What is something you dislike but still begrudgingly use?

Eggs@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 229 points –

This question was inspired by my hatred of Temporal Anti-Aliasing which, in many games nowadays, is poorly used as a performance bandaid. On lower resolutions it will smudge and blur the image and certain bad cases of TAA will cause visible ghosting.

Yet in spite of all this, certain games won't let you turn it off or have hair/fur/foliage look like dogshit without it so sometimes I still use it.

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Amazon basically.

Some things are near impossible to get in a reasonable time frame, or get shipped from China anyway if i get them at the source.

Also returns aren't a maze of bullshit and return fees like many other online sites.

Amazon sucks but their return/refund policies are amazing. I pretty much never have to worry about a lost or missing package.

Exactly. Amazon alternatives in India aren't great when it comes to returns and refunds.

Even if I'm going to buy the thing from a different ruthless conglomerate, I often check Amazon just to look at more reviews first.

I manage to live without Amazon. I just pretend it doesn't exist, I don't know if it's cheaper or quicker on Amazon as I don't see it (I use a search engine that can block results). It's also probably other aspects of my life that also make it possible, spare money, spare time, no kids, live in a city.

Youtube.

You should try Piped.

How's the recommendations algorithm on piped?

It simply shows videos from channels you subscribe to on your feed. In the settings, you can make it show you either "feed" ore "trending" as default. This of course makes it harder to discover new channels.

Any plans to stop using it?

Nope. Lots of good content on there

Check out one the 3rd party frontends for it. I personally use piped.kavin.rocks on desktop. Same content but you dont visit the YT site for it

My vote goes to Google, to whom I am tightly married. It's ecosystem and interconnectivity between apps as well as devices is unbeatable. It's super reliant.

It's the one entity that can wreck my online and offline presence. I mean, I use android and Google to login everywhere. If Mr. Google so decrees, my phone could wipe and google account be gone tomorrow. Same applies to Apple and Microsoft, but I don't use their systems as much. The poison I picked is Google and I hate it.

I feel like I don't use that many Google services (mostly because I'm not convinced they won't shut down), but the ones I do use are the ones that would really suck to lose access to. I realized this a few months ago and have at least been working on moving my email away from Gmail to my own domain since that is the critical one that could screw everything up.

I moved to protonmail years ago for this reason, but then my friend gave me a free paid YouTube account so I created a new Gmail account and found a new love for heavy metal. Since then the algorithm has learnt my tastes so well I would be devastated to lose my account, but I made a pact with myself that if my friend ever decided to ditch her account that I wouldn't pay for my own. So I'm totally at the mercy of her whims, and she doesn't even know!

In the last months I tried to cut as many Google services as I could. I use the Proton suite now, it's nice.

Unfortunately I still heavily rely on them for Android phone and TVs... Not to mention YouTube, which is yet to have a good competitor.

I doubt we'll ever see competition to Youtube. It has reached the point where they will basically have to be antitrusted like AT&T to see a competitor.

I don't even know if YouTube will be around in 30 years, let alone not have competitors.

All gigantic businesses think they're too big and entrenched and used every day to fail, until they do. Just look at Yahoo! as one example from recent memory.

So, we'll see, I suppose!

In the end I am just a dummy on the internet speculating. For all I know climate change will be coming down from the top rope and take Google with it.

I mean...you're probably right. But there's a little part of me that thinks...they said the same thing about Facebook, that it wouldn't last five years, that it would go the way of MySpace and something else would jump in, but... it's been just a few months shy of 20 years now, and even though it's not the juggernaut it used to be, it's entrenched in a way I never expected.

And then there's, like, GE, which is 130 years old...or Cigna, Remington, Citi, or Chase, which are older. Some others, like AT&T, do a little dance and come back...I dunno. Some companies just have staying power (in the case of Cigna, I think it might be a pact with some unholy abomination). And they're all still dominating or at least leading their respective markets.

Even your example, Yahoo, while certainly not the cultural force it once was, is still around in a slightly different incarnation. Nothing ever really dies, it seems.

Windows

I like Windows, it's MS that I hate and the bullshit they add to Windows.

I hate to break it to you, but the stuff MS added to Windows comprises literally all of Windows.

Ehhh not really. On consumer devices yes, but when you start dealing with automated deployment and group policy and things like that, you can automate disabling telemetry services.

Now if you’re using something like azure or intune, you just have control of the spyware.

If you're on M365 you get the added hit of them renaming portals, moving or downright removing settings. God forbid ymthe setting you need is powershell only and not ocumented online, cause support doesn't even know their own products.

Yeah…. The double edged sword of cloud infrastructure is that you have to rely on them not to fuck it up.

Less of an issue with AWS

'I hate dirt in my burrito.'

'There's lots of stuff in a burrito.'

This analogy doesn't work because you cannot cleanly separate things in a burrito, whereas you can in Windows to some extent.

My burritos never reboot by surprise to force updates that break decisions I mad about what's in them.

