Sometimes, it’s the little tech annoyances that sting the most

macOS wouldn't remember mouse settings? This means war!

See full article...

 

[DovePig]

Obligatory xkcd...

 

[frau koujiro]

I don't have one in the front of my mind, but this was a delightful (and relatable) article!

 

[calistan]

Windows moving my icons around. I have all my HDD/SSD icons neatly arranged across the top left of the screen, but whenever it feels the need Windows will swap a couple of them with other random icons from further down the screen.

I’ve never tried to fix it, but every time I have to move everything back to where it was, it reminds me that I don’t really like using Windows.

 

[Litazia]

I'm old enough to remember the Bad Old Days of trying to get Wing Commander running on a PC and having to muck about with HIMEM.SYS files just to get the game to load.

This reminds me of the boot disk I had for running certain games. I had four separate boots on this thing, and of note was boot 3 (dummy boot) and boot 4 (real good boot - I remember its name being this silly!). There was at least one game I played that needed boot 4. But, to get it to work, I had to boot up with boot 3, then immediately reset and go with boot 4. You could not combine boots 3 and 4 into one boot, that would not work. You could not go to boot 4 directly, that would not work. There is no reason that boot 3 would stick around when you reset, but this was the magic of the dummy boot and the real good boot.

 

[YetAnotherPoster]

This morning it was being unable to see the person I was calling on Skype, instead there was an indecipherable icon on a black background which meant I couldn't even begin to search for an answer. Plan B was Zoom but that didn't let me sign up and no explanation of what the error code meant. And then after half an hour the other person's Skype started working again. I fear a simple clear error dialog box has become a lost art.

 

[YetAnotherPoster]

Windows moving my icons around. I have all my HDD/SSD icons neatly arranged across the top left of the screen, but whenever it feels the need Windows will swap a couple of them with other random icons from further down the screen.

I’ve never tried to fix it, but every time I have to move everything back to where it was, it reminds me that I don’t really like using Windows.

Try DesktopOK which won't stop it happening but will return your icons to their old positions if it happens.

 

[SeanJW]

Obligatory xkcd...

View attachment 105710

Or two results.... the second is just "Worked it out".... and that's it.

 

[Steven N]

This reminds me of the boot disk I had for running certain games. I had four separate boots on this thing, and of note was boot 3 (dummy boot) and boot 4 (real good boot - I remember its name being this silly!). There was at least one game I played that needed boot 4. But, to get it to work, I had to boot up with boot 3, then immediately reset and go with boot 4. You could not combine boots 3 and 4 into one boot, that would not work. You could not go to boot 4 directly, that would not work. There is no reason that boot 3 would stick around when you reset, but this was the magic of the dummy boot and the real good boot.

That’s why I always tell people: “You’d think computers are an exact science, well, they’re not.”

 

[zaco]

I am still mad about the watchOS changes a couple releases ago that rearranged all the controls.

 

[slurmsmckenzie]

Not sure if this counts as there is a specific reason for it rather than it being a random glitch, but - I recently got a new work laptop (Dell Latitude) and despite it having a full-sized number pad it doesn't have separate "home" and "end" keys like my previous one did (also a Latitude). Instead they are shared with F11 and F12 and only work when Fn lock is not engaged, which I prefer it to be because I'm used to using F keys for various things.

So for the first few weeks I keep pressing F11 when I want to press "home" which I find annoying for the muscle-memory reason (it doesn't do what I expect) but also because it doesn't do what I want. I've had the laptop for about a month now and it is still annoying, but I'm slowly getting around to pressing Fn + F11 instead. Over four years of muscle-memory to break out of!

 

[Firehawke]

Apple seems to have almost always had severe irritation issues of this variety. The only reason you don't really hear more about it is that their primary competitor tends to almost blow up their entire OS with critical bugs on the second Tuesday of every month.

 

[gnasher729]

One that annoyed me for ages: I like to display the current time with hours, minutes and seconds. Apple used a font where “1” was a bit shorter than the other digits. The result was that when the last digit changed from 0 to 1 to 2 the display jumped forth and back by a pixel. Every ten seconds. Just annoying.

 

[Steven N]

USB-A plugs are posessed: [tries plugging a cable into ones PC] “Oh, it’s upside down” [flips the plug] “darn, it one of those again” [flips it again] Success.
Posessed, I tell you.

