PabloGraphics

Here I list some open-source applications that are generally considered 'all the rage', but which in my opinion are overrated - cumbersome to use or set up, horrible looking, or simply not quite working ... . I list a (much) better alternative, if there exists one.

Amarok I know it's almost blasphemy, but I've never been able to stomach this one; despite the claim that it's "fully skinnable" the skin support has been limited to a title panel, and in the latest version even that seems to be missing; ...
    alternative: Exaile...

MPlayer Another blasphemy: I've always had some problems with this player; it's not very user friendly, the setup is cumbersome, and - last but not least - despite all the claims, I haven't been able to play a lot of files on it, sometimes the video was wrong, sometimes the sound, and on my current system it doesn't want to play video at all, while Totem plays everything
    alternative: Totem

Vlc   The widely advertised and promoted cross-platform open source player, I've never really taken to it thanks to its weird interface and the fact that some features don't seem to work. Still, it seemed to be THE player to play any format imaginable, as it included all the codecs within it. Those days are gone for me, as on my current system it stopped working altogether
   alternative: Totem

Xine Another widely endorsed player and standard. It may play files pretty well, but the interface is a horror. Although fully skinnable, most skins are unpalatable, unreadable, and yucky. So are the menus, with arguably the weirdest setup system - by the geeks for the geeks, not for the avarage user.
    alternative: Totem

Open Office Sun's giant suite, the only rival to MS world dominance in office software. Praise be to it for that, still there are a lot of quirks and a fair amount of nastiness in this package. Let me just mention my favourite - the inability to just pick any colour you want for your graphics on the go. Not even in the Draw module. You've got a limited predifined set of (largely atypical) colours, and the only way to have the colour you want is to add it in the program's setup, where you also have to give it a name and store it for later use. Absolutely ridiculous, I don't know how they can get away with that. A commercial software sympathiser would say - they can because it's free...
    alternative: none

Thunderbird Some more blaspheming. Everybody gnome-oriented seems to lament the lack of a pre-installed version of this app on Ubuntu. I for one aplaud the decision. Not because it's a bad application, it probably does it's job of sending and receiving email pretty well. But the setup is unnecessarily complex, and also I don't see the need these days for a standalone email/newsgroup client with no other features. Evolution, while not perfect, is a lot easier to set up, neater, has got calendar (synchronizable with google calendar), tasks, and notes. To have any of those in Thunderbird you need an extension, and the Lightning calendar extension mocks itself with its name - it's ludicrously slow, so much so that it was virtually unusable on a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 as soon as you had more than a few appointments a day (!).
    alternative: Evolution