Salt

Raised as a usability problem by 17 people on Hacker News over 8 years (2013–2020), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with Salt, 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 19 complaints

Salt minions constantly crash or hang, so deployments are unreliable2020-11-20
Error messages are really bad, so problems are hard to diagnose2020-05-05
Confusing distinction between states, grains, pillars and modules is unintuitive to learn2019-10-31
Resulting syntax is atrocious and borderline unreadable, with ugly templated YAML2018-06-21
CLI reports success even when the command has failed, misleading the user2017-03-29
Man page for salt is enormously long, over 130,000 lines, hard to navigate2016-04-25
Too many concepts and awkward terminology make it hard to learn2016-03-10
Creates too many dependencies and makes the container build process difficult2016-01-12
Becomes horribly slow for spooling up tasks beyond about 500 nodes2014-12-09
Returns success during failure and no output when states run long2014-08-08
Commands fail after server updates with non-descriptive error messages2014-08-05
JSON output with escaped newlines makes it hard to find the relevant error line2014-08-05
Clients silently fail to update past about 500 machines, requiring workaround polling2014-08-05
Configuring Windows servers requires much more manual work than with other systems2014-01-24
Doesn't make it obvious where to download Salt; steers users toward Enterprise2014-01-24
Information is too spread out, making the docs hard to use2013-12-01
Took three hours to get installed on CentOS2013-06-24
Couldn't get the hello-world example running despite following the directions exactly2013-06-24
Hard to translate manual SSH configuration into Salt states; unclear how to write them2013-06-24