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Topic: Let's Whine About Shitty Software  (Read 19993 times)

Ambious

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #15
I fucking hate KDE.
Every time I install it I'm like "NOOOO! WHY?!" and then I try reverting back to Gnome and the entire system is already garbled with crappy mac-ish icons.

fluffy

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #16
KDE was okay back when it was a CDE clone, because they took the general CDE concepts (which were a well-intentioned but poorly-executed attempt at modernizing Motif) and made them workable. Then they decided to "innovate," where by "innovate" I mean "copy Vista, badly."

My Linux DE of choice is xfce. It's reasonably lightweight, pretty flexible, doesn't get in the way, and mostly does what you fucking tell it. There's maybe a hundred papercuts in it (rather than the thousands in everything else) and none of them actually cause me grief, they're just minor nuisances that I shrug at and move on from.  Also you can set it up to work pretty much exactly like classic NeXTStep, only with a betterless-shitty file manager, and I still feel that NeXTstep was one of the better UIs around (maybe that's why I put up with so much nonsense from OSX).

Although Linux's media player ecosystem is bullshit. They all try to clone the wrong parts of iTunes, for a start.

Ambious

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #17
What's worse about KDE is the shit widget-y thing they've got going and the entire "MS Windows friendly" interface.
Ironically, MS Windows itself has a better interface by now (disregarding Windows 8, mostly).
I haven't tried xfce, I might give it a go next time I'm board (read: in a couple of minutes probably).

STOG

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #18
Why can't I mark projects as completed? Oh, Sharepoint is down.

Did my project get accidentally eaten by another user accidentally because we had the misfortune of sending out completed projects at the same time to the same server? Thanks, Sharepoint!

Why can't I send out releases from one certain time to another certain time? Oh, because Little Lord Sharepoint is attempting to backup all the data and also this is 1994 and we are using AOL 4.0, so we can only do one thing at a time.

I thought our techies were morons, but to be fair, Sharepoint is a piece of goddamn garbage that makes everyone unhappy. It'll shit up your documents and be the rotting elephant carcass in the room. (But our software engineers are pretty dumb, though.)

Sharepoint randomly goes down when our poor sysadmin is trying to get some sleep? Sounds like Sharepoint!

« Last Edit: April 18, 2014, 01:34:56 pm by STOG »

A Whirring Bone-White Gleech

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #19

Lemon, April 18, 2014, 09:34:12 am

Greetings human, I just decided to install a 700MB update to one of your games, and saturated your internet connection to do it!  You weren't using it, were you?

Oh, you were playing a non-Steam game, and I just caused you to lag out and get kicked from the match?  You were watching netflix and I just caused the stream to freeze?  Man, I probably should have asked before I did that.

(A huge pet peeve of mine is software that either grabs lots of my system resources or starts long, uncancelable jobs without asking me first.  And software updates can frequently do both.)


Old KDE
fluffy, April 18, 2014, 11:47:07 am

I hated KDE 3 a lot more (and I've never used anything older).  The thing that I really hate about KDE4 is the atrociously poor integration, and KDE 3 was at least as bad in that respect.  At the same time, KDE 4 at least has useful features that KDE 3 didn't, like the comics plasmoid and file-view plasmoid, and the ability to configure a screen-corner-tap to trigger a workspace view (basically like Gnome 3 and.or Expose).

xfce
fluffy, April 18, 2014, 11:47:07 am

XFCE is a really good one, and I pretty much agree with your assessment.  The UI is lean and efficient, sanely organized with options for what you want to configure and no bloat.

Although Linux's media player ecosystem is bullshit. They all try to clone the wrong parts of iTunes, for a start.
fluffy, April 18, 2014, 11:47:07 am

Jesus.  Amarok is horrible, Rhythmbox is good but it's aging (especially in the UI).  Banshee would be really cool if it didn't crash every half-hour or so (more if you try to listen to a podcast).

Lately tho I've mostly been using Google Music's web player (and feedly's web-app for RSS and podcasts), which makes the music player on my platform largely irrelevant.  I use VLC whenever I want to play something on the local drive.

