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In your opinion, which FOSS software is by many considered "old" or "obsolete", but are in fact, in your opinion, in many ways better than the newer alternatives? (feddit.dk)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'll start:

RSS and blogs, news vs. social media
XMPP vs. WhatsApp/FB messenger/Snapchat
IRC vs. Matrix, Teams, Discord etc.
Forums vs. Social media, Reddit, Lemmy(?)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Isn't that a type error? The examples given were for protocols, but your specific objection was about clients. There are many amazingly smooth clients for the aforementioned protocols. They may not be popular, you might not like them, but they definitely exist.

We should also briefly take note of the disastrous UI that Microsoft Office has.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Fair point, but I'll push back a little on your second point. RSS for instance. I really want to like it, but I just cannot get it to work smoothly.

I've tried like 8+ FOSS RSS clients, mobile, desktop, web-based. Not one of them has worked seamlessly. I get all kinds of weird problems. The RSS link doesn't work, thumbnails don't load, feed headlines are garbled, articles are badly out of order, sync doesn't work, etc.

I know that if I can't get them to work right, there's no way a random person on the street is gunna be willing to tinker and mess around with them.

You bring up a really good point about MS Office UI. Very cluttered and clunky, but so many people are used to it that it doesn't matter to them. I actually think that Only Office and Libre Office are easily good enough to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for 90% of users out there.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

As someone who has written and maintained an RSS aggregator for years, I can tell you that this jankiness is in big part because of how vague and under-defined the feed formats (RDF, RSS2, Atom) are, and how "creative" various websites are in producing feeds which are just barely standard-compliant, but also just enough screwed up to cause problems when parsing them.

It was a headache after a headache trying to get all the weird corner cases handled.

[–] Arnaldur 1 points 2 years ago

The category is FLOSS software, I find it more likely that OP could only think of protocols when making the examples.