Edit: typo

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

Windows moving my icons around. I have all my HDD/SSD icons neatly arranged across the top left of the screen, but whenever it feels the need Windows will swap a couple of them with other random icons from further down the screen.

I’ve never tried to fix it, but every time I have to move everything back to where it was, it reminds me that I don’t really like using Windows.

There's a small free tool called Iconoid that you can use to save icon positions, and restore them with a click. Windows 11 has gotten much better than previous incarnations at not jumbling icons, and Iconoid is no longer essential - if Windows messes them up only on timescales when you may have added or moved icons, it's probably a wash as to whether it's worth saving them periodically - but it's still an option for anyone who is annoyed by this habit.

 

[DovePig]

This reminds me of the boot disk I had for running certain games. I had four separate boots on this thing, and of note was boot 3 (dummy boot) and boot 4 (real good boot - I remember its name being this silly!). There was at least one game I played that needed boot 4. But, to get it to work, I had to boot up with boot 3, then immediately reset and go with boot 4. You could not combine boots 3 and 4 into one boot, that would not work. You could not go to boot 4 directly, that would not work. There is no reason that boot 3 would stick around when you reset, but this was the magic of the dummy boot and the real good boot.

Heh. Reminds me of making a Hackintosh build, back in the days. Dual booting to Windows would sometimes mess something up so badly it then needed a full unplug for ten minutes (presumably to let some cap drain?) to even start POST after a reboot again. Otherwise, it performed perfectly normally. To this day, I have no idea what the issue was, but it worked. Cue in the magic "unplug and wait" ritual...

I know, I should have just sacrificed that chicken, alas...

 

[Pixy Misa Mk II]

USB-A plugs are posessed: [tries plugging a cable into ones PC] “Oh, it’s upside down” [flips the pug] “darn, it one of those again” [flips it again] Success.
Posessed, I tell you.

Nah, they just have rotational symmetry over 540 degrees.

 

[DovePig]

USB-A plugs are posessed: [tries plugging a cable into ones PC] “Oh, it’s upside down” [flips the pug] “darn, it one of those again” [flips it again] Success.
Posessed, I tell you.

You just have to push them in stronger – every round peg fits in a square hole, given enough force

 

[SpaceHamster]

Windows moving my icons around. I have all my HDD/SSD icons neatly arranged across the top left of the screen, but whenever it feels the need Windows will swap a couple of them with other random icons from further down the screen.

I’ve never tried to fix it, but every time I have to move everything back to where it was, it reminds me that I don’t really like using Windows.

Back in the late 90s my coworkers at a tiny repair shop we owned together took note that I spent a lot of time arranging my desktop icons (and wallpaper, WinAmp skins, etc) just so. So any opportunity they could they would stroll by and right click the desktop and [View] -> [Auto Arrange Icons] (disclaimer: probably wasn't the exact same labels back in Win98SE, but you get the idea). I'd come back from a service call and see all my icons infuriatingly sorted into several rows, in whatever arbitrary ordering explorer used. I would sit there and yell about "fucking Micro$oft!!", because of course Windows would sometimes do this of its volition, for example if you changed resolution.

Needless to say I eventually caught them, and to this day no one has discovered where I buried their bodies.

 

[Derecho Imminent]

macOS

There's your problem.
/turnaroundisfairplay

But seriously, for years my favorite game forums would require us to relogin every time the computer was rebooted, unlike every other login I ever use. So annoying. It only finally changed when they got new forum software so I guess it was an unfixable design choice.

 

[cruff]

Had my AirPods connected and working fine for a couple of years to my KDE laptop up to Fedora 40. Updated to Fedora 41 and they started dropping off while on Teams calls every minute or so, supremely annoying to say the least. Got fed up with having to revert to using the laptop speaker and microphone. I did some searching which led me to a post that said to create a wireplumber config fragment to prevent bluez from using the A2DP profile with the AirPods. That worked great, no more drop outs (and I listen to music on my phone anyway, so no problem there with low audio quality).

