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Make Apps for Linux

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Re: Make Apps for Linux

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're making the right decision. Open-source is extremely difficult to make even a living wage off of - the number of people who do is orders of magnitude smaller than those who make a living off of commercial software.

It's definitely possible to make a decent living with FOSS software. One of the main contributors to my note-taking app is @bjorn[1] who developed the awesome Tiled editor[2] and managed to figure out a sustainable way to earn a living from donations/sponsorships. There are probably more instances of that. I tried to go the same route, but other than a $5 monthly payment on Patreaon (thank you awesome contributor!) I…

Oh, yeah, it's totally possible - just do a HN search and you'll find people who are doing it (e.g. Andrew Kelley, the Zig designer - and he's making a programming language, which nobody will pay for in this day and age!).

However, like being a social media "influencer" (e.g. Twitch streamer), it requires a lot of both hard work and luck, has a limited amount of "capacity", and isn't a viable source of income for most people.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#82
post #34

I think the premise is wrong when there still doesn’t exist a core set of frameworks that are abi stable on Linux. On competing platforms there are way more frameworks out of the box (CoreImage, CoreAudio, CodeML, SceneKit, AppKit, etc) and they don’t break as often. I know in Linux they have fun things like snap and flatpak but it is really solving the problem using a bit of infrastructure and package management ins…

That core would be GNOME or KDE frameworks, coupled with the FreeDesktop standards, at least that was the plan about 20 years ago.

However as the site says doing distributions is what most folks keep doing, and naturally there isn't a single stack that can keep up with snowflake distributions.

In the end, Google took the Linux kernel, placed two core set of frameworks, one in Java, and the other in JavaScript, and naturally those are the winning Linux distributions for regular consumers.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#83

The problem is OSS software not even trying to compete with the market. People using OSS software taking it for granted that the UX is going to be subpar, and it really is. Regular propriety software faces the risk of their users not paying, therefore adapting to make end user experience great. OSS usually doesn't have that risk. Open source needs to be exposed to risk from end users. I tried to change that with Note…

There is a large intersection of Linux users and people who cherish their freedoms. For many people, using non-open source note taking software is a non starter because of the vendor lock-in and privacy concerns. Thus, you'll probably lose out more by not open sourcing the program than by open sourcing it and risk having some people not pay. I wager a lot more people is willing to pay than use proprietary software. A…

I'm a big believer in open source software. I've had wonderful contributors and I'm using qutie a few open source libraries/components in my own apps. That's why I open sourced my own app.

I've tried many different options so I could make a living with it (ads, donations, premium features). There are definitely more ways to explore. But for now, I need to ensure that my financial situation is stable before anything else. Then, maybe in the future I'll be able to afford tinkering with a sustainable way of open sourcing.

I've also started to notice many VCs starting to invest in open source software (just today saw Godot featured on HN). So that can also be a potential route.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#84
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CLI is peak UX for anyone technically competent.

Utter nonsense. The CLI lets you do complex custom things that you sometimes can't do with a GUI. But it is pretty awful from a UX point of view. Terrible discoverability, terrible UI, very unfriendly, no contextual help, etc. etc. I can't think of a worse interface from a UX perspective.

Really? Do you communicate with ChatGPT by pointing at pictures?

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#85
post #26

The problem is OSS software not even trying to compete with the market. People using OSS software taking it for granted that the UX is going to be subpar, and it really is. Regular propriety software faces the risk of their users not paying, therefore adapting to make end user experience great. OSS usually doesn't have that risk. Open source needs to be exposed to risk from end users. I tried to change that with Note…

The CLI is peak UX for anyone technically competent.

We should have kept using MS-DOS...

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utter nonsense. The CLI lets you do complex custom things that you sometimes can't do with a GUI. But it is pretty awful from a UX point of view. Terrible discoverability, terrible UI, very unfriendly, no contextual help, etc. etc. I can't think of a worse interface from a UX perspective.

Really? Do you communicate with ChatGPT by pointing at pictures?

That is a REPL, not a CLI.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utter nonsense. The CLI lets you do complex custom things that you sometimes can't do with a GUI. But it is pretty awful from a UX point of view. Terrible discoverability, terrible UI, very unfriendly, no contextual help, etc. etc. I can't think of a worse interface from a UX perspective.

Really? Do you communicate with ChatGPT by pointing at pictures?

Conversation mode, where you talk with it, is quite an improvement over having to type at it, especially for slow, hunt and peck typers.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#88
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CLI is peak UX for anyone technically competent.

Utter nonsense. The CLI lets you do complex custom things that you sometimes can't do with a GUI. But it is pretty awful from a UX point of view. Terrible discoverability, terrible UI, very unfriendly, no contextual help, etc. etc. I can't think of a worse interface from a UX perspective.

The manual exists for a reason. I find it much easier to type `man program` then `/whatever` until I find what I'm looking for rather than scanning the screen for the correct icon. There are also some conventions and after a while you get to a point where it's intuitive to use any new program. Just like with a GUI and icons, what does the wand do?

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#89
post #26

The problem is OSS software not even trying to compete with the market. People using OSS software taking it for granted that the UX is going to be subpar, and it really is. Regular propriety software faces the risk of their users not paying, therefore adapting to make end user experience great. OSS usually doesn't have that risk. Open source needs to be exposed to risk from end users. I tried to change that with Note…

The CLI is peak UX for anyone technically competent.

That's what people who gained their technical competence in a CL environment always think: we're always most productive in the interfaces we are familiar with. I'll agree that most technically competent people probably prefer using the command line for many tasks, but correlation != causation. It's really easy to mistake our own preferences for being objectively good, generally... which is why designers exist, why most user-facing commercial software doesn't require reading a single line of documentation, and why most FOSS projects-- almost entirely indifferent to or hostile towards deliberate design-- are only useful to people who have a working mental model of what's happening under the hood.

I was strictly a vim guy for a decade and a half... my coworkers occasional snicker merely steeled my resolve, but I knew I was doing the pure and efficient and technically correct thing by sticking to barebones vim. Lots of vim stuff and ex commands are beneficial to my workflow, but after a coworker convinced me to try out some more modern options with vim modes, I realized that my attachment to vim as an editor was driven by my emotional investment in how many times I struggled with vim's clunkiness. I wore it as a badge of honor. I thought it gave me cred. In reality it just showed how utterly inflexible I was. The Jetbrains editors, for example, offered more functionality out of the box than I could practically cram into my vim setup, yet was completely configurable, and the features were generally intuitive and discoverable. I didn't have to look up how to do some relatively obscure thing in ex-- there was probably a menu option for it so I just didn't have to keep it in my head. Sure, vim is and always will be my default editor for light editing, and there are obviously people whose use cases are perfectly satisfied by using it. However, assuming for years that I was more technically competent for doing intensive professional work in complex codebases using that clunky old editor was plain old self-indulgent arrogance, like most other nerd badge-of-honor things are.

I've been using command line environments daily for decades, and usually head there first to do many tasks, but many of these archaic tools only persist because of a reverse eternal-September problem. By the time someone gets technically advanced enough to start influencing how our technical environments work, the curse of expertise obfuscates their downsides and they mistake their own comfort with something for it being objectively good.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#90
post #52

> Target All The Linux Distributions If you are going through the trouble of targeting all Linux distributions , why not just target all platforms by using a framework like Flutter or React?

Then you are stuck using basically a browser wrapper for your UI, which frankly sucks for performance and native integration most of the time.

The move to making everything a webapp is great for development velocity right until you smash into one of the many, many corner cases where it sucks.

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