fast_ vs _is good UX_ and so on.

All of them lack some kind of functionality: mail calendar apps are buggy (win
and mac), GPU suspend problems (linux for me), can't replace hardware
parts(macos), weird finder problems, weird "explorer.exe" problems, weird
nautilus problems.

Why can't OS'es just work? Why is UX getting worse? Frustrating to say the
least.

~~~
lupinglade
All the security/passwords/confirmation prompts is tiring as well. And from
the developer side its even worse, at least on macOS. Security Scoped
Bookmarks are a nightmare to work with for anything but the simplest case.

------
tqwhite
Twitter on the web. The worst program I have ever used. Jumping, twitching,
changing so I can't read. It is torture.

------
coronadisaster
Android. Very bad for the consumer, from a privacy standpoint. Hopefully a
plain Linux phone will be my next phone.

------
billysielu
Amazon Music on Android because every time I open it it shows a full screen ad
for their music subscription service.

------
conductr
Probably not what you’re looking for but, the internet. General internet usage
has become tedious for many reasons.

------
Finnucane
[https://www.virtusales.com/](https://www.virtusales.com/)

------
eatmygodetia
Emacs.

It's such a mess, but nothing else comes close.

------
rogerthat_au
LinkedIn Jobs (as an employer) - lots of bugs, constant work-arounds and
clunky to share it with anyone else.

------
vandal_at_your
Chrome or firefox. Egregious wastes of my time, 90% inaccessible, untrusted
interpreters of untrusted code.

------
symlinkk
macOS has an extremely weird UI to me.

* Why does the maximize button fullscreen by default?

* Why can’t I simply drag windows to the side to split half and half? No, I don’t want to switch to fullscreen mode to do this.

* What is the point of the minimize button and why do things minimize to a special area on the right side of the dock?

------
buzzlight1234
TI Code Composer. Because transparent Cmake and GCC and my choice of editor
would make life too pleasant.

------
godelmachine
Xero Workflowmax to submit timesheet

It’s not at all intuitive and takes weeks getting used to.

I used Salesforce earlier and it was smooth.

------
misiti3780
Hands down, it is JIRA. But close seconds include zoom, ring central, and
slack video/voice calls.

------
hkt
WSL2's clipboard integration, or maybe terminal emulator. The agony of line
endings is enormous.

------
hinkley
npm will be the official reason I stop writing Node code at some point. It
does not know what it wants to be and it disagrees violently with concepts
from the tools it pretends to emulate. This whole lock file debacle makes me
angry and I'm not close to the only one.

------
s_T_e_v_o
Hands down, Windows 10. Don't even have list the 100 reasons why, because we
all know them.

------
riledhel
Cisco webex teams. Slow, feature lacking, horrible formating. Reminds me of
Salesforce Quip.

------
ajkjk
Bash and its derivatives, I think.

------
gru
Android OS on my Philips smart TV.

------
ssss11
Its been a few years but still recent, using Oracle eBusiness (EBS) was like
pulling teeth.

------
timtas
Microsoft Teams. Thoroughly shabby. Free to my company, and worth every penny.

------
aliswe
Hacker News.

------
stepstop
Probably SAP apps at my employer

------
swasheck
Teams.

I step away for 3 hours and that process that is consuming 4GB RAM is none
other than Teams.

------
leafario2
Eclipse. Killer feature being a live expressions viewer for my embedded
target.

------
netik
webcam control panel. it’s meant to adjust and control logitech cameras but it
resets the camera back to defaults (no gain, no exposure) every time a piece
of software restarts the driver.

it’s wretched and ruins every zoom call.

------
Waterluvian
Atlassian is a garbage fire.

------
c6401
Sorry jira but it's you

------
afpx
The entire AWS web console.

------
surajs
Chrome