Sharepoint!
STOG, April 18, 2014, 01:32:46 pm

Microsoft's business applications.  Sure, they're agonizing, but hey, there isn't a competing platform you could switch too, and even if there was it's probably missing a feature that someone in your office is using, so you're pretty much stuck.
« Last Edit: April 22, 2014, 02:33:36 pm by Der Trommelnspinne »

fluffy

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #20
Old KDE
fluffy, April 18, 2014, 11:47:07 am

I hated KDE 3 a lot more (and I've never used anything older).  The thing that I really hate about KDE4 is the atrociously poor integration, and KDE 3 was at least as bad in that respect.  At the same time, KDE 4 at least has useful features that KDE 3 didn't, like the comics plasmoid and file-view plasmoid, and the ability to configure a screen-corner-tap to trigger a workspace view (basically like Gnome 3 and.or Expose).
Der Trommelnspinne, April 22, 2014, 02:21:15 pm
3 was starting to get pretty crappy. I remember liking version 2, although at the time I was a die-hard pwm2 zealot. I probably would still be using pwm2 if it would actually build on a modern Linux.  I keep hearing that I need to try out Awesome because Awesome can be configured however you want, including just like pwm2.

count_actuala

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Runic

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #22
Jesus Christ, Javascript implements GUIs in some weird and unintuitive ways.

A Whirring Bone-White Gleech

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #23
Jesus Christ, Javascript implements GUIs in some weird and unintuitive ways.
Runic, April 29, 2014, 10:02:47 pm

Javascript is a crime against language design.  Javascript is the way it is not because of good engineering decisions, but because Netscape slapped some shit together in a hurry, then their shit became too widely used to ever be replaced, so it's gone through almost two decades of bandaid-fixes and having new features randomly shoved in.

Because it's widely used, idiots decided that it must be good, and now it's being used in areas that it was never supposed to be used in - like as a syntax for config files, or to implement extensions in lunix desktops.  Or as a core language for the Qt platform.

Google might could replace it with dart, except, among other things, they're kicking up a whole lot of NIH by doing the initial development internally.

Runic

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #24
Yeah, this is the first language I've ever learned and I can already tell that there are some pretty important features that they just sort of slapped on there.

fluffy

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #25
The nicest way to put it: JS is a decent language with a lousy syntax.

Which is to say, under the hood it's actually quite elegant and efficient and can bring all sorts of interesting optimizations to the table. And because JS is so widespread, the core is being worked on quite a lot and it's getting better all the time.

BUT it has to maintain compatibility with the shitty old shit, and it's shit. And it gives shitty developers a LOT of rope to hang themselves with, because it hides so many details behind abstractions and closures and "garbage collection solves everything" (except that by design its GC mechanism is kind of bad).

This is why there are so many languages out there which essentially use Javascript as the worst, most roundabout bytecode (CoffeeScript, asm.js, etc.) and because of the entrenchment of JS, those are doing quite well, whereas Google's alternatives (NaCl, DART) are going to languish in obscurity forever because it's easy to enhance your existing JS runtime to work well with those other frontends but a pain in the ass to throw it all out just for something that everyone's already given up on.

The entire PS4 UI is written in Javascript. As is the new PSN store UI that was rolled out on PS3 a couple years back.

If you do want to do any JS development at all, I highly recommend using strict mode, which isn't widely supported but it does at least work in a way that's backwards-compatible.

Or, better yet, use an entirely different language.

fluffy

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #26

Moriarty

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #27
Note that old versions of the file chooser’s documentation suggested using gtk_file_chooser_set_current_folder() in various situations, with the intention of letting the application suggest a reasonable default folder. This is no longer considered to be a good policy, as now the file chooser is able to make good suggestions on its own.Quote from

By "make good suggestions" they apparently mean "will display an arbitrary selection of files the user happens to have opened at some point since the OS was installed". I always wondered why so many programs defaulted to a list of seemingly random crap in the open file dialog, and now I know. They're actively being advised not to set a logical default directory.

The question of why the GTK people thought this was a good idea remains unsolved.

junior associate faguar

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #28
I'm pretty sure GTK was designed in the old Unix tradition (i.e. on lots of psychoactive medications)

Down10

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Let's Whine About Shitty Software #29
I was reading this thread and the Java system update popped up. Swear to God.