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The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

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Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#151

Post by littlecranky67 »

boomlinde wrote: post #127
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #68

It is exactly the failure of Microsoft and Apple to propose any meaningful cross-platform API. Both are fighting to increase vendor lock-in - it is in their best interests that apps written on Windows don't work on macOS/iOS and the other way round. Linux/OS folks themselves are unable to solve this problem on their own and it becomes a mouse-and-cat game. The popularity of web apps helped to reduce the problem, but…

I don't get this. I've used GTK, Qt, Tk and FLTK software in OSX, Windows and Linux. The rest is usually covered by standard libraries and third party libraries. So I take it this approach is disqualified on your terms for not being meaningful, which raises the question about what "meaningful" means. My own guess is that it's a matter of convenience of distribution: enter an URL and you can start using the app.

None of those UI libs work on Android or iOS.

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#152

Post by riezebos »

dalmo3 wrote: post #134
riezebos wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not completely true, while WSL doesn't help Windows GUI apps to be more cross-platform, it does help Linux GUI apps to work on Windows[0] So to refer back to the top comment we could say that Microsoft is proposing WSL as a cross-platform API for GUI apps. [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-a...

W11 only, sadly.

Hmm, you're right, I didn't see that part. It seems their original plans[0] have changed...

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-initial-previ...

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#154

Post by TeMPOraL »

mastrsushi wrote: post #53
vbezhenar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is not memory-hungry. Webapps are.

I didn’t think of it that way, It’s probably a tug war

Chrome has stellar engineering work done on it. It'd bet it's in the top 10 of the most optimized pieces of software ever. It's because of this work that modern web applications are even possible.

The consequence - perhaps unintended - is that the web application practices all settled around extremely wasteful but "fast enough" patterns. It takes extra work and going against the grain to make web applications performant, and rarely anyone bothers.

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#155

Post by sciprojguy »

bumbada wrote: post #144

Don't drink the Kool Aid. We have been doing multiplatform development for a long time. It is in our company's interest not to depend on a single provider(like Apple, MS or Google) for anything. It is also in those single provider interests to make you depend on them as much as they can, because every company wants to become a monopoly. If you can not change provider overnight, they have a virtual monopoly over you.…

"Technologies like objective C, C sharp, Azure or swift are designed so you can not escape the company platform. So easy to get in, so hard to move your code to other platforms once you have been programming for years on them."

FYI, Swift is available on Linux and Windows along with a significant chunk of its core libraries (e.g. https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation) and app frameworks such as Vapor (used for writing web apps and APIs).

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#156

Post by TeMPOraL »

junon wrote: post #116
asperous wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40 million Chromebooks will be shipped in 2021!

This comment saddens me.

When I see Chromebooks being mentioned, I always think about "One Tablet Per Child" charity from Person of Interest show.

(Slight spoiler for season 4)

Giving every child in the country a free tablet with Internet access, loaded with quality educational software sounds like a great good, but is it so good if it also comes loaded with surveillance equipment and is controlled by a malicious AI attempting to control human society?

(Chromebooks aren't free and Google isn't an evil general AI, but it is a multinational adtech corporation, which is as close as you can get to amoral GAI in the real world today.)

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#157

Post by anoncow »

This also represents that Windows and Mac OS are no longer the only operating systems. Chrome and Firefox are closely equivalent. And Chrome is the leader with its dominance on Android and Desktop systems.

iOS is the only threat left and if any of the anti-trust measures against Apple are able to break Apple’s grip on the iOS enough to let Chrome or an equivalent browser act as an OS equivalent to what Chrome could do on Android, we could see a very different app ecosystem in the next decade.

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#158

Post by TeMPOraL »

linguae wrote: post #5
mohanmcgeek wrote: post #2

Electron apps are still desktop apps. The web however did eat the desktop: everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app. I have literally 4 apps that I use on my machine: terminal and postman in addition to the above. I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps

Two words: app stores. While this is less of a concern for Google (the Android supports alternative app stores, and Google would love it if we all used Chrome), switching to mobile apps will deprive Apple of a significant source of revenue derived from the App Store. Thus, it is in Apple's best interest for developers to continue writing iPhone/iPad apps and Apple receiving a chunk for each sale than for developers t…

Yup. This bears repeating. Desktop got conquered by web tech because OS vendors had no moat around third-party software. Smartphone OSes managed to create app stores before web technologies got to the point of competing with native, so mobile OS vendors have both leverage and strong business incentive to keep apps native to their platform.

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#159

Post by capableweb »

SPBS wrote: post #67

Why would anyone use Hyper? It's not like there aren't better terminal emulators out there for each platform. Using Electron to emulate a terminal is plain insanity to me, you are trading off performance and system resources for the js hype.

Same reason Rust people use a package manager made in Rust, JS people use a package manager made in JS and Java people use a package manager made in Java, because it's close to the context you're already in and if you need to extend/modify/remove something for your own use/for the community, you already know how to do it.

I myself would never use Hyper, but I can see why people would. If there was a comfortable terminal in/for/with Clojure, I'd at least try it.

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#160

Post by azangru »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #92
crazy_horse wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you see that the top post on HN for a decent chunk of yesterday was celebrating that they were getting 200 rps? 200 rps was not something to brag about to your parents 15 years ago, but half of HN seems to have never heard of serving a static file through Nginx. I don't want to be overdramatic but it confused the hell out of me and it made me worry about the industry. How can you have all these people cargo-culti…

Whats Nginx. Is that AWS. (Kidding) As has been the case since the emergence of MicroSoft, companies in software/internet rely on general ignorance of users/developers for their business plans to succeed. Making people smarter and more self-reliant, running their own software for themselves, is not part of the plan. Making them reliant on someone else is the plan. Desktop has too much potential for user control. Web…

> Whats Nginx. Is that AWS.

Nah, it's Kubernetes

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