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Worst programs you've used? (self.linux)

submitted ago by mjwhitta

I've seen a lot of posts about "what are great programs for blah", so I thought I'd try something different. What are some of the worst programs you've ever used? What programs have made you either extremely angry or just want to laugh in the developer's face? Bonus points for screenshots!

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[–]ownsyouall 106 points107 points ago

adobe flash player

frequent security flaws. Very slow i have an i7-950 and a gtx560ti and i cant even watch 720p videos on it. Plus i had a werid bug one time where it would show the flash application on anything black so if i minimized a web browser with a flash player on it i could watch the video on my black wallpaper. The latest updated fixed this though finally.

[–]genpfault 6 points7 points ago

i could watch the video on my black wallpaper

Oh overlay surfaces, you horrible, horrible hack.

[–]silverskull 2 points3 points ago

This same process was also the only available option to render hardware accelerated video under Microsoft Windows XP and earlier, since its window management features were so deeply embedded into the operating system that accelerating them would have been impossible.

ಠ_ಠ

[–]r4nkor 5 points6 points ago

Why on Earth did they give up on Linux video acceleration, I don't know. It actually worked at some point earlier this year. I could watch YouTube HD videos (and I suppose only YouTube, nothing else) on my netbook with nVidia ION.

Sure, this whole bleeding-through was annoying as hell... but again, it worked!

[–]whiteychs 2 points3 points ago

I second this. It's obvious that adobe treat linux as a second rate citizen. I remember flash 9 being broken forever and never being completely fixed. Flash videos bleeding through tabs for example.

Market share wise it makes sense, I suppose. It's still irritating.

[–]lidstah 1 point2 points ago

I'd love to be able to upvote you more!

[–]wretcheddawn 1 point2 points ago

At first I was like... my Flash player works just fine, even if I play 1080p videos on Windows, and then I realized this is /r/Linux. Yes, Flash for Linux is about the buggiest app there is.

[–]bwat47 0 points1 point ago

tbh I really don't have any issues with flash on linux, it just uses more cpu due to lack of hardware accel. Watching a 720p flash video on youtube uses no more cpu than a 720p html5 video.

I did have problems with it prior to flash 11 because of buginess with ndispluginwrapper, but since the native 64 bit release its been pretty smooth sailing.

I am always afraid adobe will turn around and pull support for linux like they did with air though, they really can't be trusted which is why in the end I really do hope html5 kills flash.

[–]wretcheddawn 0 points1 point ago

Yeah, in my experience it will play the videos just fine, even at 1080p, on a 7 year old machine, until it inevitably crashes. In Firefox it would crash the whole browser (even though it wasn't supposed to be able to), in Chrome it would just crash the plugin. Even still, it was then a fight to kill the right processes to get it to start again. This was not 64-bit, it was a Yonah-core 32-bit processor.

Pulling support for Android scares me. I know I'll be able to play old flash content, but they aren't going to support new OS versions, so it's entirely possibly that Android 4.1 or 5 will not have any Flash support. Movie trailers, and a lot of sites are still using Flash and there's a ton of legacy content. I can only hope somebody writes an open source implementation to replace it.

[–]bwat47 1 point2 points ago

How the hell can you not watch 720p flash on an i7? Sounds like some sort of bug, definitely not "normal" performance.

I have a laptop with much lower specs (i5 2.53ghz, integrated intel graphics) and I can watch 720p and 1080p flash just fine. 720p flash will use ~15-20% cpu on this laptop, a little piggish but not unusable.

[–]ownsyouall 0 points1 point ago

i cant as in the frame rate cant stay above 30 what system are you using?

[–]DimeShake 0 points1 point ago

Considering normal video frame rate is about 23FPS, I'm not sure what you're expecting :)

[–]ownsyouall 1 point2 points ago

im expecting to get 30 fps just like vlc, totem, gnome-media player and what both firefox and chromium/google-chrome can get with html5 videos.

[–]overclockedreality 1 point2 points ago

I'm going to explain how to watch a flash video full screen with no problems at all:

First, open the video from the website, youtube, projectfree.tv, whatever. Let it start buffering enough to where it starts to play. Immediately pause it. You are done with the web browser, minimize it.

in a console type ps -aux | grep flash You will see the following:

myusername 1401 5.9 1.3 163408 41824 ? SLl 21:37 0:01 /opt/firefox-aurora/plugin-container /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so -greomni /opt/firefox-aurora/omni.jar 1056 true plugin

myusername 1437 0.0 0.0 4172 880 pts/0 S+ 21:38 0:00 grep flash

As you can see, one is the search for flash, but the OTHER one, the flash player, has a PID of 1401. Navigate to /proc/1401/fd and ls -lat. You see a long list of things, but you will see something that looks like:

lr-x------ 1 myusername users 64 Dec 13 21:37 16 -> /tmp/FlashXX79rENS (deleted)

Flash used to store the temp files in /tmp but has since then decided to obscure them. So file name 16 points to the deleted flash file, great. Just mplayer 16 or vlc 16, BOOM, you have your video playing full speed, no lag, as big as you want it baby.