How often does this even happen? In the past 3 years I've not met a single person who's had a Windows update trigger randomly or had Windows make breaking changes.

If you expect me to prove Microsoft's still doing what they've been infamous for doing for twenty straight years, the answer is no. Even if they magically stopped fucking people over this way - this doesn't justify your dismissal of someone's complaints about those stupid problems Microsoft created. It still happened to them, and they hated it, and you had to pipe up and say 'well what about the parts where it didn't fuck you.'

I'm not dismissing whether they ever happened. I'm questioning whether they still happen. I'm not going to hold a grudge against someone who stole an eraser from me in the 1st grade. I'm similarly not going to hold a grudge with Microsoft for one or two forced updates back when Windows 10 launched. If you wanted to talk about the issues with Windows Modern Standby or with Xbox's treatment of the Minecraft community, then fine. Those issues still don't ruin the other 90% of Windows, especially when considering the alternatives.

Neat, did you read past the first sentence?

Did you read past my 2nd?

Yeah. And I answered them before you wrote them. You know damn well Microsoft constantly includes infuriating bullshit - whether or not it's the example I gave, dismissing your ridiculous hair-splitting. An example we have not established is even wrong. I just don't fucking care whether it's still a thing, because regardless, it's part of a pattern.

The root of this pointless bickering is that someone said there's parts of Windows they fucking despise, and you countered by saying Windows has many parts. Which is not a fucking counter.

I've always felt theres multiple sides to Microsoft. Theres devs making a damn good and simple product. Then comes the enterprise devs that over-engineer the product. Then theres the marketing coming in and try to buy up competition or bundle the product with other products to force it on people (MS way of advertising). And THEN the suits either ruin the product for money or shutting it down for not either making enough money or for not helping their enterprise products make money (like for example VSCode is a product that helps MS make money on Azure).

Windows 7 was a fantastic operating system.

Windows 7 was fourteen years ago.

WhatsApp

Absolutely, it's essentially required in Europe... but also, fuck Facebook.

Surprisingly hard for people to accept, if you don't have it.

I really wish I could get out of using WhatsApp, but it's all everyone ever uses.
And there just isn't any good enough argument you can use to convince the average user from doing otherwise. Unless it literally makes the phone explode in your hands, people will not change.

I didn't have it for ages but it just resulted in people "texting" me and me never getting it because they actually sent me a WhatsApp

They will fall, the enshittification has already begun with the integration of influencer-related groups.

I think WhatsApp is still fantastic. Just a matter of time till Facebook incorporates it fully in. That is what worries me.

I won't deny it is working very well. It is the Facebook part for me too

Facebook. I never willingly go on it, but my friends all use it for events and shit. It’s funny hanging out with them and having someone mention things from a group chat I’ve never even touched. I absolutely refuse to install that fucking malware they call Messenger.

Other than that, anything Google. Have to use it all for work.

So many small businesses have a Facebook page and no website which is quite frustrating too. I just want to see your hours, why did I need to sign up to another website to do that?

Google Maps is normally good for hours if they actually have a physical location.

I’ve recently been trying to de-Google my life. I used to be all in on them, but they’ve changed and so have I.

And yea Facebook sucks, but it’s how I can keep some semblance of social interaction by lurking what other people are doing. 😭

I finally converted my friends over to discord a few years ago, and even then I'm looking to move off of discord. But it was like pulling teeth getting them to leave messenger

I told myself I would never install it until it became the only option for keeping in touch with a girl I like. But hey as long a that's all I use it for, they can't glean that much info from me, right? Right?

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Discord. Too many people and communities on it that won't use Matrix.

I'm sorry but Discord and Matrix both suck. They are no place for a community. They're places for a group of friends to chat and hang out, not a place for large discussions. They have a large amount of random crap mixed in with actually relevant info and they both aren't indexed by any search engines. IMO, traditional forums or even Lemmy and Reddit are far better for that.

What stops me from moving away from discord is the in-server game streaming. If something ever shows up with performance parity on that and the possibility of spinning up my own server I’ll drop discord in a second. So far I haven’t found it

Several things from Google.

  • Google Maps - none of the OSM-bases options are there yet. I need traffic conditions and good Android Auto support. At the same time I hate that Google Maps is so full of ads. When I search for "breakfast" and the top result is a sponsored result for Dunkin and the closest is 50 miles away...
  • YouTube - the content is there so it's hard to go to an alternative.
  • Google Photos - my issue with this is really more tied to Gmail. If I stop paying for more Drive storage for my photos, I will stop receiving email because my account is full. But I did switch away from Gmail at least.

Check out piped.video. It's content of youtube without youtube. That means no recommendatios based on their algorythm, which might be nice sometimes but it's a good alternative. LibreTube for an Android app is what I use.

Ente seems good Google Photos alternative, but you do have to pay for it (they have like 1GB free space)

Yeah I use SmartTube on my TV and piped on my phone but I still count that as "using YouTube."

It also sucks they offered unlimited free photo hosting then reneged.

