Piece of shit software - Crappy software/apps/programs that make you MATI

[Seasoned News Reporter]

Well well well. I have a few things for this. To whoever mentioned gnome earlier in this thread, you're on the right trail. Gnome software as a whole is on some bullshit that the only useful thing it has is disks which is also obsolete as you can use terminal or other options. You ever wanted to setup virtual machines you best keep away from gnome boxes because that shit makes chopping your dick off & trooning out look like a fucking sane decision. It barely has customization options & the vm's it sets up run like absolute fucking dogshit. Sure sure my fx 8370 & 750ti is considered poop for specs in 2021 but you cannot deny gnome boxes is absolute fucking trash when you then use qemu & virt-manager. Much better performance. Though this is inline with how gnome deves are massive cunts who want to be the "Apple of the linux world".

Also the desktop app for mega is donkey shit garbage. Resource hungry piece of shit. The guy who made megatools did a much better job & you can run all that in a terminal with 1 command & a bunch of links. None of this extra shit of trying to create a cloud storage link on your pc or downloading files to ram first then saving it to your fucking hard drive.

I fully expect autistic ratings for at least one of these.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

Oh boy. Blender's UI is a very special hell.

Spoiler: the blender 2.8 ui sucks

For those unfamiliar with blender it has a dense, complex UI resembling Photoshop that hasn't had a major overhaul in over a decade. There are so many functions that 90% of them don't have UI elements and need to be accessed via hotkey or search box,

I really should say 'hadn't had an overhaul' there because it did get one a year or so ago with the 2.80 release that moves two thirds of the common functions to different places and remaps nearly everything to a new set of shortcuts (goodbye muscle memory). It also added several new unnecessary UI widgets like pie menus that nobody asked for and added irritating behavior where some controls selectively hide themselves based on your past behavior.

The end result here is 90% of the blender tutorials, walkthroughs and books are now completely obsolete since everything is so different, 2.84? readded an option to use the old keybindings but like a third of them don't work or are obsolete due to changes,

The most infuriating part about all of this is that they still haven't fixed the fucked up plugin architecture (one of the driving forces behind the 2.8 backend overhaul) so AFAIK there's still no way to write a plugin that doesn't involve digging through many arcane C macros and recompiling blender itself.

To be fair, the Blender community promptly puts out tutorials with major changes like the UI and feature addons like grease pencil. You can find answers to almost anything you need despite that major change. I guess plugins are a different story though.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

They do, but 90% of the stuff I've had to look up regarding blender has been specific nitpicks to how the UI works that tend to only get answered on stack overflow (eg, where is the global setting to permanently lock blender units to one scaling factor across all new files).

The pie menus though.. their presence may sound like a minor nitpick but any time there's a cycling series of options attached to a hotkey they're going to make things excruciating,

For example: You're in edit mode editing vertices. You need to edit polygon faces.

2.79: Hold ctrl, hit tab twice to toggle to line mode, then to face mode. Done.

2.8: Hold ctrl and hit tab. There is now a pie menu open centered on your cursor. Drag your mouse radially to the 'face edit' section, release. Ctrl-tab on its own just opens the pie menu when held and doesn't actually change the edit mode.

2.83?+: OK, ctrl-tab cycles edit modes again but only if you hold it long enough for the pie menu to appear fully (1/4 second) before you release it. Get used to half of your tab presses being ignored when you try to cycle too fast.

Maybe they'll get it working eventually but for something that shouldn't have been a problem to begin with it's just infuriating.

 

[moocow]

Also the desktop app for mega is donkey shit garbage. Resource hungry piece of shit. The guy who made megatools did a much better job & you can run all that in a terminal with 1 command & a bunch of links. None of this extra shit of trying to create a cloud storage link on your pc or downloading files to ram first then saving it to your fucking hard drive.