[–]DaemonXI 0 points1 point ago

You can get rid of the "grep flash" result by running:

grep [f]lash

[–]ownsyouall 0 points1 point ago

Wow that works great thanks. But an easier way i have used is cclive. Just use cclive -f best [youtube video here] and then play it with your video player you may need a vp8 codec installed. That dosen't work on teevox though

[–]localtoast 0 points1 point ago

to add insult to injury, I can play YouTube 720p on a Pentium with VESA graphics, and it works well.

I can play non-Flash 720p on a Pentium 3 with a Rage Pro assisting.

Other flash video players don't work well though, very slow and CPU eating.

[–]STDOUBT 14 points15 points ago

Brasero. Wow. I always replace it with Xfburn because Xfburn actually burns disks and stuff.

[–]mrmojorisingi 6 points7 points ago

Weird, what issues did you have with Brasero? I've used it to burn dozens of discs with no problems, except that it hangs for about 30 sec as it checksums at the end of a burn (as kdorf mentioned).

[–]kdorf 2 points3 points ago

???

I never had any major problems with it. The only thing that seriously annoys me in later versions is there is apparently no way to prevent the disc checksumming after the burn. You have to manually stop it every time.

[–]memejob 0 points1 point ago

I switched to GnomeBaker. Eons better than Brasero.

[–]PHLAK 0 points1 point ago

I've never really had a problem with Brasero I guess. I have Xfburn on my laptop now since it came with Xubuntu. I'll give it a try next time a burn I CD (probably in late 2014).

[–]AutoBiological 0 points1 point ago

I've always installed KDE dependencies just to run K3b. I don't think I ever burned anything with brasero. I know I've played around in it, but I don't even try anymore.

[–]MuseofRose 1 point2 points ago

Brasero was definitely miss for me many of times. XFBurn is decent. Though, K3b is the best I've ever used. Though in general CD-ROM and Burned CD-Rom support in Linux has always been shitty for me.

[–]tinou 13 points14 points ago

network-manager... but they say it's better now.

[–]phonkee 7 points8 points ago

I use wicd.. no more wifi problems.. :-)

[–]tehphr4nk 1 point2 points ago

gnome's network-manager works great. KDE's is awful.

me: hey knetwork-manager, here is my wifi's info

knetwork-manager: I'll connect to the network when i feel like it.

[–]drew_danger 0 points1 point ago

It's "I'll connect after you log out and log back in" in my experience, but yeah. I feel your pain.

[–]Philluminati 0 points1 point ago

Yeah I'm fucking voting for this. When Fedora switched to that my Internet went from normal to sporadic. I think at the same time a kernel driver popped up for Ath5K network cards which was horribly broken even though the predecessor, madWifi, delivered perfect results.

[–]bwat47 1 point2 points ago

I've never had an issue with networkmanager, never understood all the hate for it. Right now I am using wicd though, only because I'm on XFCE and didn't want to pull in a bunch of gnome dependencies.

[–]shadowfirebird -1 points0 points ago

It's not that it's buggy (although...) -- it's that the whole concept is broken.

Laptops, sure, but desktops should be connected to the network whether they are logged in or not !

[–]Scott555 0 points1 point ago

I've managed to avoid having to deal with that until recently when a rhel 6 box wouldn't mount nfs for kickstart, and I found myself transcribing the gibberish NM output from tty4 into a search. Utter nonsense.

I still fail to see what the point of that mess is. On the other hand, if that's what lets my laptop automatically detect and config my wifi, then I guess it's a necessary evil.

[–]railmaniac 4 points5 points ago

Strigi.

I like KDE 4.x, but this damn thing slows up my startup and takes 90% of the CPU. Plus the fact that having used Windows XP for so many years, I have trained myself to remember where I keep my damn stuff rather than search for it - so why do I need an index in the first place?

The first thing I do in any new KDE4 installation is disable Strigi.

[–]VersalEszett 39 points40 points ago*

vim. You know the joke?

everyone's first vi session. ^C^C^X^X^X^XquitqQ!qdammit[esc]qwertyuiopasdfghjkl;:xwhat

Then again, if you know how to use it, it's one of the most amazing ones.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points ago

i love the :xwhat at the end

[–]mjwhitta[S] 4 points5 points ago

I used vim in college and then switched to Eclipse/Gedit/nano/pico for most things but occasionally I have to use vim and it turns out just like that! =)

[–]jjsullivan5196 5 points6 points ago

Actually the help prompt got me over that real quick.

It was just trying to find the right way to do it.

:q

"File not saved"

Yes I know, :q

"File not saved"

No, this is patrick, :!q Thank you

[–]vytah 8 points9 points ago

/bin/bash: q: command not found

[–]meditonsin 2 points3 points ago

$ grep alias ~/.bashrc | grep exit
alias :q='exit'
alias :wq='exit'

[–]Scott555 0 points1 point ago

Oi! Why does this box keep kicking me off!?

