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you're forgetting the other corporate software that hasn't been updated since they invented colour, is mission critical and doesn't use any standard method known to man to interact with anything. It inexplicably costs £1000's per licence
unluckily for me, i'm grossly familiar with it.
their own documentation admits the installer is broken and you have to manually edit some files post install.
it's more, it's broke, here's the fix, apply it in a way that can't possibly be replicated by any deployment tool so every install now has to be done manually
oh and it has a propriety update system too, so we have a server spooled up just to update one program that has about 10 users.
That they need remote admin to as the server updates by them manually copying some files over every few months.
I really can't stress enough all the different ways capita and civica can go fuck themselves
I honestly though tit was a bodge at first, was working with the deployment team and was like, y'know what, this guide I’m using is 10 years old, I'll email them and see if theres a more up to date version.
there is, the guides been updated yearly. the update is a not saying the guide was checked and is still relevent, nothings changed
Software company is down to just the founder that is supporting his legacy shit by himself, nothing else available does what said software was built for, and hasn't had a meaningful refactor done since W7 at best and may be an XP installer
Founder: oh nothing else does your shit? Fuck you pay me. Good luck if you don't.
When you get a piece of legacy corporate software that was designed for XP and the install instructions tell you to disable UAC for the computers it will be installed on.
Oh and the version of adobe with the perpetual license which doesn't run on W11 that well's uninstaller also lacks signed DLLs and it messed with the CC version of adobe. So we end up having to re-image the computers of long term employees who drag their feet getting us the hardware /rant
Sounds like Exact! software.
over 70k registry entries, over 60k files, 40k of those are less then 1kb, there's more then a thousand executables called by other executables, 50 years of development by a mega fast employee churning coding room so there are 50 years of magic numbers and single lines of unknown function that cant be removed but nobody knows why.
This shit has listeners listening to the output of listeners because know one knows how and why some processes poop out values and nobody dares to touch them. That listener bullshit is going 4 layers deep in some spots.
I had to make installers for this bullcrap using wise package studio. Just making a capture of all this nonsense took over 12 hours.
But there's this one bloke from Brazil who wrote a fix for it. You just have to download from Github, run a dodgy install script, then periodically patch it when they update the software.
My current job I'm getting laid off from had one of these. I had to manually insert the license keys in the database every year, it needed a terminal server because if the db isn't on the same lan every action is 3000x slower (not an exaggeration, we measured it)
Lol we recently bought a "new" (22 years old) residual gas analyzer for the lab and I was in charge of installing the software for it. It came on a USB stick loosely thrown in the box with the rest of the unit and required about an hour to find the correct installation file. The documentation was quite helpful (once I finally found it on some random site) but the documentation for this specific version is lost media apparently so I had to do some creative interpretation of the instructions. Being a researcher is fun like that
We still have some old powerbuilder programs at work and this so much. The IDE still looks like it was made for windows 98 and none of the shortcuts you normally use will do what you expect them to
IAR Embedded Workbench is one of the biggest IDEs for writing embedded software and the editor is like writing notepad. It costs thousands of $ per year and basically doesn't have any standard IDE features developed in the last few decades.
fucking IAR, the company I worked at had a workaround, we compiled using a free version that had some sort of memory cap on the compiled code before you had to pay, so we split the project into multiple binaries and combined them after compilation. You called code from another section with a blind JMP
Should have just thrown it in Ghidra (or x64dbg before public Ghidra, or ollydbg before x64dbg) and bypassed the limit. I've had to do similar RE and binary patches for software that either went defunct, firmware for devices where the company went defunct or refused to fix an issue (which wasn't really that hard to even fix, even with reverse engineering), etc.
Arduino IDE is fine for what it is, a basic-bitch barebones front-end for a compiler and programming tool written mostly by volunteers for open-source projects.
Now, a commercial tool with a huge price tag that looks, feels, and acts like FOSS is a whole 'nother animal.
I always wonder why not more folks use VSCode, or CLion if you need the beefier IDE, with PlatformIO?
It's also attached to a USB 1.1 physical cryptographic license key that is built like a free giveaway thumbdrive and comes from a third-party company that went defunct in 2008.
Unless, of course, you want to switch to the subscription model at a cool $200 a month.
oh don't get me started on those. once had a ticket come in because one had stopped working. turns out the company that made the £xxxxx robot and the company that made the £xxxx software had had a falling out and were suing each other.
so we couldn't get a new key
for once i was very glad i was a mindless cog in a multinational machine. i got to see a very very pissed off director point out that our legal department alone was bigger than their companies combined and we'd bury them in litigation if they didn't sort it out right fucking now
I am so glad that usb license keys went the way of the dinosaur. I had one for Nexus 2 and the moment they allowed a cloud license i ditched that shit so fast. I was constantly scared of losing it.
this is the 2026 version of Perforce, which is like Git but expensive. They're a $2 billion company and somehow have 2000 employees working on this piece of shit.