~~~
yewenjie
What's stopping you from using another browser?

~~~
frank2
It is possible for Chrome to be better than all of the other browsers and
still be the worst piece of software GP uses every day.

If you like the web, then maybe this does not compute for you.

------
balladeer
iCloud sync. It's broken and it has been broken since a long time. Considering
it's run by a company as wealthy as Apple (on their closed ecosystem) it's an
utter disgrace.

------
Jemm
Any web browser.

Just the simple act of going back a page makes that page reload; why?

------
spotman
Slack. Frustratingly slow and bloated. Company is addicted to it.

------
iceman2654
Sage 300. 32-bit software still exists. Macros are written in VB6.

------
fishywang
homebrew. I can probably replace it with nix, but in two months I'll just hit
my hardware refresh cycle and ask for a Linux laptop from my employer and be
done with Mac for good.

------
lvturner
Gsuite admin interface. (thankfully I don't use it every day)

------
jokethrowaway
Netsuite trumps everything, I have fond memories of JIRA as well

------
taauji
music.youtube.com

slowest interface ever. songs are impossible to find when playing from a
playlist. focus never switched to the music player. no native cast plenty
other problems

------
vermooten
Teams & SharePoint.

------
gadders
All enterprise technology - SAP, PeopleSoft, ServiceNow etc

------
buro9
Every city parking app and every local authority website

------
Shorel
Android. And things that run on Android like WhatsApp.

------
tasubotadas
Windows Command Line

------
zanmat0
Ryver, an unheard of, abominable clone of Slack.

~~~
236dev
I haven't ever used it. Why don't you like it? Is it buggy or lacking features

------
mike50
Java browser based document management system.

------
sdiw
Google Chrome. It takes so much of a memory.

------
billfor
Quicken (well it was an open-ended question).

------
las_balas_tres
MySql Workbench. What an utter piece of crap.

------
SkyPuncher
Not me, but my wife - an EMR.

God they're fucking terrible. The actual EMR's are often fine. Then some
hospital administrator gets involved and completely destroys usability.

------
dkersten
I actually very strongly dislike using slack.

~~~
randompwd
I would remove Slack from workplaces solely so that my co-workers can no
longer waste the day on social slacks that are not even tangentially related
to our work.

------
martindbp
Every tool I use and hold dear, apparently!

------
srathi
Proofpoint spam filter! Drives me nuts!

------
dilatedmind
Also building docker images with bazel

------
VaedaStrike
LinkedIn web app and firefox mobile.

------
findso
Google Doc Search

Google Doc search is totally useless

------
p2detar
IBM/HCL’s Lotus Notes Domino.

------
trav4225
Every web browser that exists. :)

------
michele_f
CheckPoint VPN client: pure evil.

------
simonCGN
Anything from Microsoft really

------
KSteffensen
Without a doubt IBM Clearcase.

------
bribri
Service Now

------
nuker
Windows servers in the cloud.

------
majkinetor
Anything from Oracle really!

------
baggy_trough
Apple Music. Trying to make it play something on a HomePod from iOS takes a
computer science degree.

------
okasaki
Firefox

------
RyJones
Expensify

------
stunt
Jira & Microsoft Teams

------
eqtn
Atlassian Jira. Its Slow.

------
AsyncAwait
macOS Finder and how every sane alternative costs serious money.

------
dylan604
The internet. I mean, I love the concept of what the internet could have been,
but it's currently the most hostile thing I have to deal with on a daily
basis. Bad actors are too prevalent, and the amount of BS stuff we've tried to
come with GDPR/Cookie banners, Do Not Track, AdBlockers, etc.

~~~
asddubs
i think the problem is capitalism incentivizes bad actors, rather than the
internet itself.

------
iElectric2
IRC / Matrix+Riot

------
agustif
Mac OS Big S __ _

------
dogmatism
Cerner

Literally kills people every day

------
ChicagoDave
Confluence and Jira.

------
justanothersys
Dropbox’ desktop App

------
charlieflowers
My “smart” tv’s ui.

------
TekMol
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.

~~~
conradev
Do you actually want to do those things on the go without a full size
keyboard?