[–]wellwatch 0 points1 point ago

I would in inadvertently close so many terminals this way.

[–]Whoopska 4 points5 points ago

^C will now display Type :quit<Enter> to exit Vim so that person should hav stopped a lot sooner.

[–]moonhead 2 points3 points ago

no. that joke is about emacs.

yes i mad.

[–]ANewMind 1 point2 points ago

My very first time was when I was new to Linux, and in a terminal only. Not only could I not do anything with but make it beep, I couldn't close it! I eventually rebooted the computer just to get out.

I said that I would never use vi again. Today, it is the only editor that I will use. I'm using the Pentadactyl addon in Firefox to post this.

[–]stimulatedEmission 0 points1 point ago

Love love love Pentadactyl. I frequently use a netbook so it would be worth installing just for the screen space, even if I weren't an avid vi user.

[–]shadowfirebird -1 points0 points ago

In the version I know, vi is called 'emacs'.

[–]Scott555 0 points1 point ago

I never known any competent *x SAs that couldn't use vi effectively.

I had trouble at first like everyone else until I watched someone who knew what they were doing.

First I was all,"'wtf is this shit." Then I was like "Oh, that's what you do."

[–]ownsyouall 0 points1 point ago

i still don't know how to quit the damn thing i just end up closing the terminal i have it in.

[–]eldridgea 6 points7 points ago

[esc] :wq to save and quit [esc] :q! to quit without saving.

[–]pancake_breakfast 2 points3 points ago

..so annoying over SSH. esc :wq

[–]shadowman42 4 points5 points ago

better yet :x

[–]lidstah 6 points7 points ago*

<esc>ZZ : save buffer, close it.

:qa! : close all buffers without saving and asking BS.

:wqa : write down everything and quit.

[–]Broem 1 point2 points ago

You can do ctrl+[ if your ESC doesn't work.

[–]fforw -1 points0 points ago

That's good to know. Too bad [ is AltGr+8 for me :\ (german keyboard)

This is just like the nice shortcut for Eclipse's for word completion which is Alt+/. But / is Shift+7.

Every fucking symbol with any programming meaning is AltGr+something. In short, it's a wonder any German ever wrote a program.

[–]lidstah 0 points1 point ago

Same for frenchies… I usually switch between azerty (fr) and qwerty (us, ascii) keymaps here, depending of what I'm doing (hint: setxkbmap -layout … mapped to a key). I really should learn dvorak and bépo, by the way.

[–]fforw 0 points1 point ago

tried changing keymaps, but never could really get used to it. my typing depends on a lot of automatism, any change usually hurts my typing. Even thinking about typing often interferes with the typing. If I don't think about it, I can type totally blind. Only when I focus on how I type, I make more mistakes etc.

[–]MekkaGodzilla 0 points1 point ago

I did myself a favor and learned bépo 2 years ago. I highly recommend it!

[–]Anarchobrony 1 point2 points ago

AFAIK a lot of programmers/geeks in Germany just use a US keyboard and switch to a German keymap when typing in their native language.

[–]fforw 0 points1 point ago

I think it's really rare. I never knew anyone who really did this in all the years I worked in the industry.

[–]VersalEszett 0 points1 point ago

I saw many students who did this in all the years I'm studying CS now.

[–]fforw 0 points1 point ago

Maybe it's an age thing.. Maybe those students just don't comment their code (in German).

[–]Anarchobrony 0 points1 point ago

Strange. All four of the German programmers I speak to frequently use US keyboards for exactly the complaints above.

Oh well, bad statistics for me!

[–]AutoBiological 0 points1 point ago

Word completion is "alt + /" ? I think that's a terrible combination anyway. I type correctly most of the time, so I use my pinkies for "ctrl" but I don't even know how I would use "alt" conveniently to word complete.

I'm pretty happy with using [tab] in bash. That's a convenient autocomplete.

[–]gigprowl 10 points11 points ago

This might be reaching back. Any AOL program/chat app/torture device, bonzi buddy (removed these from comps in my early tech support days), anything with "in house legacy application" in the description it, LOTUS NOTES (FUCK YOU IBM), and any "server OS" that comes with a gui.

[–]Scott555 0 points1 point ago

Yes, Notes. Hate.

[–]zdubdub -1 points0 points ago

pidgin / gedit!

[–]xaoq 22 points23 points ago

All-time worst kind of software are scanning and printing suites for windows. Those shitty HP programs make me rage. #1

Adobe Reader. So slow I would decipher pdf files on my abacus faster. #2

Gnome 3 and Unity hold the #3

... and I realised that i hate slow programs above everything else.

[–]jamesbennetdotcom 5 points6 points ago

I use the HP Linux software for my Lazer printer. Its actually really good, must only be their "home" software that sucks...

[–]odinsbane 0 points1 point ago

Oh, I haven't tried printing with gnome 3. Last time I used ubuntu 10.04 and it worked like a charm.

[–]xaoq 4 points5 points ago

It isn't a printing in gnome3 that's a problem (although there was some printing or scannning related problem, where developers just said "nope, we won't fix it").