Mega is a lolcow in its own right. Everything about the service's design completely baffles me. It's basically a clone of the old megaupload site but with more shitty javascript bling, endless upselling, the dogshit desktop client and a far more cooperative attitude towards DMCA complaints. No clue why anybody uses it.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

Mega is a lolcow in its own right. Everything about the service's design completely baffles me. It's basically a clone of the old megaupload site but with more shitty javascript bling, endless upselling, the dogshit desktop client and a far more cooperative attitude towards DMCA complaints. No clue why anybody uses it.

Why do you think I use megatools whenever I need to download something from mega? Sure it's practically a linux only terminal app with a weirdo windows choclatey install but it's vastly superior to the official client, just grab all your mega links & paste in the terminal right after the megatool download command & go. Gives you more time to do important things while it downloads stuff like doing McAfee's choice palette of drugs.

 

[comfysocks]

Fuck Uplay and Ubisoft. I was finally going to finish Far Cry 3 but now you need Uplay. I finished 3/4 of it with it trying to check a non-existing server every time it saved. I bought a copy of Uno because I thought I could play it by myself but no, I need to be online.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

Fuck Uplay and Ubisoft. I was finally going to finish Far Cry 3 but now you need Uplay. I finished 3/4 of it with it trying to check a non-existing server every time it saved. I bought a copy of Uno because I thought I could play it by myself but no, I need to be online.

I'm glad you mentioned this. Game launchers fucking suck usually. The only good ones are steam, lutris, arguably ea origin. Epic launcher iis a giant piece of shit but it's nowhere near as bad as say rockstar's launcher.

 

[AmpleApricots]

GNU find is useful but a piece of shit sometimes, especially the way where it helpfully scolds you for putting parameters into the wrong order. Has code to recognize these situations and display a message for it, yet doesn't have code to just handle it on a best guess basis. Really?

 

[Right To Bear Blarms]

GNU find is useful but a piece of shit sometimes, especially the way where it helpfully scolds you for putting parameters into the wrong order. Has code to recognize these situations and display a message for it, yet doesn't have code to just handle it on a best guess basis. Really?

The O in Open Source stands for Passive Aggressiveness

 

[moocow]

I'm glad you mentioned this. Game launchers fucking suck usually. The only good ones are steam, lutris, arguably ea origin. Epic launcher iis a giant piece of shit but it's nowhere near as bad as say rockstar's launcher.

I seriously don't understand how none of these companies can produce a reasonable "launcher." Even the Steam client is dogshit; we're all just used to it by now. Launchers don't have much hard work to do. Show a list of owned games, download/install them as directed by the user, download updates to keep games patched, uninstall them on request by the user and then fucking launch the damned things when the user wants to.

I could legitimately bang up a prototype launcher in an afternoon that can do all that shit. Qt 5, mingw, GCC/clang, boom. It'll run on Windows, Linux and Mac, use minimal resources and stay the hell out of the way until you ask it to do something. How these companies have failed to do this after banging on it for years completely eludes me.

I know they want to show ads, integrate purchases into the launcher directly, provide chat, voice comms, live streaming and matchmaking, but honestly none of that is particularly challenging either. Practically all of that shit could easily be moved to a separate tool though to leave the client itself lean and fast, with an API for both parts to use to talk to each other as needed. Hell, several launchers already offer an API to some extent -- it's trivial for Discord to figure out when you crank up a game for instance, and it's not just scanning the whole process list on your system periodically to do it.

GNU find is useful but a piece of shit sometimes, especially the way where it helpfully scolds you for putting parameters into the wrong order. Has code to recognize these situations and display a message for it, yet doesn't have code to just handle it on a best guess basis. Really?

Meh, I'd argue it's better to err on the side of caution in a tool like find since it includes options to immediately execute user-specified commands on found items without confirmation (or even visibility by default). You probably don't want it guessing what it should do when you feed it parameters in an unexpected order and you've got -exec "rm -Rf {}" \; on the list too.