No they didn't. They offered unlimited free photo hosting for the Pixel 1. Which I still make use of. Later pixel generations got free unlimited uploads for 2 years.

Isn't Waze better, functionalitywise, than google maps? I dont think they are any better on ethical fronts, but still better to use the less powerful evil...

I deleted my Google account recently and I agree that Google maps is in a league of their own. I now use Magic Earth in my car, but searching for something is not as good as Google maps. But so far the realtime traffic info is good

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Almost anything Google. I have an Android because I hate the restrictions of iOS, but forcing me to sell my location to Google if I want to know where I am (even in an open source app because location is a system thing).

Ah man it's depressing watching the fall of google. From my gmail beta account which was incredible to do no evil, google are great, theyre open, to so many cancelled projects replaced by similar ones(ehem chats and video chats) and so much bad behavior with their ads.

If you don't want that, you should look into microG. It replaces Google Play Services with an open source reimplementation, so apps that use it and stuff like location still work but without actually talking to Google. If an app uses Google Maps, it will instead use OpenStreetMap, for example. There's a version of LineageOS, which ships without Google stuff and instead with microG and F-Droid as well.

MicroG is not exactly secure or privacy friendly if you continue using the same services.

Pootly my thing is a Google Pixe phone, as these now dont have a headphone jack anymore and are from Google, but for GrapheneOS

GrapheneOS! The catch is you need to buy a google pixel.

Look into custom ROMs, there's a few degoogled privacy focused ROMs but support depends on ur mobile. You can also degoogle it yourself but can be quite time consuming.

I hate that there's an app for everything, it's like when everything wanted your fuckin email now they want an app plus your email and a phone number, I have having to download POS apps on my phone for simple things that can be done from a browser, like concert tickets.

YES! This is my number one pet peeve. I am so fucking tired of having to install an app just to use my new e-scooter, or light bulb, or to use 100 new different functions that would work perfectly well on your website if you weren't such a fucking money grubbing troglodyte.

I work in marketing and it legitimately has no downside to a business other than having one team to make sure it works and the other to make it look good. It makes sense to not have to pay Google or Adobe or whatever other tech company that charges for web usage and ad tracking. At the same time, it allows companies a direct connection to you through push notifications.

Amazon. I try to buy elsewhere most of the time but other sites just don't have the same stuff sometimes.

Delivery is fast, prices are right, and they have an excellent return policy. Also Ive had many moments where I try to go to a store and thanks to this post digital retail apocalypse world we live in their selection is limited compared to what it would have had 10 years ago.

It took some work and sometimes we pay a little more but we cut Amazon out of our lives.

Prime is just too good if you happen to use Amazon's other products. Free overnight delivery on Whole Foods items, that's literally 4-6 hour delivery sometimes. Access to Prime Videos which (very) occasionally has a show I want to watch. And a free Twitch subscription which I use to toss creators I like a few extra bucks every month.

Socks. If I'm at home you'll never see me wearing socks, not even if it's -5°C out there. But got to use them while wearing shoes, I guess.

I hate socks and shoes. Something to do with being on the spectrum. I go barefoot, or wear thongs (flip flops) or crocs if I have to wear something. I pretty much only wear shoes/boots when mowing the lawn.

Really? I'm the opposite. My feet are usually always freezing even if it's warm outside! So I wear socks.

Not OP, I don't hate socks but they actually make my feet cold indoor sometimes

I don't mind socks but I hate shoes and I don't like dirty socks. The sandals I wear all the time have a toe thong so no "socks with sandals" for me.

Browsers. Firefox hasnt given me reason to doubt. Yet. And I find that odd. Still uses it. Because every other big browser have given me reasons.

Generally "free" stuff from big companies is giving me more and more the heebie-jeebies. Even if they have good reputation. But there's NO WAY I could ever pay for everything I use. Nor donate to every deserving person who has given their free time to create and publish FOSS.

Mozilla really pushes Pocket through Firefox. I've gone through the about:config to get rid of it. Pocket gives me doubts.

They also push their VPN a lot. Every week or two I open Firefox and they send me to their VPN page on their website telling me to try it.

Like no. I'm not interested in paying for a rebranded mullvad.

I can understand your frustration, but they need to generate revenue somehow, and presently I think it's the VPN, donations, and Google default search money.

At least the VPN aligns with their core values.

I recommend Librewolf. It's a privacy focused fork of firefox. They apply their own patches to every new firefox release so you always have the newest features of firefox minus the bloat.

Comes preinstalled with ublock-origin, no Telemetry, no Mozilla VPN, no pocket, no prompts to create a mozilla account, no ads on the start page, default search engine is ddg and deletes all cookies (exept for whitelisted sites) on launch.

I was a huge fan of Read It Later, which became Pocket.

I absolutely fucking refuse to use what it has turned into.

I think I'd use Pocket more if I could export from into a selfhosted app.

Should look into the ladybug browser firefox while the only "decent" browser isn't great nether and ladybug looks really promising

Google.