Gnome3 is a problem in itself.

[–]wadcann 1 point2 points ago

and I realised that i hate slow programs above everything else.

I don't think that "slow" necessarily bothers me as much as "high latency to interaction".

I've used shell scripts that process data relatively slowly, but they aren't interactive and can go off and do their thing in the background.

[–]mondaytuesdaywednesd 1 point2 points ago

Adobe Reader is slow, but none of the FOSS alternatives render as well. With Adobe no longer updating Reader for Linux, I'm worried I'll be stuck using Adobe Reader 9 for eternity...

[–]xaoq 1 point2 points ago

Okular? I never had any problems with its rendering.

Another minus for reader is from being so insecure and full of exploits :)

[–]mondaytuesdaywednesd 0 points1 point ago

Okular uses the Poppler backend, same as Evince. Often I see blurry yet readable fonts that simply render better in Adobe Reader, and common enough to be really annoying I see bugs producing nearly unreadable documents like this one. Open the attachment for that bug report in Adobe Reader and Evince/Okular and observe the difference.

[–]xaoq 1 point2 points ago

Ha. Indeed those fonts look blurry. I don't have Adobe Reader on any computer tho so can't compare, but I think for the rare times I use pdf I rather have some blurry fonts than adobe software ;-)

[–]AutoBiological 1 point2 points ago

I hate you for bringing this up. I was pretty content with reading PDFs in linux. Now I'm going to think of this every time I do. :(

My problem was usually the copy/paste formatting. But as for JSTOR and PubMed documents I read a bunch of them without a problem.

[–]zdubdub 0 points1 point ago

Unity is so counter-intuitive

[–]mjwhitta[S] 0 points1 point ago

I haven't used windows in so long that I forgot about #1 and I completely agree. Thanks for bringing back nightmares!

[–]MidnightTurdBurglar 9 points10 points ago*

GOLD MEDAL: My personal standard for shitty software was a 1991 video game called Conan the Cimmerian for DOS. I spent $50 of my hard-earned paycheck for that PoS back in the early 90's. You couldn't play the game for more than about 20 seconds without it freezing or crashing your computer. I literally never got it to work. And if memory serves, Electronics Boutique refused to give me a refund for it. Here are some screenshots. Mind you that I never experienced any of these before the program would freeze. (It was not a hardware issue either.)

SILVER MEDAL: Star Office. I was just reading another thread where some redditor was bitching about LibreOffice. Oh, if only he could have been around in darker times. Star Office was such a slow, bloated piece of junk that you would literally forget that you had started it by the time its spashscreen would load. A sandwich or two later and the actual word processor might be ready such that a poor soul could experience a clunkiest, slowest, buggiest, most feature-free software on earth.

BRONZE MEDAL: IE in just about every version.

HONORARY MENTIONS: Every program underlying automated operator systems. Most cheap embedded phone operating systems... Nokia in particular. Rule #1 if you want to design good software: test it by actually using it!

[–]zekran 4 points5 points ago

Pretty much anything made by Freedom Scientific or it's shell company ilk. Works with Linux!

Yes I understand that your screen reader only works for Windows XP. No I do not have Windows XP, I have -

I'm sorry are you from the past?!

[–]GuruMedit 3 points4 points ago

Maya 2012. With just the sloppy menu system and all the new bugs introduced, this is by far the worst release of the software to date. Tools were broken, the camera system is so glitchy that it can't even remember its settings, but the worst was I spent three hours trying to figure out why part of a rig I built was not working. Finish building it and it wouldn't translate. Tear it down, rebuild again thinking i may have done something wrong, and repeat until I discovered that closing the program and restarting fixed it. It was a bug. Weight painting has some fun stuff as well in this new version. Every single person on the team is furious that we upgraded the studio to 2012.

[–]kotnik 5 points6 points ago

xste, by far. At that time (10 years ago) was the only subtitle creator I could find. The thing defies all UI concepts ever imagined.

[–]kotnik 10 points11 points ago

I don't usually post to Reddit. But when I do, it makes me doublepost.

[–]dagle 7 points8 points ago

Magic online. By far. If you choose a nick that starts with a c (I think it was) you can't trade with people. The program crashes all the time. The timers stops working all the time. The list can be made very long of things are very bad with this program. Still they make a shitloads of money on it since you need to pay for digital cards.

Then you think, maybe it got some bugs, all programs have those. Yes but not only are they many the program is also badly constructed from the ground. Magic is a card game nothing more, how hard can a card game be for a computer? Well a 1.6 Ghz atom isn't by far enough, the thing lags... I can't understand how, it's just horrid. Then you think about how you can play magic on different sizes of tables, yes it can crammed but it's possible. With magic online it isn't, if you have a resolution to small it will just cut of a part of the screen that you most likely need, like the cards in your hand.

It has gotten so bad it's quite common to get returns from tornaments no questions asked if you say the client crashed because of some internal error.

The program used to be bad but usable, now I don't even know if I would classify it as usable. And do not try to run it in wine it's more likely it will destroy your computer than working.