~~~
ScottFree
Sysadmins do.

------
pavelevst
Java, FortiClient

------
hos4m
Google Chrome.

------
geogra4
Oracle openair

------
jheriko
Every period. Web period. Browser period. Ever.

------
jpkeisala
Skype

------
Goose90053
Quicken

------
snwfog
Slack

------
ipunchghosts
Latex

------
nixass
Quip

------
rock_hard
Gitlab

------
gergely
IBM Notes

------
druvisc
Instagram

------
koolhead17
LinkedIn

------
lytedev
I love this question.

JIRA.

------
agdtdudhegsjhs
Jira

------
black_13
Jira

------
User23
JIRA

------
itpragmatik
SAP

------
pragmatic
Jira

------
dkdk8283
Slack

------
hit8run
Citrix

------
dilatedmind
Gerrit

------
Uhhrrr
Printing.

------
sam_lowry_
Helm

------
dave_sid
Apple News

------
techslave
1 git

2 jira

------
twblalock
Webex.

------
billysielu
Twitch for not moderating chat.

------
pagade
iTunes, Google Sites.

------
thibautg
TrustArc cookie / GDPR / tracking popup. It is filled with all the possible
dark patterns.

------
enitihas
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 from
terminal to another folder, where you can see them in finder.

~~~
tornato7
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.

~~~
baggy_trough
Drag your home folder to the finder sidebar.

~~~
Someone
Or into the toolbar ([https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/customize-
finder-to...](https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/customize-finder-
toolbar-sidebar-mac-mchlp3011/mac))

------
wecloudpro
Any apple product.

------
p0nce
gmail

------
neillyons
webpack

------
fortran77
iTunes

------
technotarek
iOS

------
pankajdoharey
iTunes

------
billconan
gimp

~~~
mch82
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.

------
2OEH8eoCRo0
IBM Clearcase

------
black_13
Jira.

------
yewenjie
Android.

~~~
enitihas
What is so bad about "Android", as in stock Android?

~~~
yewenjie
Mobile devices have insane potential, but we are essentially stuck with
Google's design choice monopolies, rendering the OS consumer-friendly but a
terrible experience for power users.

What's worse, there is no viable alternative to it, though some tries have
been made.

The default Android phone comes with loads of bloated and useless apps that
spy on you. Unlocking bootloader, installing a custom ROM, installing all your
favorite apps is a long and painful process (some vendors take weeks to
approve your unlock request).

All of these, in the name of a platform which is'open-source'.

------
disposekinetics
Jira

~~~
nikivi
Don't get how people still use Jira. Linear is great
[https://linear.app](https://linear.app)

~~~
lordofgibbons
That's an easy one to answer. They don't support Linux or Windows yet.

~~~
nikivi
It works inside web browser

------
ikaria91
Office365

------
benjaminsuch
macOS

I have a very bad UX. It's small annoying issues, like minimizing a window. If
you don't explicitly minimize the window and open another program, the other
window is hidden. Where is it? How can I open it? Yes by minimizing every
window until I have found mine. For applications, this is not that bad, since
you have the dock and just click on the icon to reopen your window, but what
happens if you have several windows open of that app? It's a nightmare.

I could write a whole list of toxic UX in macOS.

~~~
Razengan
I find macOS to be much more pleasant than Windows.

> _If you don 't explicitly minimize the window and open another program, the
> other window is hidden. Where is it? How can I open it? Yes by minimizing
> every window until I have found mine._

I don't understand exactly what you mean.

> _what happens if you have several windows open of that app?_

One of these:

• Right-click/Control-click on the Dock icon

• Check the Windows menu of the app. Minimized windows will have a Diamond

• Press F3 to open Mission Control.

• Press Control+F3 to see all windows of the currently focused app.

• Press Alt+F3 to open Mission Control settings and configure them to your
liking, along with setting Hot Corners for showing application windows etc.

