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I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

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Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#151

Post by famouswaffles »

ryandrake wrote: post #17

Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck . They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern i…

>To me, in my open source projects, my "development cycle" ends when I push to git, and that can be done as often as I want.

If development ends at a git push and users are left to build/fend for themselves (granted this is a lot of open source), then yeah not much difference, but if you're building and packaging it up for users (which you will more likely to be doing if your project is an app specifically) then the difference is massive.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#152

Post by kylemaxwell »

otterley wrote: post #58
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck . They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern i…

To be fair, probably most of us here on HN write software to put food on the table. Don’t pooh-pooh our careers.

Both can be true: we can have different preferences about what we're doing to put food on the table and what we're doing when we build something on our own for other reasons.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#153

Post by d3Xt3r »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #129
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck . They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern i…

To me, I prefer desktop apps because I KNOW when I've upgraded - it either said "upgrade now?" and did it, or, in the olden days, I had to track it down, or I installed an updated version of a distro, which included updated apps, so I expected some updates. There are some things that NATURALLY lend themselves to a website - like doctor's appointments, bank balance, etc - but it's still a pain when, on logging in to "…

> For something like Audacity (the audio program), how the heck does it make sense to put that on a website (I'm just giving a random example, I don't think they've actually done this), where you first have to upload your source file (privacy issues), manipulate it in a graphically/widget-limited browser

I understand it was just an example, but you'd be surprised how far browsers have come along with technologies like Web Assembly and WebGL. Forget audio editing, you can even do video editing - without uploading any files to the remote server[1]. All the processing is done locally, within your browser.

And if you thought that was impressive, wait till you find out that you can can even boot the whole Linux kernel in your browser using a VM written in WASM[2]!

But I do agree with your points about lack of feature stability. I too prefer native apps just for the record (but for me, the main selling points are low RAM/CPU/disk requirements and keyboard friendliness).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47847558

[2] https://joelseverin.github.io/linux-wasm/

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#154

Post by TacticalCoder »

the__alchemist wrote: post #83
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck . They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern i…

They're also ubiquitous for creative works, i.e. the sort of things a small set of people spend much time on, but is not something most people use. Examples: - CAD / ECAD - Artist/photos - Musician software. Composing, DAW etc - Scientific software of all domains, drug design etc

Slicers for people doing 3D printing too (don't know if webapp slicers are more common than desktop app slicers though).

Desktop publishing.

Brokerage apps (some are webapps but many ship an actual desktop app).

And yet, to me, something changed: I still "install apps locally", but "locally" as in "only on my LAN", but they can be webapps too. I run them in containers (and the containers are in VMs).

I don't care much as to whether something is a desktop app, a GUI or a TUI, a webapp or not...

But what I do care about is being in control.

Say I'm using "I'm Mich" (immich) to view family pictures: it's shipped (it's open source), I run it locally. It'll never be "less good" than it is today: for if it is, I can simply keep running the version I have now.

It's not open to the outside world: it's to use on our LAN only.

So it's a "local" app, even if the interface is through a webapp.

In a way this entire "desktop app vs webapp" is a false dichotomy, especially when you can have a "webapp (really in a browser) that you can self-host on a LAN" and then a "desktop app that's really a webapp (say wrapped in Electron) that only works if there's an Internet connection".

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#155

Post by Pannoniae »

mpyne wrote: post #141
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language). The impact on people's time, money and on the environment are proportional.

> But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language) Does it? Have you compared a web app written in a sufficiently low level language with a desktop app?

Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser. Even fairly decent-looking ones, not your Doom or Quake!

And if we're talking about simple GUI apps, you can run them in 10 megabytes or maybe even less. It's cheating a bit as the OS libraries are already loaded - but they're loaded anyway if you use the browser too, so it's not like you can shave off of that.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#156

Post by trueno »

onionisafruit wrote: post #18

This is from 2009, and the title should say so.

yeah perfect, i came in here to say

I'm done making web apps (2026).

seriously desktop apps kinda own i just desktop-app'd a pwa made it do SSO auth at my org and now its just part of the self-serve application download kiosk and we're laughing at all the pain we've endured for so many years writing up proposals and billing to scale up web app infra for internal tooling and stuff.

im kinda enjoying coming back to earth right now with my team and we're just hmmmmmmm'ing a lot of things like this. we've had devops chasing 23498234892% availability with k8s and load balancers and all this stuff and we're now assessing how much of that cruft was completely unnecessary and made everything some amorphous blob of complexity and unpredictable billing & and really gave devops a moat to just say "no" to so many things that came through the pipeline. there's so many things that can just be dragged back to like an actual on premise machine and served up through the internal network. we are... amused at how self-important we made ourselves out to be this past decade.

we're probably like days worth of goofing away from going to buy a few mac minis and plug it into some uninterruptable power supplies and just seeing how un-serious we can get with so much tooling we've built over the years. and for everything else, desktop apps. seriously desktop apps is like free infrastructure if you build it right.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#157

Post by itsgabriel »

ryandrake wrote: post #17

Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck . They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern i…

I generally agree. If you're not doing it for money you don't technically need most of these things. But if you see open source as more than “here's the code” some of them matter. Support will find you, via GitHub issues, emails, or DMs. Analytics is really important because it shows whether the software works for people besides you. Without money you usually do not have playtesters or a UX designer, so you get fewer useful bug reports. Frustrated users rarely take the time to write a detailed issue.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#159

Post by CMay »

In practice this was about a product that is not targeted at desktop-savvy people. At the same time, you also have people who know "this isn't a hard problem, why do I need go through all this. let me go look for someone who did it better." Not to mention all of their younger tech savvy family telling them, "don't download anything!"

If your product targets a segment that expects a desktop app, do that. Web app, do that. Phone app, do that.

Something like this would have worked if it was still back in the Walmart bargain software shelf where people could impulse buy a CD, put it into their computer and have it automatically start and install, then show up on the desktop. Despite that being less common now, it was more streamlined in a way for many users.

Many of those people probably aren't logged into Steam or Windows Store either, so you have to do your own thing. It makes sense that web is the least friction for those people.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#160

Post by yen223 »

traderj0e wrote: post #150
mwkaufma wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I know I was there -- also today's wasteful "open-web alternatives" wouldn't fly anyway, because I recall even during the XP era having min-specs of, like, 800mhz/512mb

Yeah, they were like "Flash is too slow" then the replacement was 5x slower

No one argued Flash was too slow, they argued (correctly) that Flash was closed source, proprietary, and had a lot of security issues
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