It shouldn't be that hard to make a good version of the program but as it is now it seems like wizards of the coast can't and if you try to make a good alternative you will get into legual issues.

[–]knocklessmonster 6 points7 points ago

nano. When I installed Arch my first time, nano kept mangling my configs because it was wrapping the lines, so I jumped ship to vim. Now, whenever I have to use nano, I want to beat my face in with my netbook. The bug has since been fixed, however, and AFAIK, only existed in one version.

[–]Peter-W 5 points6 points ago

nano -w

[–]Rainfly_X 4 points5 points ago

I've never had that issue and I love the fuck out of nano, but sympathy upvote from me because that sounds terrible.

[–]RMSBeardedLesbian 1 point2 points ago

alias nano='vim'

[–]an_ony_mouse 5 points6 points ago

The worst "program" I ever used was Windows ME. That's what drove me to Linux in the first place. I swear I reinstalled ME every two weeks until I gave up on it.

[–]mutantturkey 1 point2 points ago

Mutantturkey here,

I still have my old Toshiba running windows ME rock solid. Runs DVDs like a champ for me

[–]an_ony_mouse 0 points1 point ago

Congrats! You are definitely in the minority.

[–]edthedev 1 point2 points ago

MS Visual Sourcesafe.It did not like being used across those new fangled network thingys all the kids are using, but they are probably just a fad anyway.

[–]vln 12 points13 points ago

Blender! If you're going to reinvent the whole concept of a GUI, you're going to repeat all the mistakes of the past three decades.

[–]gngf123 22 points23 points ago

I would suggest trying Blender again, they have made huge changes to the GUI over the past year. The interface is now pretty damn nice.

[–]vln 8 points9 points ago

OK, I just reinstalled it...and it confirms what I said before. They're no longer fumbling around with the basics of how to display information as meaningful icons, but are into the Windows 95 era of cascading menus. Good work.

[–]traztx 2 points3 points ago

I haven't tried it yet. Do you know if the new gui version of blender in ubuntu 10.04 repository?

[–]gngf123 1 point2 points ago

No idea, but the interface changes have been around for some time so there is a good chance of it. If not, the Blender SVN repo on launchpad is a decent bet.

[–]Haesken 1 point2 points ago

Oh fuck, I had to use this for a 3D modeling class. Even after ~four months learning it (with the "new" GUI), it was still the most frustrating and unintuitive POS I have ever had to use.

[–]freyrs3 5 points6 points ago

The UI may not be intuitive to all people but its still a very powerful piece of software in the right hands.

[–]zgf2022 0 points1 point ago

Oh god yes. Great technology locked up behind a wall of gibberish.

[–]_Tyler_Durden_ 4 points5 points ago

Blender was an in-house application, it was therefore in no way shape or form an attempt at reinventing the whole concept of general GUIs.

[–]jjsullivan5196 0 points1 point ago

I wouldn't say the UI design is the problem, it's more just the level of interaction it limits with your models. When you do an action 3 times out of 10 that action will have no visible reaction.

Also, the modelling kernel sucks. I'm glad bmesh is coming in the 2.6 series, I'm tired of working without ngons and going "derp derp what happend to my surface area?"

[–]pancake_breakfast 13 points14 points ago

OpenOffice / LibreOffice

Share your problems below, and let the healing begin.

[–]Pinhedd 4 points5 points ago

I prefer to do all of my work in MS office on my host Windows OS and do all of my programming / development / administration in a virtual machine under VMWare Workstation. I administrate a metric fuckton of remote servers so it just makes sense to try and keep that whole stack rather platform uniform. Anyway, occasionally I get stuck writing up a document in Libre Office on the VM because I cant be assed to switch back and forth between the VM and the host. It's not bad for something that has functional parity with MS Office circa the year 2000

[–]bwat47 3 points4 points ago

The UI is a relic and its slow. Libreoffice has been making some improvements though. I am really hoping they eventually overhaul the UI and drop java.

Right now I just use abiword and gnumeric since my needs on this pc are relatively limited and they are much faster.

[–]ctrl_all_del 2 points3 points ago

fucking "autocorrect"

[–]wadcann 2 points3 points ago

So it has good Microsoft Office emulation?

I once got a letter from someone where every line started with a capital letter. Couldn't figure out why. Finally realized that the guy was typing like the thing was a typewriter and manually inserting newlines, Microsoft Word was "helpfully" capitalizing the word at the beginning of each line, and the guy couldn't figure out how to turn it off.

[–]ahtnos 1 point2 points ago

Oh, that's annoyed me before, but it's nowhere near as aggressive as in Microsoft Office. I swear, Clippy is still there, behind the scenes running autocorrect in Word.

[–]RogueJediX 2 points3 points ago

I have to write in Japanese for homework and such, so it frustrates me that proper furigana support hasn't been implemented.

[–]MuseofRose 0 points1 point ago*

Not in relation to Linux unfortunately. I dont know what you mean by proper furigana support...as if you want superscript Hiragana/Katakana...or if you type the hiragana/katakana an it matches the correct kanji.

