Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 777 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#361

Post by [deleted] »

jcelerier wrote: post #322
avmich wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you count Qt apps as native, but not count web apps as native? Why?

a few reasons : - Qt is actually the native toolkit of multiple operating systems (Jolla for instance and KDE Plasma) - you just need to have a Linux kernel running and it handles the rest. It also does the effort of going to look for the user theme for widgets to mix in with the rest of the platform, while web apps completely disregard that. - Windows has at least 4 different UI toolkits now which all render kinda d…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#362

Post by bartread »

desc wrote: post #226
gundmc wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the security considerations of this? It seems like you could just as easily say it's more secure because it reduces the attack surface to a well-tested program with mature sandboxing.

You mean like the OS is supposed to be?

Exactly. The browser becomes (basically) an OS running within the host OS, so s/he's invented a kind of half-cocked virtualisation. There's a joke in there somewhere about turtles all the way down.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#363

Post by effie »

ninjakeyboard wrote: post #311
jcelerier wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, your web app may not be as good as native apps, but at least you don't have to write it 6 times. I must be living in a parallel world because I use a ton of desktop apps that aren't "written 6 times" - and write a few, including a music & other things sequencer ( https://ossia.io ). Just amongst the ones running on my desktop right now, Strawberry (Qt), Firefox (their own toolkit), QtCreator (Qt), Telegr…

I still can't believe bitwig is java. I'm a bitwig user. It even runs on linux.

Only small part, the core is C++ and assembly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwig/comments/4c2zoh/what_program...

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#365

Post by KeepFlying »

theshetty wrote: post #334
jrockway wrote: post #221

Native desktop apps are great. The reason that people don't write them is because users aren't on "the desktop". "The desktop" is split between OS X and Windows, and your Windows-app-compiled-for-Mac is going to annoy Mac users and your Mac-app-compiled-for-Windows is going to annoy Windows users. Then you realize that most users of computing devices actually just use their phone for everything, and your desktop app…

Many desktop apps these days seems to be built on Electron, a JS framework for building desktop-class apps. https://www.electronjs.org/

And many of those apps end up with terrible performance. I'm sure it's possible to write a performant electron app, but I don't see it happen often and it's disappointing.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#366

Post by heywire »

noahtallen wrote: post #326
heywire wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love vs code, and its plugin system, but if I’m on my laptop without a charger, I use something else. When I’m running vs code, my battery life is cut nearly in half.

What do you use instead? In my experience, normal IDEs (Android Studio, Xcode, Visual Studio) all perform worse than VS Code in terms of memory use and battery. :/

Qt Creator or if my battery is real low, a text editor like Gedit (yes, I’m probably saving more there just by not having features like code completion and syntax checking).

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#367

Post by mr_toad »

CharlesW wrote: post #249
brachi wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find it that crazy, if properly compiled with web assembly. The thing is that Blender's UI is all synchronous python, so, yeah, that and the addons system would be to need rewritten. Python in the browser is a no-go performance-wise, of course.

> Python in the browser is a no-go performance-wise, of course. "Running the Python interpreter inside a JavaScript virtual machine adds a performance penalty, but that penalty turns out to be surprisingly small — in our benchmarks, around 1x-12x slower than native on Firefox and 1x-16x slower on Chrome. Experience shows that this is very usable for interactive exploration."[1][2] [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/0…

The problem is not so much the run-time performance of the code, it's the overhead of loading the Python run-time environment over the network the first time you open the page.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#368

Post by irishcoffee »

jcelerier wrote: post #322
avmich wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you count Qt apps as native, but not count web apps as native? Why?

a few reasons : - Qt is actually the native toolkit of multiple operating systems (Jolla for instance and KDE Plasma) - you just need to have a Linux kernel running and it handles the rest. It also does the effort of going to look for the user theme for widgets to mix in with the rest of the platform, while web apps completely disregard that. - Windows has at least 4 different UI toolkits now which all render kinda d…

Knowing what I know about Qt and what I've done with it in my day job, it's basically the best kept secret on hn. What they're doing with 6+licensing... I'm not sure how I feel, but from a pure multi-platform framework it really is the bees knees.

I've taken c++ qt desktop apps that never had any intention of running on a phone, built them, ran them, everything "just worked. I was impressed.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#369

Post by outside1234 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #313
avmich wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you count Qt apps as native, but not count web apps as native? Why?

Qt may not 'look' native, but it has native performance, whereas Electron really doesn't.

VSCode is indistinguishable from native, so not sure its Electron that's at fault here.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#370

Post by creativecupcak3 »

I will try my best to be nice about this. But what the HECK are you talking about? Yes, of course there is. There will always be.

Electron(or whatever web-based nonsense somebody comes up with six months from now):we've optimized your insane garbage collectors. We've optimized your GPU insane modules. We've optimized data structures to get a 10X performance increase. We've cut down memory usage by half, which still rounds down to AT LEAST 100MB in most cases. Look at me now...

Desktop/Native:Good for you! But did you know my code runs on bare metal? The only thing stopping it is cache misses and dirty TLB entries. Sometimes I can use registers, but there's just a few of them. And, well, stupid RAM sometimes takes over 100 nanoseconds.

Web:What in the world is cache? TLB? Are you on something right now? What is a nanosecond?????

Web cannot perceive what a nanosecond is

Native:There, there. You'll figure it out one day.

I don't want to come off as snarky, but this feels like a dumb question. And yes, I know, from a "business" perspective writing the code "once" and have run everywhere makes more sense. But let's be real, one of the main reasons a lot of these tech companies like Discord/Slack is jumping on the Electron wagon is money. It's cheaper to have one team of developers, than 3 for each platform. But even that argument feels a little weird to me when stuff like Qt that is 100X more mature than Electron will ever be exists. And before anyone asks, as long as you open source your app, Qt is completely free.

I do think that in SOME cases an Electron app MIGHT make sense. But cluttering native platforms with all this bloat is like riding a horse to work on your 40 mile commute instead of your Honda. Even that's a horrible analogy because your Honda is terrible for the Earth. But hopefully you get my point.

This lack of concern for computational resources by us programmers is utterly discouraging. As has been mentioned before in this thread, people that do ACTUAL work on computers will not take the bloated nonsense. Go ask the struggling artist if they prefer to use Krita or the new "modern" app that takes 600MB of RAM and the entire system gets bugged down to the point where they can't do research on their browser while drawing because Windows10/macOS plus the "modern" app takes 90% of their RAM because they have a 4GB/6GB computer.

Well shit, I guess I need a 1500 dollar computer to just draw a few sketches. I already have crippling debt, what's some more debt under my belt gonna do?

Post reply on HN