• If you "Group windows by application" and have a mouse with a scroll wheel,
you can use scroll the wheel when hovering over an app's window, to "spread"
that windows stack.

• Press Option+Command+H to hide (not minimize) all windows except the active
app.

~~~
hacker_newz
When you minimize an app and switch to another, it disappears. Even if you
alt-tab back to the app it remains hidden. It's ridiculous.

~~~
Razengan
> _When you minimize an app and switch to another, it disappears. Even if you
> alt-tab back to the app it remains hidden. It 's ridiculous._

When you minimize a window, it disappears, period.

It becomes an icon on the right side of the Dock unless you set the "Minimize
windows into application icon" option.

There's a very explicit animation of where it goes, that macOS is/was famous
for (the "genie" effect).

And all windows of an app can be accessed by right-clicking on its Dock icon,
or its windows menu, or Control+F3.

------
PopePompus
iOS:

I almost never use it myself, but I get called upon to deal with it for some
of my relatives. The fact that you can't just mount the file system on a non-
crippled computer and transfer files to and from the device just drives me
mad. Getting someone's music into the right place if they don't have access to
a machine with iTunes is miserable. When the "files" app appeared a few years
ago, I thought "finally, they'll let you manipulate files directly", but no -
it's just another silo too restricted to be of any use.

~~~
Razengan
> _The fact that you can 't just mount the file system on a non-crippled
> computer_

What do you mean, non-crippled computer?

I think one of the reasons iOS doesn't expose the device as a Plain Old Disk
is so that it can continue to enforce content restrictions etc., i.e. such as
those set by parents.

------
inetknght
\- Google products.

\- - Gmail intentionally doesn't filter spam or phishing emails.

\- - Google Voice used to be useful but today is being blocked by more and
more services.

\- - Google Contacts is pervasive and uselessly so.

\- - Google Calendar also supports tons of spam and phishing.

\- - I stopped using Chrome because it stopped being a _user agent_.

\- Atlassian products. Slow bloated pieces of privacy violating garbage.

\- - JIRA is more and more confusing every day. Frequently changing UI incurs
cognitive costs. Its workflows are confusing af.

\- - Confluence is functionally inferior to Media Wiki. That's not even the
worst part; the worst part is that it doesn't use markup like the rest of the
world.

\- Microsoft products.

\- - Skype. Once upon a day Skype was nice and usable. Today Skype is
functionally, measurable, objectively less useful and less stable than it was
just half a decade ago.

\- - Github. It was great until a few weeks ago. That new UI is still worse.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
> Gmail intentionally doesn't filter spam or phishing emails.

my spam folder is fully of spam and phishing emails. no idea why that doesn't
work for you. i see essentially zero spam in my inbox (and i have several
extremely public email addresses)

------
podgib
G-Suite

Google Slides makes me want to cry every time I have to use it. Google Docs
isn't much better. They're poor web versions of office software from the 90s.

Google drive is a disaster of product. Uploading and finding files are both
incredibly painful.

Google sheets is fine for simple stuff, and I get why people use it, but
there's far better alternatives. For anything moderately complex it's a dog.

I can't stand the gmail interface, but I can at least see why some people
prefer it. It's the one part of the suite that isn't far inferior to its
competitors.

~~~
techslave
you are mistakenly judging g suite on the individual product requirements. eg
how a spreadsheet should function. that’s not what g suite is.

all features are MVP and the main selling point is being collaborative.

~~~
podgib
Fair. I also find the collaboration tools clunky and annoying to use.

When judging it as a whole, I find it worse than judging individual
components. For example, sheets on its own is a decent tool; sheets as part of
the suite is dragged dow by the rest.

~~~
techslave
clunky and annoying compared to what? they are the best i’ve seen and quite
good. if there’s something better please share. i would love to know about it.

comments in spreadsheets stink but everything else is pretty great. ok one
more flaw. you can’t unassigned a task from yourself. you can only reassign to
someone else or mark it done (which clears the comment thread).