Though, if it is the latter there was a program here JWPCe I used on Windows..that has specifically been made to run in WINE. I dont know of any native programs mainly because I havent begun typing in Japanese. Good luck

[–]ownsyouall 3 points4 points ago

images show up as

"Read-Error" it's a .docx file

[–]cwstjnobbs 1 point2 points ago

I have to use Word Viewer because my boss won't spring for an MS Office license for me. In fairness I don't need an office suite really.

LibreOffice feels a lot nicer than OO though.

[–]jiz899 1 point2 points ago

IRC session at #libreoffice:

me: uhh, how do I insert header in margins

pro: you don't!

me: what?!

pro: it's stupid, margins are margins (links to WONTFIX bug report)

me: ragequit IRC

[–]flussence 3 points4 points ago

This one has a justification: margins in word processors aren't the same as in CSS, they're supposed to mark unusable areas around a physical piece of paper so you don't end up with text under a staple or page binding or smudged by someone's thumb or whatever. If you want your header flush with the page edge then you have to tell it that's a printable area first.

[–]ahtnos 0 points1 point ago

Well, they are right. How do you expect to print in the margins? I just tried it and yes, inserting the header puts it at the top of where the page body was before. However, it's dead simple to move. So... I don't really see it as a problem either way; inserting at or above the current margins is just a design choice. Neither seems particularly like the "right" way to do it, and the header's easy to move, so if you don't like it, move it.

[–]blue_yellow_man 1 point2 points ago

Classic example that even if your application is functionally the most amazing application in the history of the universe* if your customer support sucks so does your application.

*I mean generally not specifically LibreOffice

[–]izbm 0 points1 point ago

spellcheck? NOPE HAHA

[–]__dict__ 8 points9 points ago

Open/LibreOffice can use hunspell/ispell/aspell to spell check just like most other linux programs that spell check. You probably just don't have the English dictionary installed.

[–]jesuisauxchiottes -3 points-2 points ago

Hunspell still suck compared to Word's spellcheck.

[–]TOOOOSCARRRRY -4 points-3 points ago

Switching from MS Office I can't figure out how to do anything (especially in Calc)!

[–]biffsocko 4 points5 points ago

You can't compare one program with a completely different one and expect them to be exactly the same. You should judge Open Office on its own meritts. Does it do or have the functionality of what you want it to do; how would you change it?

[–]mjwhitta[S] 0 points1 point ago

I thought LibreOffice was more like MS Office than OpenOffice was. I didn't have too many problems but admittedly didn't use it a lot either.

[–]ICECREAMSOAP 18 points19 points ago

OS X.

[–]grelphy 17 points18 points ago

That fucking goddamned window manager is the worst fucking piece of crap software ever to get access to pixels. The whole GUI is a pile of garbage that's worse than stuff that existed in the 80s. Everybody making claims about the "elegance", "simplicity" or "intuitiveness" of OS X's GUI is blind, an idiot, or both, and needs to get Steve's decaying cock out of their goddamned mouth.

There. I said it.

[–]Laugarhraun 3 points4 points ago

Could you expand your thoughts? I'm not very knowledgeable about the subject and I'd to have a better insight on what you mean.

[–]ICECREAMSOAP 2 points3 points ago

He thinks it sucks. His meaning is that because of this, it is a bad program.

[–]ICECREAMSOAP 10 points11 points ago

Downvoted by an angry man in a beret with an Apple on the back of his Prius.

[–]not_prompt 3 points4 points ago

Care to explain why?

[–]this_is_the_internet 4 points5 points ago

I'm not the poster you were asking, but I'm not a huge OS X fan either. Most of my work (bioinformatics) is targeted squarely at Linux. Hence, I don't find OS X to be a very useful platform for development. Why my company insists on giving everyone Linux workstations and Mac laptops I'll never understand. "But it's UNIX!"... This is probably where my resentment comes from. Maybe ICECREAMSOAP has a similar story.

[–]wadcann 1 point2 points ago

Install Linux on the laptop, if it's a problem?

[–]this_is_the_internet 2 points3 points ago

Well, it's not generally that well supported on my particular model. I do run it in a VM, but that isn't very satisfying. I'm thinking I'll just give it back and get a new personal laptop.

[–]ChesFTC 1 point2 points ago

I do bioinformatics, and don't have a problem using a Mac laptop and running large jobs on bigger Linux machines/clusters. The only irritating problem that I've come across is that Macs don't ship with gawk. Otherwise it's all perl/c/c++ for me, which is effectively cross-platform, since it's all terminal-based and doesn't hook into the OS in any special ways.

I spend all day in the terminal, and using vim+latex. Plus having gcc and llvm is nice for testing/development. clang gives wonderful error messages.

I still think that Lion's new Mail/Cal/Add. Book are going to prevent me from upgrading though. And I wish that I could use sloppy mouse focus everywhere too.

Why do you resent it?