Reddit - I don't post there any more, but sometimes I still end up there looking for answers and information.

BUT most of all:

LinkedIn - This platform is built to benefit companies, employers and managers, not the masses of people scrambling to use it to get noticed and build their careers. There are so many things that bug me about LinkedIn, but ONE is definitely that I have no real options NOT to use it (without suffering terrible economic penalties if I you know, don't want to give them my data). I get resentful and anxious every time I look at it.

If you work in IT, LinkedIn is just another spam source.

I deleted my account the first time they were hacked. So much fluff and fake networking. Any employer that relies on that shit is a place I don't want to be.

YouTube. I wish they made better decisions about how to run the platform,.

It being free is only barely enough incentive to use it. If they ever have effective anti-adblock and force users to watch five ads before every video, I'm gone. I will never give any money to a monopolistic company if I don't have to.

They are making great decisions for their customers and stakeholders.

It's not just one thing. I can easily whip up a list:

  • Cars - they strangle out the city and make our urban communities dystopias
  • MS Office - I can mostly avoid it, but every time I have to use it, WTF?
  • Java - the syntax is fine. It's the whole universe of build/config/versioning tools that gets me
  • Pure Capitalism - I'm ready to protest the hell out until we get some democratic socialism
  • First Past the Post Voting - It just degrades into a two party lockdown

Facebook because my family is on it.

I can manage to skip FB altogether, but 99% of my friends and family are on Messenger

We have a group chat going that’s been pretty successful. My brother left Facebook first and that made it easier for me.

YouTube, Amazon, Comcast Internet, and my employer. In fact, all employers.

Social media. I use some begrudgingly and most others I avoid like the plague.

What social medias are you disappointed in and which ones do you use begrudgingly

On certain platforms such as reddit you can still access the site without a account

Interestingly you signed up to a new social media platform in recent months. If you disliked it that much then you'd just continue to use the ones you were already on before you decided you hated them.

iPhone. I travel a lot and I had my bags lost three times. Well no more thanks to AirTags.

We don’t know where your bag is, come back tomorrow and try . I understand you overworked and underpaid but my bag right behind that wall. Oh look it was.

This is only thing reason why I keep using it. I am not going to be hater . For some people it is a great phone but gods on high the limits all over the place.

Here is app drawer. Great can I change Categories? Nope have fun if an app is wrong category. At least I can change what icon gets big? Nope.

The keyboard? Where is the bloody , or ? Button? On android I can have button that lets me pick any of those. But not here I have to go into an under keyboard. But you can have auto prediction on! Not once have it given me a question mark during this whole rant.

The spellcheck. This is probably me being dumb but god, how do I correct? It doesn’t seem to work if I click the word it doesn’t work if I use spacebar to guide it to end of a word. Only seems to work if I somehow managed to click at the end of the word.

The first party cable missing the basic thing pretty much every 3 party cable using to prevent the cable from breaking but no need to 3d print option for it.

The lockdown. Now this maybe obsidian but I will blame Apple. I love lockdown and I probably should not use it yada yada. But why can’t I just a bloody list of all apps and white lists what I want? No instead I have do a big song and dance with sync on obsidian for over 3 hour’s then just one day it works and shows up.

I've used ios quite a bit and have many, many complaints. But you just reminded me of one. My work has two ipads for us to use in the field. One is the biggest sized model, the other is a mini. The password has an exclamation point. For one iPad, the exclamation point is in the first page of symbols. The other is two pages back. Like what the fuck

Change the password to use symbols that are easy to access on both keyboards?

Google is rolling out their own find device network soon™ with third party trackers that are rechargeable. They're pushing it through play services too so every android phone in the world will be in the network too, so it's a much more global network if you are traveling off the beaten path.

Some people especially with older devices might not like the constant telemetry in the background...

You have full control of the level of opt in. You can go always listening, only in high traffic areas, or completely opt out of the network. But if you want to use the network, you have to contribute to it.

I'm sure, and it's great for the usability of the products, I'm just always wary about updates changing settings in the background and not necessarily informing the user. Google is pulling this same thing with their 'ad personalization' tracking nonsense. Most users won't know how to or won't bother to opt out of something that was automatically turned on in the background, even if they would prefer it to be off if they had been asked.

That's an extremely small minority, and you can turn it off if you want.

  • Cars, even if I use public transports and my bike as much as possible, I still have to use it sometimes
  • Supermarkets, I try to buy things elsewhere but it's not always possible...

I waste time every day watching YouTube shorts.

The way it's designed, you can see a little bit of the next short, and the curiosity will get me, i'm always really tempted to scroll and find out what the next one is.

I wouldn't intentionally waste time like this, which is why i haven't installed TikTok; but i do watch YouTube every day, and so shorts come get me where i am. And honestly, it's a garbage experience. Part of me thinks i would probably have more fun on TikTok because their algorithm is better. Shorts keeps giving me these channels that edit bits of podcats, often MrBeast and Joe Rogan, and there's loads of channels doing this so i keep seeing it no matter how many i block. What content i do enjoy is drowned out by a lot of trash content like that, and would probably be better in long form anyway.