 

[Considered HARMful]

I seriously don't understand how none of these companies can produce a reasonable "launcher." Even the Steam client is dogshit; we're all just used to it by now.

I don't know launchers other than Steam, but I guess it's because the corporate wants to have their very own "look & feel" to their special snowflake launcher. Therefore they can't really depend on OS-specific widgets/toolkits (like the Qt you mentioned), which ends up in reimplementing every-fucking-thing, from scrollbars to window stacks, inevitably with poor results in regards to input handling.

Note that the same brainworm has infected browser software a number of years ago, what with the "client-side decorations" on Linux DEs.

 

[moocow]

Therefore they can't really depend on OS-specific widgets/toolkits (like the Qt you mentioned), which ends up in reimplementing every-fucking-thing, from scrollbars to window stacks, inevitably with poor results in regards to input handling.

That's the crazy part. Qt is absurdly customizable. Just look at this fucking abomination:



That's the official Qt installer (on all supported platforms), built with Qt. You can apply "skins" to elements or the entire toolkit at build time or runtime, and if that's not enough you can literally override every aspect of the rendering of every widget using class delegates to change absolutely everything about your UI's appearance.

Then there's Qt Quick which uses a declarative language (QML, I think) to produce UI layouts instead of the "classic" C++ Qt UI mechanisms (though the C++ widgets are just as flexible). QML widgets are similarly customizable:



(god MacOS is so fucking ugly; even the window decorations look stupid)

Five minutes of lazy searching didn't turn up anything concrete as to which toolkit Valve uses for the Steam client, though given how slow the god damn thing is I sincerely doubt it's using Qt. If you're not a pajeet, it's hard work to make a Qt program that's as sluggish as Steam is. Similarly I have no clue what any of the other launchers are using, but given how lethargic they all seem I suspect they've mostly just standardized on some kind of webshit garbage like Electron and loaded them all up with megabytes of unnecessary Javascript.

Maybe they don't use Qt because they're too miserly to pay for a commercial license to use it in their products, but for one thing I'm fairly sure you can still use it for free for commercial applications under most conditions and for another it's not like it's super-expensive and these companies have more money than god anyway. I think it's more likely they don't use it because they don't have enough developers competent enough to work with it.

Bleh. Desktop developers are a dying breed, I fear. Skilled people who still know how to use C/C++ proficiently to produce fast tools and GUI applications are becoming harder to find these days. Even on /g/ it's become way too common to see idiots mocking C/C++ for application development and promoting fad languages like rust and go or even webshit.

Oh well. I like job security anyway

 

[Considered HARMful]

That's the crazy part. Qt is absurdly customizable. Just look at this fucking abomination:

I know, I worked with Qt for some years, seen that stuff and did some of that myself. I have nothing against the Qt, quite the opposite. [I never bothered to do QML though, nowadays I'm more efficient building UI from the C++ than using QtDesigner and/or QML]

Once again, I don't know about other launchers, but in regards to Steam I guess it's inertia and/or sunken cost. Valve uses Qt for some of their development tools, but not the Steam itself. Remember that Steam started (and sucked big time) as part of Counter-Strike 1.6 release, way back when Qt wasn't as popular and capable as it is today.

Bleh. Desktop developers are a dying breed, I fear. Skilled people who still know how to use C/C++ proficiently to produce fast tools and GUI applications are becoming harder to find these days. Even on /g/ it's become way too common to see idiots mocking C/C++ for application development and promoting fad languages like rust and go or even webshit.

Oh well. I like job security anyway

Also, yes.

 

[Frail Snail]

Five minutes of lazy searching didn't turn up anything concrete as to which toolkit Valve uses for the Steam client, though given how slow the god damn thing is I sincerely doubt it's using Qt. If you're not a pajeet, it's hard work to make a Qt program that's as sluggish as Steam is. Similarly I have no clue what any of the other launchers are using, but given how lethargic they all seem I suspect they've mostly just standardized on some kind of webshit garbage like Electron and loaded them all up with megabytes of unnecessary Javascript.