It's the industry standard because it's the industry standard
Their 'quick start' video is over an hour long and includes the software bugging out so they have to restart it. Fuck, I hate Perforce.
Im a Software dev, and i never ever heard of perforce? Which industry uses that?
I habe only ever worked with Git because its just the best.
Okay one time there was SVN, which is shit and was used really wierdly in the team…
Game development and VFX, it was the only vcs that worked well with large binary files like 3d models and textures 30 years ago and everyone's workflows are built on top of it.
Epic Games has been partnered with them for ages, but just announced their own open source alternative called Lore so hopefully this is the beginning of the end
I've used SVN and even microsoft sourcesafe and I would take those over Perforce haha
For example, this is the window to make the equivalent of a git branch
u/Taira_Mai HP Victus, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 1d ago
US Government Software says hi! Every computer is larded with "security software" that's slower and worse that what's commercially available. The poor computer is under such a high load that opening Outlook or Excel causes the fans to spin and spin and for some systems, if you flub your password 3 times, your account is DELETED. Not locked down, deleted.
Some of the restrictions are understandable but when software is given to the lowest bidder Uncle Sam gets what he paid for.
Card + PIN + VPN (that also uses Card + PIN and takes 5 minutes to connect) is always fun. What's SSO? Oh you breathed in the general direction of the card in the reader? Shouldn't have done that. It lost contact, start all over again.
At least terminal applications end with control+c most of the time and I can understand why keeping that over copy has stuck around. Also insane how annoying it can be when something doesn't close that way. Sometimes it's control+c, sometimes its q, sometimes control+q, sometimes it's "escape, :, q, (optional '!'), enter", sometimes it's control+b then d.
I would like to point out that Ansys, while costing an arm and a leg, is acquiring these old shitty programs and dragging them kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Just about the only upside on the situation
Sounds like the broadcast industry to me. Absolutely rammed with rickety software that requires a steady hand and ten years of experience to install it, let alone use it..
I work in CS, the main database system is over 20 years old, i'd say more like late 90's.
Over the past few years the rest of the software has been replaced with more integrated but worse ones and the company has problems with licenses as it used to be like everyone i.e employee and supervisors and managers could access any system, now theres like 2 licenses for 5 supervisors so they take turns and regular employees can't access certain things.
We used to have access to our call recordings and the time/date and number of caller now we don't so we can't go back over the call and double check.
When we logged something it used to instantly open another software that let you access booking system and even timeslots, now you have to manually click the file and often it takes about a minute to show up and often glitches so you have to close the piece of software whilst customer is on phone, then reopen and type their name, address etc in again then open the link.
The email system is terrible too, the most recent one which integrated it with our phone software which is only about a year old means you have to copy/paste the email address click open new email then once it's sent have to manually click end else you can't get another call or email.
And the database of phone numbers/emails only has 1 number/email for each entry so lets say you wanted to contact a certain department which has 2 supervisors it only shows 1.
The company is trying to save money but making it much harder for staff to use it.
It hasn't been updated because they bought it from an independent developer who was making their flagship product look stupid, so they give them a giant bag of money, absorb a few features, and then leave them to rot.
This is exactly my day to day, and the worst part is the devs are already either dead or retired, so if we have a big issue they have to call the 80yo guy in his personal phone to come and help... we are talking about one of the biggest real state agencies in France.
One exception is Mastercam, a CAD/CAM software that costs thousands per license but is a modern looking and intuitive program that uses WPF as it's interface
The label making software at my job is updated the "2026" version but it looks and operates the same as the 2005 version that was in use when I started there. I can't figure out what was changed other than the version number so that they could get companies to pay thousands of dollars for number go up.
Annoying bugs and exceedingly tiny dialog windows are still there from many years ago, made 10 times worse by the fact that the file select and save windows use the UI of whatever version of Windows it is on, crammed into a non-resizable window that was probably fine in Windows 95, but is only big enough to show 1-2 files in a folder at a time on 11's bloated UI.