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Holy crap, Lois. Where do I even begin?

  • Microsoft on my desktop. Want to try out Linux but even boomers would make fun of my tech skills. That, and more games are on Windows.

  • Cars. Born in bumfuck nowhere, and cities with public transit are expensive as hell. If I ever get a better paying job, I'm selling that shit and moving anyways, because cars are also a huge money sink in and of themselves.

  • Google. I'll give them props, it's a good search engine even in its enshittified form, some of the ads I can deal with because if I am looking for a new t-shirt or something, then it would make perfect sense a Uniqlo ad would pop up. But its privacy that's the problem, and I try to be as "normal" as possible in this KiwiFarmsified hellscape. In the panopticon, the winning strategy is to not be interesting.

  • My iphone (inb4 avocado toast Venezuela). It would be silly to trash this thing now by principle, but once when its unusable, I'm going for a Linux Pinephone.

  • YouTube. It's a Monopoly and my broke ass doesn't want to subscribe to curiosity stream. It's like Texas though, while it's mostly derivative cringe, there's small pockets of gold that keep me there.

  • Linkedin. Pretentious garbage

  • Suburban life. Again, I am not a suburbanite by choice, decent paying jobs are tight and it's even harder to find an apartment in a state I know I probably won't be killed in AND I can afford.

TL;DR: I REALLY need to start learning 2 tech so I can navigate tech alternatives. Oh, and I need to get my shit together in life so I can afford to live in a blue city.

  • Linux: try installing virtualbox and messing around with it so that you know what you're getting into before having to make the jump. You dont have to go all in in the beginning. Spin up a virtual machine and play around and see if you are able to migrate any of your work to that.
  • Google: once you migrate off gmail everything gets way way easier. DuckDuckGo is easily better then google for all search results other then maps and youtube
  • Cars: not a car replacement, but ebikes are fun/addicting as shit and allow you to go 4x as far and fast as a regular bike without being totally sweaty at your destination. Again not a total car replacement, but it has replaced many vehicular activities and drastically cut down on me burning fossil fuels

Google

Startpage uses Google on the back-end but keeps your searches anonymous. Or there's always DuckDuckGo.

My iphone [...] once when its unusable, I'm going for a Linux Pinephone.

Don't, it's not ready yet unless all you do is call and text. (Then it's fine ig)

Windows

Try out a live USB, it won't save anything you do to it and you won't risk deleting your data by accident (like with dual boot). All you need is an old USB stick / flash drive (just make sure it's big enough, a few Gigabytes should be good)

Here's a walkthrough for Linux Mint (an Ubuntu alternative). I'd recommend specifically Mint Cinnamon (Download Link):

https://itsfoss.com/linux-mint-live-usb/

Ubuntu is not hard to install. I think there's even an installer for Windows that you can download.

Safety bars on my power rack. I hate when the bar goes low and clanks on it and I'm always hyper aware about hitting it. But I have a home gym and I don't want to die doing anything less than a 3 plate bench.

Cant you just put the safety bars a little lower so it only touches if you're about to fall over?

I was thinking about bench press and I like to bring the bar down to my chest but then it clanks the safety. I got straps ordered and I'm hyped to put them in

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JavaScript.

Just within software development:

  • JS (I'm using TS everywhere now).
  • Php (old project I'm hoping we're getting rid of).
  • VB (old code was somewhy written in VB).
  • MySQL (feels like Oracle doesnt really care about its C# connectors).
  • SQL-queries directly in code (I'm pushing as hard as I can for any kind of ORM, but somehow my fellow devs doesnt find it as practical).
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Consultants completely undocumented JavaScript. Had to convert thier entire library to typescript to even get a chance of knowing what they are doing.

I just had to help convert an old undocumented JS project to TS too. Fortunately had some help from 2 other devs but it was still a nightmare. Tons of intertwined code responsibilities that we shaped up back into lanes, and broke out a metric ton of interfaces from.

It’s much better now and has comments everywhere. It’s also earned the company record profits recently, so now I can point to it for the C-suite.

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Java

(I'm waiting for someone to rewrite it in Rust)

Java is being used so much that until legacy softwares are rewritten by rust or a different language it won't be replaced.

Illustrator. It's industry standard for graphic design, but has the stability of a toddler on ice

I’ve built plugins for Illustrator and other adobe projects and their internal API is trash.

This is the company that re-deployed their entire history of support forums accumulated over decades, into a new forum software, without realizing they were breaking twenty years’ worth of links.

Those forum posts, which took the place of their nonexistent documentation, were the community’s collective work product and the company just said “fuck it” and broke every link and bookmark anyone ever had to any obscure topic about adobe tech.

Fucking.... Wow. I personally never had any luck on their shite forums, but that's terrible.

