The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:15 PM UTC

evilos wrote: post #64

nineteen999 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app. The media creation community is looks at the web programming community and wondering what the hell you are talking about, and why your view is so narrow. Blender, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, Visual Studio, ProTools, Reaper, Substance Suite etc. etc. the list goes on and on. These kind of applications often have extremely heavy system requirements and are…

Visual effects artists and embedded programmers are very niche communities (former embedded SW engineer here). Probably something like 90% of people just need a browser 90% of the time. It's kind of a no brainer from a business point of view. If your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be. Of course there are drawbacks but the economics are in the browser's favor.

[deleted]

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

#182

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:18 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #179

What a lot of people don't appreciate is that a GUI platform is a essentially a marketplace like eBay. There are "sellers" and "buyers". The sellers are the developers. The buyers are the users. Real money is often involved in the transaction. Where do sellers go? Where there are the most buyers! Where do buyers go? Where there are the most sellers! Hence, marketplaces with no physical constraints are natural monopol…

Microsoft's big money probably isn't Windows anymore, but Azure. Given that they make so much more money off their cloud offerings, I suspect that they actively want to kill off personal computing entirely. If so, they're doing a good job with recent Windows releases.

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

#183

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:19 PM UTC

tazjin wrote: post #163

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat. I was asked recently to develop a small custom app for a library that would need to be maintained for decades. This left me scratching my head as to which GUI technology to choose to minimize the danger of it being broken/unsupported after 10 years. Paradoxically, I think Win32 might be the safest choice as MS can't really innovate (=break) too much here anymore (although I might underappreciate…

Emacs Lisp would probably rank even higher.

Or DOS. You can run DOSBox on anything including a web browser.

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

#184

Post by jiggawatts » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:20 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #141

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…

Requests aren't made equal. I don't have an opinion about the manga hosting site, but I have worked on a website where many read requests required a lot of heavy joins other data work for actual useful work and weren't really cacheable, as every used requested his own data. Here's an example: https://cs.fastcup.net/match6279498/stats

Manga hosting is the poster child for slowly-changing, largely read only static content. A bunch of thumbnails and some text, with a basic search function.

The site you linked is more interesting. It's the type of thing where the obvious optimisation would be to perform the complex processing in-memory for live games, and then return a single precomputed static document blob for old games. (I assume the match results don't change over time.)

Most sites have data that isn't anywhere near as "live" as the developers assume it is...

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

#185

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:21 PM UTC

mrighele wrote: post #140

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 think that's the reason. Webapps got widespread when the Internet was still mostly consumed on the Desktop, which essentially meant Windows. The main reason in my opinion is ease of distribution: it has always been painful and full of friction for the end user on Windows, and the web made it much easier. You can see how on mobile platforms, where app distribution is not a big problem, native applications are…

Web applications didn't see wide-spread use until after the release of the iPhone. Prior to that most applications were native or Java.

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

#186

Post by mikewarot » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:22 PM UTC

All of the replies here seem to agree that the desktop market was shattered because it wasn't in any one parties interest to be cross platform, even Linux has multiple GUIs.

All of the solutions that are web based are resource hogs.

Mobile users are going to be stuck using "apps", and thus shouldn't be considered as part of general purpose computing.

All of this tells me there is a market opportunity for a capability based OS to sweep in and offer a desktop environment that allows running old programs, and even operating systems, in a sandbox. It has to be at least as good as Win32/Windows 2000/NT in terms of UI, and run on any modern CPU.

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

#187

Post by jiggawatts » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:24 PM UTC

smackeyacky wrote: post #120

Paradigma11 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) is a cross-platform framework for creating native mobile and desktop apps with C# and XAML. Using .NET MAUI, you can develop apps that can run on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows from a single shared code-base.

No linux. Where 25% of .net developers are. Its not going to fly.

25% of .NET developers are on Linux!? Got an actual statistic to back that up? I would estimate more like 0.25%...

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

#188

Post by tonyedgecombe » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:28 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #182

jiggawatts wrote: post #179

What a lot of people don't appreciate is that a GUI platform is a essentially a marketplace like eBay. There are "sellers" and "buyers". The sellers are the developers. The buyers are the users. Real money is often involved in the transaction. Where do sellers go? Where there are the most buyers! Where do buyers go? Where there are the most sellers! Hence, marketplaces with no physical constraints are natural monopol…

Microsoft's big money probably isn't Windows anymore, but Azure. Given that they make so much more money off their cloud offerings, I suspect that they actively want to kill off personal computing entirely. If so, they're doing a good job with recent Windows releases.

Yes, this chart tells you everything:

https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2019/7/31/49654246-1...

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

#189

Post by tonyedgecombe » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:37 PM UTC

mrighele wrote: post #140

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 think that's the reason. Webapps got widespread when the Internet was still mostly consumed on the Desktop, which essentially meant Windows. The main reason in my opinion is ease of distribution: it has always been painful and full of friction for the end user on Windows, and the web made it much easier. You can see how on mobile platforms, where app distribution is not a big problem, native applications are…

You certainly see that in business. My corporate customers don't want to install anything on the desktop other than Office (and I don't think they like that very much).

This isn't new, I remember talking to the CIO of a big bank twenty years ago about this.

On top of that users quite like software delivered through a browser as it allows them to bypass their IT department.

From the consumer side it's more about costs, people will tolerate all sorts of shit as long as it's free.

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

#190

Post by paulryanrogers » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 12:37 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #186

All of the replies here seem to agree that the desktop market was shattered because it wasn't in any one parties interest to be cross platform, even Linux has multiple GUIs. All of the solutions that are web based are resource hogs. Mobile users are going to be stuck using "apps", and thus shouldn't be considered as part of general purpose computing. All of this tells me there is a market opportunity for a capability…

The sandboxes would have to be both secure and transparent enough normal users can get their work done. Hardware support would also be a huge factor. I doubt it's possible by anyone less than a FAANG company, and there isn't much money in the prospect, IMO.

Still, it could be marvelous.