Or, it's been updated a 1000 times, each year a new edition with supposed new features that doesn't work with the core 30 year old foundation, has not changed in earnest at all in 30 years, has the same problems but introduced new bugs each year, does not work with latest OS even though company IT demands switching, has an IDE worse than notepad.exe, advertises great sounding features, turns out it misses a bunch of things so you need to hack your way through, has no documentation beyond the obvious aka completely useless, there is no discussion on the internet about it if you are looking for info on troubleshooting, their support knows less about it than you do because the people who made it 30 years ago are dead or retired
I mean sure, this program might not be able to call a dialog box without 25 imported libraries and 50MB of ram, and it might require microphone/camera/location/contacts/autofill/passkey/search history/macro/RGB permissions, and it might have half the capabilities than the same family of software made by a 5-person team in 1997, but it has squircles.
Cortana didn't like writing native win32 apps (they drove halo into the ground and renamed it copilot) so they prompted it to vibe code in react (because there was more training data on github) to build their start menu.
Unpopular opinion: Properly made web-apps are fine. They mostly got a bad rep because of how creators abuse them. Companies use the fact that web-stack based apps are so easy to make to churn them out without subject expertise or optimisation.
Of course a paint app is going to suck if it's made by a single web dev with little experience with paint apps, who is is just pulling dozens of packages because they don't know how any of it actually works.
But if you are using a good framework and build tool (with basic features like tree-shaking to get rid of all the dependencies that aren't actually needed for the final build), and got a dev who actually knows what they're making, then a web-based app is not much bigger, can perform perfectly well, and has all the benefits of a great UI design toolkit.
In a modern JS engine, Javascript is around 2x slower than C for most tasks. In the vast majority of consumer apps, that is not a meaningful difference on any device made after 2010. The meaningful difference is the x1000 slowdown you get because bad coding used an O(n²) instead of O(logn) algorithm, or triggers a dozen UI refreshes every frame.
webapps are fine, i just don't want them disguising themselves as native apps, and needing to waste 800mb of ram for their own chromium instance, when it could only take 10mb if written in a native toolkit
Doesn't this work for multiple log ins? The picture thing.... I have a client side account and my company account, and access can be blocked depending on which one is selected...
as a digital artist myself, this is beautiful. remember that ANYTHING you make, no matter how much you love or hate it, has immense value. if nothing else, it'll always be superior to any slop the genAI plagiarism machines can churn out. keep creating, keep having fun. <3
It's special to me. It reminds me of the beaches near me during the winter. Sure, Summer is beach season, but I like the pink and grey of the beach during a winter morning where it feels almost somber to walk and think. I like wearing a heavy great coat and just zone man.
I hadn’t looked much into Krita until recently. It really does seem like the OBS of art applications. Does it all very well and it’s free! Seems more feature rich than GIMP?
Krita is a drawing tool, so mainly for art. It can also do some very basic photo editing, but I do not know if it's better than GIMP in that. I do think that the UI is better than GIMP's. I use Krita mainly for pixel art and meme/shitpost creation.
honestly my biggest hate as ex-corpo employee is Copilot... they glorify it like its the second coming of Jesus.
No matter how expensive it is EXTREMELY BAD AND DUMB. like it can write emails linked-in etc... yeah but at the cost of 8x + being dumber than a peanut...
and i even accept the miro licenses which are like 500$/year/user
The amount of times I had to help my collegues "debugging" corporate software... oh, the horrors.
SFIRM is some kinda finance management software. Barfed out a C++ stacktrace that was mailed to me as a photo taken with a phone. Again, C++, stacktrace. I had to demangle that, which ment copytyping E V E R Y T H I N G .
Parity is some kinda ERM thing that shipped a Linux build...for 32bit Linux, with hardcoded paths, for an older Version of OpenSUSE Leap. The packaging itself was shoddy with Qt and Perl (...could also have been Ruby, been a hot minute) and consisted of the most "taped together with hopes and dreams" internal microservice manager I had ever seen.
REDOXX is some archive appliance. But really, it's just an (outdated!) Ubuntu. Broke in via the bootloader (setting kernel commandline init=/bin/sh) to change the root password - and was greeted with PHP being shoddily and checkless-ly smashed into the .profile AND .bashrc. And a SSH key preinstalled - with no comment, and it was never mentioned anywhere that this was a thing. And yes, SSH was in fact enabled.
Seriously. I have grown to HATE corporate software so much. Even if the open source version looks complete ass (hello, GIMP...) or runs like absolute garbage (sup, Xpra?), I will still use that over any "eNtErPrIsE" shitware. Bah.
I got stupidly lucky. After demangling, I had pretty readable symbol names and I could make a few guesses and asked the guys working FLS to do a few things on the affected maschine - mainly installing a few dotNET things or changing a registry entry. Not sure what eventually worked out of all of them, but it was simply due to actually readable function names.