I wish Astute Graphics would just make their own vector design program, their plugins are what make illustrator tolerable

Google Workspace. I have several clients who insist on using it for unknown reasons. It creates unprofessional looking work products. And in some cases, it is just plain kludgy (slicers randomly shoot themselves over the Sheet, page numbers randomly renumber when the footer is updated, etc). The part that gets me the most is that it is similar in price to other productivity suites, but often our clients opt to buy Zoom and Slack on top of that - basically doubling the price.

I'm forced to use Google Workspace and I absolutely hate it. The document suite is so horrible when trying to do anything that isn't a basic document or spreadsheet. Gmail sucks for long email threads and anything with attachments and the search is useless. Google Chat is a barebones piece of shit compared to Slack.

Luckily I've been able to get Microsoft Office for the things that require it, including Outlook using the GWSMO tool.

Exporting a Google Doc to HTML creates the worst structure I've seen in a long time. They can't even export lists correctly.

It feels like they built this in the IE6 days and never touched it again.

My employer wanted to use it to manage privacy policies, site notices and other legal documents of our clients. Greeeeat fun when it's time to embed this stuff on a client's website.

Either it looks like shit or I spend 1-2 hours to fix the formatting manually...

Windows. Android. Gmail. Expensive public transport.

There are alternatives. Proton mail is a good alternative if you just want an email service provider. As for windows, you might find a right distro for you but I dont want anyone to redpill on that. As for android, there isnt any great alternatives (ios is good only when you use apple ecosystem).

Sure, I'm aware of many alternatives, there just isn't enough impetus to move.

Linux Distros in particular just never work out well for me, whenever I try and it just falls to pieces after a while and doesn't work consistently for my gaming. I have so little of the troubleshooting knowledge I have accumulated for windows across the years that I can't effectively resolve issues I encounter.

Best I can hope for Android wise is just keeping to the custom ROMs, but they all come with the annoyances.

tutanota is a good email client

On Windows, the new version of Thunderbird is pretty good. On Android, FairEmail is my preferred app.

Google, this fucking phone, the cesspool of fezbuk, the shittified streaming services I can’t manage to unsubscribe from…

Credit cards

Just a slimy middleman taking a cut of every transaction and trapping people in debt. But a bit of a tragedy of the commons because merchants raise prices to accommodate CC fees and the rewards are hard to pass up.

Credit cards also incentivizes more spending than other forms of payment, so the merchants that are lobbying for legislation want to have their cake and eat it too. In fact, retailers did not lower prices after the Durbin Amendment capped debit card fees. Also, you're kinda ignoring the insane amount of protections that credit cards have that debit cards and cash don't, and those come at a cost. If we're talking about mom and pop shops, sure they're evil. But for a lot of consumers, they're just another tool that they shouldn't be guilty for using effectively.

Credit cards also incentivizes more spending than other forms of payment, so the merchants that are lobbying for legislation want to have their cake and eat it too. In fact, retailers did not lower prices after the Durbin Amendment capped debit card fees. Also, you're kinda ignoring the insane amount of protections that credit cards have that debit cards and cash don't, and those come at a cost. If we're talking about mom and pop shops, sure they're evil. But for a lot of consumers, they're just another tool that they shouldn't be guilty for using effectively.

All my durable medical equipment like CPAP machine, DirecTV, and Walgreens for anything.

Adobe "Creative Cloud" thanks to it's monopoly in the design industry (though I am in the process of doing my first smaller client job with Inscape atm).

There's very few brands/companies that I hate with that much of a burning passion.

People talk about Windows being monopolistic and anti-competitive all day, but Adobe might just take the cake here.

They're so unbelievably blatant about it, if they could spit in each and every one of their users' faces, they would.

Microsoft Office

Libre Office then?

I use it also, but MS Office is standard at my company so when I create a report it's in one of their formats. Maybe once I get comfortable with LibreBasic I'll try to migrate.

Passwords.

I prefer password-less logins with a hardware key but only a few online services offer it.

Planes/Airports... I travel for work and I hate them, uncomfortable, crowded, huge waste of time and lots of problems just waiting to pop out.

Centrally controlled undemocratic fiat. ... Usury.

Secret Server (Thycotic/Delinea). What a crock of shite that is. I was trying to replace it but people at work who have more influence than I do actually like it. I guess they've never used a decent password manager. If we ever actually get to the point where we have to pay for it maybe they'll change their mind.

What are you trying to replace it with? What are the features the business will get with the new product? What are some of the pain points and features missing from SS that your business needs.

A lot of time it's just about how you go about the discussion on replacing tools.

Button shirts.

The day on fully out as trans ill never touch a button shirt again. I wanna have all black blouses.

strongly relatable. i hope one day you'll get to the point that you can wear it and pull it off and still look femme and it'll be great. that's what I'm hoping for

A new Google Pixel phone as they have supported GrapheneOS. Super huge, ugly, everything Glass for no reason and no headphone jack...

To that, Bluetooth. I will have to use it with this phone, or suffer from iphone-like Dongles like a cringe applekid.

