Maxima

Raised as a usability problem by 4 people on Hacker News over 9 years (2017–2025), in 5 threads.

People raised many different problems with Maxima, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 5 complaints

Can't find boolean simplification in docs, and its syntax isn't intuitive2025-01-28
Maxima is weird and user-hostile to work with2024-01-12
Plots need many options specified; simple things like overlaying two plots are hard2023-10-19
Commenter finds the interface poor and free math tools harder to use than paid ones2022-01-08
Terminal UI is hard to read and keyboard navigation is clumsy2017-01-06