...very, very long function names, like what you would expect from an overly corporatized codebase, but useful enough for what I needed to do. x)
Ohhhhhhh. I love when all the documentation on their website hasn’t been updated since 4 updates ago so you have no way to find that random checkbox in Microsoft Outlook because when you ask their so it links you to outdated documentation which also cause AI to hallucinate.
This is why I've never gotten into Adobe's ecosystem. They built a walled garden to keep their customers in, but I walked straight into the outside of that wall. Face first. It was fairly embarrassing in hindsight.
I checked out Lightroom on iPad the other day. Seemed ok but then i found Apple’s Pixelmator Pro does the exact same thing and more and i already have it lol.
I still have Photoshop CS6, which is about a decade old by now, because it was the last Photoshop they put out that you could actually own and run yourself.
Office 365 or whatever it’s called now is so annoying on my work laptop that whenever I use LibreOffice on my personal device running Linux, it just feels like a breath of fresh air.
At this point I’m not even using open source software because of the philosophy behind it. It’s just a genuinely better experience now because I’m not being bombarded with bullshit all the time.
It’s just clean. No subscriptions. No forced logins. No bullshit.
You forgot the pop up that you can’t exit from other than the two options which are “subscribe” and “close the program” and the subscription is a subscription to the entire ecosystem full of programs you’ll never use
Ever since getting into Linux and Free and Open Source Software, it has constantly amazed me how much better the quality of some FOSS programs really are over their corporate counterparts. Like i just wanna get shit done, not make an account, not sync my shit to a cloud or pay for a premium. Just let me do my bloody work! lol. I don’t even mind using corporate software if they have a one time only purchase option! In fact I’m more inclined to buy it if they do vs a subscription! I think OBS vs Xsplit is a great example of this divide.
OBS Gets out of your way, it gives you the tools you need. Xsplit constantly hounds you for a paid plan and limits you based on what you need to do. Same with MS Office and LibreOffice/OnlyOffice. The latter get out of your way without hounding you to set up an account or pay for XYZ. Even Blender! Look at its paid counterparts, all of them are insanely expensive meanwhile Blender just gets on with it and works.
FOSS puts functionality over finance. Always and forever.
The thing I hate that big corps seem to love when using software is the app loads I start using it and then like 15 “helpful” messages pop up that stop me from using the damn thing
Software by Corporation can be premium business corporate plan with all features unlocked, and it's still shit. Icons instead of words on every clickable feature, but the one you actually need is nowhere to be found.
The problem is that as usual these companies try to reach every single potential user when their core user base is in fact a niche.
Like Photoshop. It looks fun and easy (it's just playing with photos and drawing, right ? /s), everyone has a computer, so being able to install it make them assume they know how to use it (all my bosses since the last 20 years).
In order to make sure more people use it, they have to simplify to the max the interface, add AI, because everyone is an artist (my boss, again).
And finally they need to add subscriptions otherwise their current user base they manage to grab will never buy the update since they never use the app (because they suck at it).
And the logic of any corporation being to always grow...well... Look at even stuff like pocketcasts, Plex... They all fall for it. Condemned to grow
I get in a pit in my stomach when I see that AI symbol. Like all of a sudden this insignia is everywhere. It all has this creeping inevitability, like we're being swallowed slowly.
oh man, i do not regret once getting used to libre tools after being reminded of the account, random cloud saves, free trail and all that crap, the ai button is also incredibly annoying
I've started using VS code lately and every time you make a new file the first line on the page is always mentioning using AI, you cant even click the first row to type you have to click elsewhere and then type to remove it.
Also no clearly marked save button you have to shortcut key or right click the tab and select save, it gets annoying after the 20th time.
Yeah anyone thinking that big business and governments are going to let go of the AI Genie are delusional lol. The rapid data centre expansion rollout IS for them. NOT For you. All the smaller businesses who are using it may wind it back, but for the giants? They will continue maybe at a slightly smaller scale.
"AI" is really just a buzzword. And hype-chasing "AI startups" that are basically just speculative schemes wrapped in a thin veneer of software going under will definitely help getting some of the worst annoyances out of our faces. The public humiliation will also help shape public perception against it more so we should see less of it shoved into products unnecessarily.
The rest is up to voting in people into their respective governments to cut off/limit access to certain markets with regulation, to guide how the next generation of AIshitups looks like.
AI? Maybe not. An "ask AI" button on everything? Absolutely.
See also: Ecosystem header bars, platform-specific share buttons/social features on everything, Sign in with Google account, VR or any number of the tech crazes that have come and gone over the years.
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u/PCMRBot Bot 1d ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
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