 

[Steven N]

You just have to push them in stronger – every round peg fits in a square hole, given enough force

Or an Ethernet port…
[user] “my keyboard isn’t working”
[me] checks, numlock isn’t working, checks usb cable, is plugged into an ethernet port, “Well, WTF”

 

[NewCrow]

Windows moving my icons around. I have all my HDD/SSD icons neatly arranged across the top left of the screen, but whenever it feels the need Windows will swap a couple of them with other random icons from further down the screen.

I’ve never tried to fix it, but every time I have to move everything back to where it was, it reminds me that I don’t really like using Windows.

Happens all the time with my work laptop that most of the time, but not all of the time, is attached to one or two external monitors... I've given up and created a subdirectory which at least looks the same every time I open it.

 

[Sprigganmaster]

On Linux I’m using this button to paste selection all the time. It’s so annoying when I need to use windows and it is not working.

 

[Antron Argaiv]

Not sure if this counts as there is a specific reason for it rather than it being a random glitch, but - I recently got a new work laptop (Dell Latitude) and despite it having a full-sized number pad it doesn't have separate "home" and "end" keys like my previous one did (also a Latitude). Instead they are shared with F11 and F12 and only work when Fn lock is not engaged, which I prefer it to be because I'm used to using F keys for various things.

So for the first few weeks I keep pressing F11 when I want to press "home" which I find annoying for the muscle-memory reason (it doesn't do what I expect) but also because it doesn't do what I want. I've had the laptop for about a month now and it is still annoying, but I'm slowly getting around to pressing Fn + F11 instead. Over four years of muscle-memory to break out of!

Poor design. You can do without a NUM pad, but HOME and END need to be there.
I despise laptop keyboards. Give me the old full size IBM Model M (or Dell copy: AT-101). All the keys, sloped as God intended, and full size.

Don't get me started on screen keyboards and cellphones. Definitely NOT designed for big-fingered people.

Now, to the subject of the fine article: at least you had the option of going to a terminal and typing the commands to fix the problem. Which is why I like Linux (with which MacOS shares distant UNIX ancestry) -- if the GUI fails you, there's probably a workaround to fix it, though it might involve a lot of Googling and some "sudo" commands on a terminal window.

Microsoft can go suck an egg. Windows has become a hot mess of ever-changing GUIs and crapware, not to mention the telemetry. It's becoming less of an OS and more of an advertising delivery platform. Since I don't care for that, or Apple's attempts to lock me into their ecosystem, I run Linux (which currently won't let me SHIFT-PrtSc to screenshot a selected area...nobody's perfect!)

 

[bass079]

Perhaps a bit on the niche side, but video from Resolume Avenue on my Mac wouldn’t project onto an external projection screen, instead going full screen on my primary display, even though this had worked just fine in the past. After losing over an hour of man hours trying to get the damn thing to work, an online thread finally helped me solve the issue by reversing the ‘each display has its own Space’ setting I had changed a couple of weeks prior. This happened in a theatre during the last preparations before a kids show, so you can imagine the stress and agony. Such a seemingly inconsequential setting for what I was trying to achieve it’s criminal!

 

[HermanMunster107]

Under Windows 11, use of my 10 year old laser printer scanner, the scanner is no longer supported and treated as a security threat. Luckily I have a system with Windows 10 as a stable workaround for this issue. This is a serious issue for small businesses. Windows 11 wants me to purchase a new scanner. MS is being unreasonable in their push with Windows 11 upgrades IMO. Luckily Linux still supports 20 year old hardware.

 

[zaghahzag]

This is why I find the move fast and break things attitude so infuriating.

How about move thoughtfully and not break things?

With a lot of systems I use all the time, I don't bother to try to reach an expert level of usage anymore because it's so common for whatever shortcuts or tricks you found to just change along with a UI that some project manager wanted changed to make it look like they did something that sprint.

 

[ArsLongaVitaBrevis_4321]

I am tempted to draw grandiose lessons from the incident about whether Apple's attention to iOS is leading to sloppiness in macOS—but I won't.

Oh, please DO draw some lessons here! It’s all over the internet how sloppy Apple’s Q/A has gotten, in recent years. In particular, the regressions in macOS. But most of those reports are anecdotal, and from ‘ordinary’ users…so Apple is likely to quietly ignore them.

However, having journalists from popular news sites surface those problems might just be the thing that gets Apple’s attention.

Here’s hoping, anyway!