Maybe they don't use Qt because they're too miserly to pay for a commercial license to use it in their products, but for one thing I'm fairly sure you can still use it for free for commercial applications under most conditions and for another it's not like it's super-expensive and these companies have more money than god anyway. I think it's more likely they don't use it because they don't have enough developers competent enough to work with it.

I'm gonna guess that it's a combination of not wanting to pay for a license and Valve suffering from NIH Syndrome as any tech giant is. They are using Chrome Embedded Framework, you can see it in the libraries Steam ships with. It was used as a way to display web pages at first, but the cancer has been slowly taking over. Try launching Steam with the -no-browser flag to see just how little you can do without it nowadays. I'm pretty sure most game launchers have been taking the same approach of simply hiring web developers to shit the features out.

 

[419]

Even on /g/ it's become way too common to see idiots mocking C/C++ for application development and promoting fad languages like rust and go or even webshit.

Half of /g/ is the same shitty bait threads reposted at least every 2-3 days ad nauseam with (I believe) only one board moderator who's a useless fuckwit and does nothing to even enforce their one pinned rule against instigating flame/brand wars. It shouldn't come as a surprise that a lot of posters have resorted to cheap contrarianism if not just the usual "my way or the highway" attitude.

 

[spastic_bag]

Is it just me or do most Java desktop apps look like shit, run like shit and eat RAM (also presumably like shit)? For something that updates its plugins as frequently as jDownloader 2 does, you'd think they'd work over 15% of the time, and I've booted whole desktops faster than Calibre takes to get its shit going.

Oh also I should not have to manually switch the UI font to Arial Unicode just to stop everything being ▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯.

 

[Considered HARMful]

Is it just me or do most Java desktop apps look like shit, run like shit and eat RAM (also presumably like shit)?

...and you discovered it now, after > 20 yrs of Java apps being utterly obnoxious?

 

[moocow]

Is it just me or do most Java desktop apps look like shit, run like shit and eat RAM (also presumably like shit)? For something that updates its plugins as frequently as jDownloader 2 does, you'd think they'd work over 15% of the time, and I've booted whole desktops faster than Calibre takes to get its shit going.

Oh also I should not have to manually switch the UI font to Arial Unicode just to stop everything being ▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯.

Yup. It's because long ago someone decided "y'know, Java should have a unified UI toolkit that works across all supported platforms and maintains the same look and feel regardless of where it's running!" This was indeed a noble and laudable goal, but because it's Java, it was inevitable that they'd fuck it all up by producing something that's "write once, ugly anywhere." And thus Swing was born.

It's ugly as sin, doesn't do antialiasing right at all, makes no effort whatsoever to match or blend into the host environment's look & feel and therefore looks nothing like anything else running on the system, doesn't handle Unicode very well, has awful font rendering, doesn't properly support high-DPI displays, is an accessibility nightmare, eats memory like it's popcorn and takes a dog's age to initialize and run. Somehow it's equally sluggish and laggy once it's up and running too.

The pisser is that because it worked "well enough," people glommed onto it instead of making any serious efforts to develop a competent workalike that didn't look like total ass and stood some chance of working properly with modern systems. It's rare to find desktop applications that use something else or roll their own. About the only Java program I can think of that looks decent is JetBrains' stuff. I'm pretty sure they rolled their own toolkit but they did a better job than the Swing idiots did. Of course, all their IDEs still take for fucking ever to launch, they're sluggish as hell, they're all overpriced (and SaaS now) and their anti-piracy measures have gone completely insane over the past couple of years.

lol Java sucks. Its best showcase app is Minecraft. Take that as you will.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

That's the crazy part. Qt is absurdly customizable.

QT can surprise you with how well it integrates into something bog standard.

 

[kūhaku]

I fucking hate slack and any company that makes you use it