Stop Building Closed Ecosystems • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#171

Post by ladyanita22 » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #13

photochemsyn wrote: post #5

The long-term solution seems to be to ditch iOS and Android on mobile devices entirely and replace them with fully featured operating systems based on Linux, e.g. https://itsfoss.com/open-source-alternatives-android/

That isn't realistic. We already gave pure 'Linux-based' mobile devices and desktops a chance years ago and unfortunately, they haven't taken off commercially. The only one that came out with a inkling of 'Linux' is ChromeOS and Android which both are not even fully open-source and will eventually be moving to Fuchsia-based OS and will ditch the Linux kernel.

At this point I think everyone should have it clear that Fuchsia is not happening.

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#172

Post by rvz » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 9:15 AM UTC

ladyanita22 wrote: post #171

rvz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't realistic. We already gave pure 'Linux-based' mobile devices and desktops a chance years ago and unfortunately, they haven't taken off commercially. The only one that came out with a inkling of 'Linux' is ChromeOS and Android which both are not even fully open-source and will eventually be moving to Fuchsia-based OS and will ditch the Linux kernel.

At this point I think everyone should have it clear that Fuchsia is not happening.

And your source is according to what exactly? Layoffs?

It is already running in production on Nest devices and is able to run the latest Chrome browser and they just did a release days ago.

So it is clear that the intention is that it already just 'happened'.

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#173

Post by dvdkon » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 1:43 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #143

dvdkon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose you don't, at least not as a user. But behind app availability, which is a concern for you, is this whole debate about cross-platform apps. It's likely that the only way you get to continue using your preferred platform and some new app/piece of hardware is if the developers use a cross-platform toolkit. When releasing software, macOS is a small tertiary concern for me at best, behind Linux (for myself), Wi…

This is going to sound a lot worse than I intend it to. But why would users care about a little indy app that’s a bad port with a non native UI when they have the choice of major, popular, commercial apps from the major players?

Well, maybe they shouldn't. Those popular apps are likely to be better just by virtue of being better funded. But if there were apps from the major players for every usecase, all programmers would be working for Adobe-sized corporations. Thankfully, that's not the world we live in.

Recently I've looked at apps for running a "flat owners' association" in the Czech Republic. The general feeling I got was that maybe one was at least approaching intuitive and good looking design. Using a cross-platform UI toolkit wouldn't hurt these apps one bit.

Besides, the only ones that supported macOS at all were web apps, the epitome of non-native. So if a non-programmer wants to manage such an association on a Mac, their only options are cross-platform apps or a spreadsheet, proving my point.

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#174

Post by juunpp » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 4:20 AM UTC

Kinrany wrote: post #111

juunpp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know what the argument is either. Vendor lock-in on behalf of Apple, Google, and Microsoft, sure. But then: > but all frameworks are guilty. Electron, Capacitor, Tauri, Xamarin, Qt, NativeScript, the lot. Well, these all solve entirely different problems. Different problems, different solutions. Not sure what the "lock-in" is here. It's like arguing that there is "lock-in" because one project is written…

> It's like arguing that there is "lock-in" because one project is written in C# and the other in Javascript. Seems like stretching the concept of "lock-in" too thin. This is absolutely an instance of lock-in. An ecosystem grows faster when it can borrow from other ecosystems but doesn't allow doing the same. This is exactly the same problem: there is no good FFI, so we have to write M libraries times N languages.

I agree that M libraries x N languages is an absurd reality (and why I still write C), but "lock-in" to me suggests intent, and the situation you describe is more accidental, at least if you exclude corporate languages like .NET and such.