Windows, ArcGIS, MSOffice, Microsoft services everywhere, for University.

This house, my parents, the government, police, the council, the courts, corporate bought statutory regulations, surgeons, roads, cars, petrol, proprietary hardware and driver blobs, youtube (until tomorrow, when I start notubevember), systemd (from ubuntustudio I hijacked), portrait monitor arrangements and low vertical pixels, single monitor, ptsd/sad/sad/pda, iron supplements, calcium supplements, emf, and doubtless many more things.
But not tobacco. Thanks Allen Carr's easy way (& caryophyllene, cbd, psilocybe microdosing and iboga microdosing).

Google drive/docs. I haven't found an actually good alternative (yet) so...

You won’t have the same look and feel but https://cryptpad.fr/ sometimes works for me. This or a nextcloud instance.

Cryptpad seems great otherwise, but I need something that has pages like docs do, and I'm not sure if it has pages. Thanks for the recommendation anyways!

My motorcycle.

It was bought due to a necessity.

I didn't quite get the motorcycle I was looking for, and had to settle for this one from a different manufacturer. During the short test ride the problems were not glaring, it was when I rode it for a somewhat long duration that I came to know how bad it was. What's worse is things changed and my necessity to need a personal mode of transport was eliminated, so I barely need to use it daily anymore. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tried getting a few modifications done to make it a more comfortable ride, and while it's better than stock now it's still not where I need it to be.

Starlink, mostly because of Musk being Musk, but also because the replacement schedule of the satellites is against what I would prefer for a more sustainable service. Yeah I am well aware of why they replace them that often but I would rather they didn't.

I only use the service as I travel in a RV a lot, 4g/5g just cannot compete for high speed internet in the middle of nowhere or even the middle of somewhere, and that's with a proper roof mounted and powerful external aerial. Cost vs. Other mobile satellite services starlink is just massively cheaper for large amounts of data. It seems expensive compared to 4g or 5g but it really isn't when compared to satellite services.

My phone and my phone plan. Haven't been that happy with it lately, but there's no need for me to buy a new one yet.

I dislike my location data being sold and collated with other data to build a profile on me.

windows. literally the only thing i use it for is valorant. the second they let us play valorant on linux or mac, i’m gone

(inb4 chinese rootkit boogeyman, i don’t care)

One major issue with Linux gaming is anti cheat that actually secures the client. Things like eac or vac have to cripple their client side protections on Linux because they can't put in a kernel level module that can't be replaced by anyone else. On Windows those kernel level modules are signed by Microsoft which then makes it extremely tough to break on that level.

This is likely a reason why you won't see valorant on Linux.

I absolutely love both MacOS and Linux, for different reasons of course but both are awesome IMO. But Windows just sucks, the only reason I still have it is because I've been unable to fix some controller issues with cloud gaming on Linux, and I'm completely broke (and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future) so can't buy a Mac.

Fuck.

completely with you brother 🤝 i just have the cheapest m1 air which is plenty powerful for my work, study and creative stuff. pretty useless for gaming though except minecraft lol. i pray for valorant

macOS... I have to use it at work unfortunately. It's truly the worst interface. Plasma is the best, then Windows, then Cinnamon, then Gnome.

Tried Gnome on Fedora, it's just a blatant copy of macOS. I really don't get the concept behind it. You can probably somehow work comfortably with multiple programs and monitors, but I couldn't figure out how.

It's just annoying that there's not a real program bar and the dock vanishes all the time so you have to go to the upper left corner to bring it back and then go to the bottom to actually use it again...and why is there no desktop? Who needs empty space with a background image and nothing else? That's even worse than macOS.

KDE isn't perfect either, setting up the menu bars for the first time was tedious, because I wanted the names and icons of the programs I have open on the current screen, ungrouped. Default is just icons, because a good-looking dock is better than a functional one, I guess...

There's no way to duplicate menu bars and use them on another monitor, I had to make them three times for three monitors. But at least I had the option and now I love it.

Wasn't macOS based on Gnome and not the other way around?

I always thought so, but I really don't know where I got the idea from.

MacOS came from NeXTstep and OpenStep, it has nothing to do with Gnome.

Cars. There is no direct bus to the grocery store from my apartment, so it's way easier to drive than get on 1 bus, transfer to a different line and then go there.

Fucking Costco. Pay a membership fee to wait in the following lines to buy shit:

Parking, cart, entry, items, pay, receipt check, leave parking. You can't simple stop by for an item, its impossible..

Where I'm at, a Costco membership pays for itself in 2 months with the savings on gasoline alone. Costco gas is nearly a full dollar cheaper per gallon than any other gas station around.

Also, try shopping in Costco without a cart. You'll only be able to carry 2-3 things and it helps stop me from overbuying a bunch of stuff.

Costco is a religion and I'm all for it.

Parking, cart, entry, items, pay, receipt check, leave parking. You can't simple stop by for an item, its impossible..

Do you just fucking materialize in your local Aldi or something?

