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    $ Software sucks

    Software sucks

    by dweller - 2025-03-31

    #software #rant

    I know I haven’t posted in a while, and this is a sour note to come back on. But I need to vent. Modern software fucking sucks, I am so tired of it. Let me recap what happened to me recently:

    • My gaming Windows 11 just told it me it’ll never update again (which actually would be a good thing if not for lack of security updates;)
    • pavucontrol, a PulseAudio mixer/control I used updated to GTK4:
      • Volume sliders having a minimum width, so when window is smaller they are just clipped;
      • Lost GTK theme support.
    • Firefox being murdered by Mozilla even harder than usual (just search the web if you’re curious);
    • NVIDIA 570 drivers on my Linux stopped detecting one of my monitors, at best I need to unplug and plug it back in. At worst I need to reboot and try again. Same monitor and GPU works fine in said Windows and various liveUSBs.
    • Gajim, an XMPP client I use, updated to GTK4 and is now barely useable as it now has bugs like:
      • Being slow(er than before);
      • Not updating/rendering UI elements;
      • Lost GTK theme support;
      • Pasting files now sometimes pastes part of them as text in the send message field;
      • Send message field is not active after click/not receiving input;
      • That’s in addition to still counting messages instead of using time to freeze E2EE fingerprints.
    • GIMP updated to GIMP3 and now uses GTK4, guess what, new bugs like:
      • Crashes on selecting different brushes;
      • Some fields are not active after click/not receiving input, instead triggering shortcuts;
      • Lost GTK theme support.
    • Neovim removed pastetoggle for no reason.

    At this point, I feel like not updating anything non-security related. Every time I update I’ll just get my tools broken, be it GIMP, Blender, or my fucking monitor. I miss when software would release only once in a while, giving plenty of time to learn and use features, and be a dependable part of a toolchain. Now every time you update the developers can just decide to switch things around coz they are bored.

    It’s not enough that all the proprietary software switched to subscription model with push updates. But now libre/open-source software is doing the same.

    Am I just getting old? Maybe, but in that case the old men yelling at clouds where right and I was just too young and stupid to understand them. Your tools must be dependable! If you don’t trust the tools you use, how can you build anything? Tools are the foundation for your foundation. Imagine if your real world tools would just randomly change how they work and look? How would that make you feel?

    Honestly starting to feel like “system updates” is bad. I need to be able to freeze software version and try new versions without breaking the old ones. System updates should just provide security patches. Shit… Do I just want Debian without systemd?

    Anyways, this is just repeat of my older post. Already ditched neovim back for vim, pavucontrol for pamix and looking at Dino and Kaidan for XMPP, but cannot recommend anything yet. As for GIMP, I am really used to it, but I might just start learning Krita, it should be better for drawing anyways, or so I am told. GIMP2 was really good for simple image editing though.

    /rant