 

[CrystalCowboy]

Fifth and finally, I was reminded that for all of the Internet's many (many!) problems, it is still full of people taking time to share their knowledge just to help others train AIs.

FTFY

 

[DarthSlack]

Zoom. Teams. Webex.

All these monsters seem to delight in randomly moving controls around from release to release. Get asked a question and need to come off of mute? HAHAHAHAHHA SCREW YOU BUDDY!!!!! GOOD LUCK FINDING WHAT WE DID WITH THE AUDIO BUTTON THIS TIME!!!!11!!!. Sometimes they find peripherals, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they find a peripheral and then forget that the found it.

An RTO dictat from our management might be acceptable if it meant we never, ever, had to deal with these gargantuan piles of moving garbage ever again.

 

[Coriolanus]

I had a Bluetooth headset where it would spontaneously lose the ability to use Bluetooth for calls. Bought a new headset before I realized it was the phone.

Oh well, new Bluetooth headphones.

 

[autopilot]

Not Mac, but on Linux Gnome Shell, they broke hotkey for stopping a screen recording, so that now you have to click on a button in the toolbar (which is suboptimal if you want to keep the cursor where it is for the recording).

One of the devs replied with "oh yeah we changed the one thing and didn't consider consequences", shrug
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/5386#note_2197289

And looks like nobody's bothered enough to fix it. Drives me up the wall.

 

[dkazaz]

Windows explorer never remembering folder view settings across multiple versions. No idea if w11 fixed it, I switched to Mac/linux.

trying to eject an external disk: always works in Mac/linux, occasionally on windows.


Trying to assign a single key to change keyboard language: almost impossible in any OS. Can be done with 3rd party software. Not easily.

 

[efassi]

My small niggle - My Gigabyte G27Q monitor resets to 100% brightness whenever I change inputs.
No I don't want to just use a KVM, I want adaptive sync over display port for my gaming rig, and HDMI for my work laptop. I just want to change inputs without getting my eyeballs blasted!

 

[SPHK_Tech]

Solved an issue where our laptops would not cast to one of our interactive whiteboards, whereas they would work with every other one of same model / firmware. Turns out changing the resolution to anything but the default fixed the issue - small and trivial yes but definitely beyond most of our teaching staff.

 

[bewandered]

I "love" the 80s (or maybe even 70s) retro styling in the Getty stock photo, but after i noticed that the mouse and keyboard are not the correct devices for a 1980s Mac (or Mac Plus, or possibly any Mac), it's really bugging me. The open port on the front should have one of those old-school, curly RJ-11 cables going to the keyboard.

I wanna tell that guy, "Dude, it won't work because you've got the wrong devices."
But i'll never be able to, because we're in different timelines...

As for "recent minor annoyances solved," a new 'feature' appeared in Sequoia*, where when moving a window around the screen, suddenly it maximizes or zooms and occupies the entire screen. It probably took me all of 90 seconds after the upgrade to encounter this and it really started to drive me crazy, as it was happening almost every time i moved a window, and i could not figure out why.

Eventually i came across the "Drag windows to menu bare to fill screen" toggle that's in the "Desktop & Dock" section of System Settings, and cursing while computing returned to normal levels. But it's not exactly an easy to find setting, as the behaviour doesn't actually have anything to do with the desktop or the dock.

What made this worse is Apple's decision to turn System Settings (neé System Preferences) into a morass of poorly organize settings that's only usable if you know what to type in the search box. And if you can't guess what they've chose to name something, well, then you're just screwed, especially when it's a brand new setting.

* i can't remember if it was straight up 15 or later.

 

[Raodysseus]

USB-A plugs are posessed: [tries plugging a cable into ones PC] “Oh, it’s upside down” [flips the plug] “darn, it one of those again” [flips it again] Success.
Posessed, I tell you.

Edit: typo

This has happened to me 100% of the time for years. I swear it.

 

[graylshaped]

“…No rhyme, reason, or apparent causality except that computers are just [unprintable expletives]."

Rather than add Yet Another tale of First World woe, inquiring minds want to know: was it an adjective starting in “f” and a noun starting in “a”?

Also, kudos for the “who moved my cheese” reference. Brought back fond days of HR workshops telling us not to let minor annoyances distract us from pretending major company dysfunctions were features, not bugs.