Strangely, I literally did the thing you just told me was impossible. I stopped in to buy one of those wine advent calendars.

Also, I'm not sure why you'd wait in line for a cart for one item.

Linux for a multitude of reasons (tinkering being an example, that includes shit like mint), cause I HATE windows and Microsoft so so much more

Where do you have to tinker in Mint?

Tinker = fix shit that should have worked from the start

Can you tell me where you have to tinker in Mint? I want to know if I can still recommend it to noobs

Since this is the internet i apparently have to disclaim that this is, in fact, just my opinion and my experiences:

I wouldn't recommend Linux anymore to noobs at all the moment you wanna install more than a browser

Proton is a piece of shit that barely makes the games run it's advertised for (protondb is not your friend, games rated gold and above are a crapshoot if they work and advise worked once, maybe twice), don't trust lutris either,same shit in yellow

Timeshift, messed up my whole system and needed to he installed again

It can straight up refuse to boot past the splashscreen if it doesn't like any USB connected appliance

Those are the highlights

Thanks for sharing your experiences

My android phone. I fucking hate redmi's os and my device doesnt have any custom rom. I wish I could change it sooner.

I k ow the feeling. I hate throwing things away that are perfectly functional. In my case I've had a food processor that I hated since day one but couldn't return after using. Been more than 6 years.

at some point, you grew up with that lmao. idt i will use my xiaomi for more than a year from now. Have been thinking about switching to something like nothing.

Every console I've ever had. I have a lot of games I like on the Gamecube, Nintendo Switch, Gameboy, etc. but all the games felt misplaced on the consoles that had to be used to play them. The only exception to this and the only one I ever genuinely liked was the Wii U, but Nintendo did a trash job with it and it really messed up how I was able to go about games in the future, since they made the Nintendo Switch overlap with the Wii U in terms of console generation.

My rented modem. I'm not knowledgeable enough to buy and set up my own and I hear stories of people getting throttled for not renting from the ISP.

its really not too painful to set up, and once you set it up, the only thing you'll ever have to do with it is possibly turn it off and turn it back on again by pushing a power button or unplugging and replugging the modem/router back in.

Here is what a basic setup looks like:

  • Buy a DOCSIS 3.0+ capable modem. Something like an Arris Surfboard will work swimmingly. This will set you back ~$100

  • Buy a wifi router that is capable of gigabit speeds. Something like TPLink Archer A7 should work for a basic set up. This is ~$50.

  • Plug in an ethernet cable from the modem to the WAN port of the router. On TPLink routers this port is usually blue.

  • take the coaxial cable out of the ISP provided router/modem, connect it to the modem you purchased

  • take a note of the Serial Number/MAC Address/Other details on the sticker on your modem.

  • take a note of the WiFi SSID and password on the sticker of the router. this will be your new wifi info to connect to

  • make sure everything is plugged into power and on

  • connect to the wifi with a laptop or desktop or plug an ethernet cable into one of the other ports of the router. the internet will NOT work at this point. This is expected.

  • call the cable company and tell them that you have your own modem and that you want them to activate it. They'll probably ask you for some of the details on the bottom of the modem. Ensure that they get all of this info correct or it wont work

  • once the cable company activates the modem, they may tell you that it will take 30 minutes to activate. Wait the time and then test the internet connection on your device. The internet should theoretically work at this point

If you run into issues one thing you can do to troubleshoot is take the ethernet cable that is coming from the modem to the router and unplug the router side and plug it straight into your laptop or desktop(disclaimer its not safe to browse the internet normally like this, just go straight to google and do a search for banana, no need to click on anything else, if it works it works, if it doesnt then still no internet). If the internet didn't work before on wifi or ethernet coming out of the router and it works now, then you know the modem is working and that the router is potentially having problems.

Although it might be a slight pain to set up once, if you are renting the modem for $10/month then dealing with this hassle once will be an investment that will pay itself off in a bit over a year. This is approximately 1 full afternoons worth of work for a novice if I was to guess. Feel free to reply back to this thread later if you get stuck

If you can't ditch their modem without problems, then usually you can still set it to just transparently forward traffic to your own router. Setup is usually not hard if you have an extra network cable and a computer with a network port (and many can be set up with a smartphone these days)

Adobe Illustrator - No way to use it on Linux without jumping through hoops like a circus poodle, but my school pays for it, and I don't know how to use Inkscapes at the level that I know how to use Illustrator.

Trade Republic

App's pretty meh and it's generally pretty meh but it's dirt cheap. 1€ per transaction is amazing when all I really do is passive investing.

They did notify me that they're going to delete my personal data when I hadn't followed up on my registrations for a few months which suggests they take data privacy serious and is the reason I ultimately went with them. Scalable Capital (another "cheap" neo-broker who I started the signup process with at about the same time) OTOH hasn't sent a word tome to this day; I should send a GDPR request soon.

*grudgingly

Okay, maybe that actually counts. I don't use the word in this context, but others do and I grudgingly read it.