[–]neonblue2 0 points1 point ago

You can change Mail back to the way it was. I tried to get used to it but I find its use of screen real estate to be awful. It works much better on the iPad.

[–][deleted] ago

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[–]myliverhatesme 5 points6 points ago

True. How about Finder? Biggest pile of shit ever.

[–]ICECREAMSOAP 0 points1 point ago

You really don't consider an operating system a program? Care to explain why?

[–]Rainfly_X -2 points-1 points ago

Because it's not in userspace. However, I'd argue that since modern OS's have more functionality in userspace than on the kernel side, you could count an OS as the sum of a kernel and a suite of programs, both of which are coded in languages like C. Basically, it could be argued either way.

[–]wretcheddawn 1 point2 points ago

If you want to be technical, we're talking about the shell, which is definitely a program. The OS consists of the kernel, libraries and drivers. The OS is an interface for programs. The shell is an interface for you.

[–]thewillofd 2 points3 points ago

rapidsvn on centOS

crashes every second click

[–]tolland 0 points1 point ago

and is very very slow to navigate the remote repository tree. Its clearly querying remote every click, and the remote tree changes how often? have they heard of caching? jeebus

(most of the other desktop subversion repo viewers are rubbish also... gah)

[–]FapCommander 1 point2 points ago

Samsung's new pc studio, and GPGnet. Never have I encountered programs as bad as these two, whoever wrote them needs to be hung upside down by their testicles.

[–]dbaderf 2 points3 points ago

SQL Server. Biggest management pain ever.

[–]diggr-roguelike 0 points1 point ago

TeX/LaTeX.

Sorry.

(M4/Automake/Autoconf are close second place contenders, though.)

[–]bowyakka 2 points3 points ago

Thunderbird

In short I have a very powerful machine, I write search engines on lucene for a living, take a guess which one uses all the 8 cores and 6GB of ram

Is it vim ? no

Is it yourkit the profiler ? no

What about that fat intellij the java ide ? again no !

Maybe even the search engine itself with its 30GB index ? no

Its fucking thunderbird, One day I am sure I will write software that is that awesome as to suck a computer dry.

(In fact its annoying me so much I am currently trialling mutt)

[–]Philluminati 0 points1 point ago

Mailbox size < 200MB, Thunderbird's virtual memory: 1.3GB RAM

[–]beniro 2 points3 points ago

RealPlayer. Enough said.

I see a lot of people mentioning software that they are simply frustrated with. I mean LibreOffice is really the worst software you've ever used? Brasero? GNOME 3? OS X? These are not the worst.

[–]Theon 5 points6 points ago

Calibre.

I love it, but it's just horrible. The GUI sucks, and I don't even mean it looks like crap (which it does), there are simply mistakes.

Duplicate entries in right-click menus, retarded choices in the "add book" menu:

  • Add books from a single directory

  • Add books from directories, including sub-directories (One book per directory, assumes every ebook file is the same book in different format)

  • Add books from directories, including sub-directories (Multiple files per directory, assumes every ebook file is a different ebook)

Confusing convert book "wizard" (YMMV, of course), stupid choices : "Delete all but this format". Needlessly specific, and actually deletes only the formats you choose (though this might be a mistranslation/bug), the CLI tools are "too automatic"; which isn't a mistake itself, but if something goes wrong (in my case, encoding), you're screwed, as there are only few options.

Still, it's the best (opensource) library management software I know, and it has exactly the features I want, so I guess I will put up with it :)

[–]ChesFTC 8 points9 points ago

Calibre is like a case-study of bad UI design. It's amazingly capable, powerful, and useful. I can't praise it enough in these respects, but the interface can only be described as the geocities page of dancing babies covered with marquee text of desktop GUI design.

Converting formats, which is a very large part of its raison d'etre, is so poorly laid out. I understand that the book formats themselves are incompatible in odd ways, and it's a difficult problem, but surely it could be easier than this, while still retaining an "advanced" set of options. Still, I have it figured out by now.

[–]Theon 0 points1 point ago

You put it more eloquently than I could, thanks :)

[–]mjwhitta[S] 0 points1 point ago

I had Calibre installed about 3 months ago and I agree the GUI sucks. I actually choose not to reinstall it when I did a fresh install of my OS.

[–]mikaelhg 3 points4 points ago

Various Human Resources applications.

[–]mjwhitta[S] 0 points1 point ago

haha, well that's kind of a broad range! =)

[–]wadcann 1 point2 points ago

I gotta agree with mikaelhg. I've never seen any web-based intranet HR thing that didn't absolutely suck.

[–]pppjurac 2 points3 points ago

Samsung Win32 software for Android phones.

[–]genpfault 2 points3 points ago

In b4 xorg.

[–]matty323 18 points19 points ago

XFree86 is the correct answer.

[–][deleted] ago

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[–]MidnightTurdBurglar 0 points1 point ago

No. You weren't.

[–]tolland 1 point2 points ago

puppet. just sucks at configuration management.

[–]denrober 1 point2 points ago

Without a doubt the MegaCli32 and MegaCli64 command line programs to interact with LSI RAID cards (known by Dell as Perc 5i).

