ROS

Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 9 years (2018–2026), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with ROS, 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 17 complaints

Too many scattered config formats, and silent node failures are hard to diagnose2026-08-31
Getting it set up was an immense pain; creating modules requires writing CMake files2026-06-20
Dozens of unrelated projects crammed into one workspace, making it hard to navigate2026-02-14
Companies struggle to figure out how to migrate off ROS2025-06-20
Horrible build system and odd defaults make it hard to build robust systems2024-11-14
Builds copy everything by default, forcing rebuilds; custom messages need awkward metapackages2024-09-20
Unreliable DDS and bad defaults make robots work only half the time, with no clear cause2024-06-10
Tooling and setup are painful; long trial-and-error before anything works2024-06-10
Docs and interface are hard to use, confusing for newcomers, poor onboarding2024-06-10
Tab autocomplete and parameter fetching in the CLI take seconds2024-02-11
Build system is brittle and full of automagic that wastes developers' time2022-07-25
Students struggle to install it and find its learning curve too steep2022-07-25
Build system is idiosyncratic; sparse docs and weak debugging tools2022-07-25
Launch files and message passing add complexity that makes simple tasks much harder2020-08-28
Catkin build wrapper is unpleasant and build setup is hard to use2020-05-12
XML launch files grow into a bad programming language for conditional node configuration2019-02-08
Docs assume Catkin build system, leaving users unsure how to arrange files2018-09-06