[–]Scott555 0 points1 point ago

You know, I don't mind it. Consider being bound to GUI nightmares like HBAnywhere, and it's a welcome relief.

[–]Cipherisoatmeal 1 point2 points ago

I once downloaded Pornview. Shit crashed like every second and even if I had porn on my HD I wouldn't use it. Shotwell would do a better job since its actually stable. It entertained me for like 5 minutes until I sudo apt-get removed it.

[–]shadowfirebird 1 point2 points ago

My Ubuntu install keeps recommending I install a game called 'Slingshot'. It's a recommended game in the Software Centre. It looks pretty cool. One problem:

It crashes immediately upon running, without as much as a window or an error message. The developers have not touched the code (apparently) for over ten years.

[–]floomp 1 point2 points ago*

Did you report a bug?

This is what's listed as the homepage for the slingshot Debian package: https://github.com/ryanakca/slingshot

There's definitely some recent activity there.

Edit: It looks like Debian stable and Ubuntu oneiric have an older 0.8 version, while Debian testing has 0.9, with the new homepage URL. Although, crashing at startup is definitely a grave bug, regardless of how old the package is.

[–]shadowfirebird 0 points1 point ago

I should have reported a bug, I know. But a little research brought up an Ubuntu forum where one of the 'gods' claimed there had been no activity for ten years, so I just laughed and gave up.

[–]somerandomguy101 1 point2 points ago

itunes, it's super slow and crashes constantly, (and is the only program that crashes)

[–]sunng 1 point2 points ago

Sorry, Gwibber.

[–]Scott555 1 point2 points ago

Lotus Notes

Console One

Magic/Remedy service desk

[–]starfishy 1 point2 points ago

OS: Windows

Individual program: iTunes

[–]JimMarch 1 point2 points ago

ZONEMINDER

A total ghastly mess in one sense, insanely powerful in another. It's a security cam monitoring system that runs on top of basically a whole LAMP server. Plus a custom-compiled FFMPEG and a heaping shitload of undocumented dependencies. Documentation blows chunks. It basically has to be custom-compiled. There are packages in the Ubuntu and similar repos but they're out of date and in most cases don't work. As one example, the part that links it to MythTV in Ubuntu is set up for a different version of Zoneminder than what's in the same repos as the MythTV module.

And did I mention the documentation bites?

[–]Philluminati 1 point2 points ago

MySQL

[–]wretcheddawn 1 point2 points ago

  • Quicktime
  • Safari for Windows
  • IE
  • IE for Mac
  • My companies corporate software - they even managed to mess up vendor's applications by customizing them so that you have to click through 5 pages of company logos before you can use it...in IE6.

[–]metamatic 1 point2 points ago

Seriously? Nobody's mentioned GIMP yet?

And since this is /r/linux: Sendmail, Yum and RPM.

[–]mjwhitta[S] 0 points1 point ago

I've never actually used Sendmail, Yum, or RPM so I can't comment on those, but what's wrong with GIMP? I've never had a problem.

[–][deleted] ago

[deleted]

[–]mjwhitta[S] 0 points1 point ago

=O I've used Star Office! It sucked so much! And I completely agree with IE too.

[–]kotnik -4 points-3 points ago

xste, by far. At that time (10 years ago) was the only subtitle creator I could find. The thing defies all UI concepts ever imagined.

[–]dnaod 0 points1 point ago

Samsung Kies has just recently taken over from iTunes which took over a long long time ago from Microsoft ActiveSync which took over from Windows ME.

[–]purpleidea 0 points1 point ago

windows (as long as: s/programs/operating systems)

[–]LiteweightPhenomenal -4 points-3 points ago*

K*

(With 1 exception being Komodo Edit/IDE which I don't think uses QT)

[–]freyrs3 3 points4 points ago

I don't know about that, KVM and Kerberos are pretty awesome.

[–]Philluminati 0 points1 point ago

Kopete was alright too, plus the original Amarok.

[–]Theon 0 points1 point ago

Disagree, Ktorrent is awesome, if a little slower. Also Kdirstat (even if that "visualization" feature is ugly and useless), and I don't recall any other KDE applications I use that start with K.

[–]MrOrdinary -3 points-2 points ago

Yep. They pushed me around while upgrading to KDE4.5 or whatever it is. Now they've almost but not quite finished putting everything back in, they're planning 5.0. Same all over again I suppose. KDE had potential, like all the rest.

Most hated software is... Nepomuk! Akonadi! Strigi! and any of those stupid, stupidly named THINGS. And none of this shit works properly.

[–]tomstockmail 2 points3 points ago

They've stated they're not pulling a 4.0 for 5.0.

Although it's not like the 2.6.39 to 3.0 transition either, there will be pains since it's not going to be simply a name change.

[–]ukaszg -1 points0 points ago

xorg and windoze, what did you expect? :P

[–]mjwhitta[S] 0 points1 point ago

haha, agreed!

[–][deleted] ago

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