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Make Apps for Linux

makealinux.app

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Re: Make Apps for Linux

#211

Post by chefandy »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #145
chefandy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like to shit on tools like Electron, but there's a reason they're popular. If you need to reach a broad audience with a native tool, using heavy-handed web-based plumbing is a bigger win for Linux users than supporting only windows and macos where like 97% of desktop users are.

Hold on mate, isn't that what Java was supposed to solve. I remember before the days of electron when I was a wee lad in the 2000s, all cross platforms apps were Java. Look at Ghidra, it's a Java app for Windows, Linux and Mac. The "holy trinity" of operating systems, covered with one language and framework. So what happened? Did devs forgot Java exists and felt like reinventing the wheel but worse this time?

Java is great for making huge well-organized codebases with a lot of developers, especially if you've got good tooling support or a rich ecosystem of existing code to work with. Outside of that... If it was a good development ecosystem for native gui-based apps targeted at end users, why wouldn't the preponderance of native user-facing apps be written in Java, anyway? Ask nearly any experienced mobile app developer if they're more productive in Java on Android or Swift on iOS-- it's not even close. Sure, some of that is the OS itself, but a whole lot of it isn't. On the desktop, the one time I tried to make something with Swing I wanted to Fling my computer out the window. Clunky.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#212

Post by ziml77 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #174
zlg_codes wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who uses Linux as a daily driver, I can recognize these gargantuan apps a mile away and stay away from them. They are absolute hogs of system resources, and for something simple like Etcher there's no excuse. Things like Electron are good for devs but bad for users. We have more computation power than ever and yet programs still run slow.

Oh, it gets better. Even the default Weather app shipping with Windows 11 is also an Electron pile of trash that uses ~520 MB of RAM. Just let that sink in. 500MB of RAM just to show you the weather forecast for the day and week. That was my entire system RAM of my Windows XP gaming rig. Same for the Widgets app, it's not only bad because it shows you news and ads when you open it, it's worse because it's also, you g…

The Weather app in Windows 11 a UWP .NET Native wrapper around WebView2 controls. It's exceptionally silly that it's basically just a web browser with predefined tabs and that it uses so much RAM, but it's not Electron.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#213

Post by FirmwareBurner »

ziml77 wrote: post #212
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, it gets better. Even the default Weather app shipping with Windows 11 is also an Electron pile of trash that uses ~520 MB of RAM. Just let that sink in. 500MB of RAM just to show you the weather forecast for the day and week. That was my entire system RAM of my Windows XP gaming rig. Same for the Widgets app, it's not only bad because it shows you news and ads when you open it, it's worse because it's also, you g…

The Weather app in Windows 11 a UWP .NET Native wrapper around WebView2 controls. It's exceptionally silly that it's basically just a web browser with predefined tabs and that it uses so much RAM, but it's not Electron.

Oh my bad. I think I saw it call some Edge system components in task manager and I assumed it must be Electron.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#214

Post by emptysongglass »

There's a lot of complaints that there isn't much in the way of tooling to create cross-OS compatible apps but I disagree. Just looking at solutions which aren't Electron:

- Telegram uses Qt and ships a performant native app across all three OSes

- Flutter compiles down to native code across all three (and mobile)

- Kirigami is a QtQuick framework that will give you an executable app across all mobile and desktop targets

Go and build your app. There's no reason this needs to an excuse to flame on Linux.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#215

Post by chefandy »

prmoustache wrote: post #209
chefandy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse for users than nothing? IT shouldn't be a default, but if it's that or nothing-- as it often is when it comes down to limited resources-- I think it's better than nothing. If you're looking to make a useful tool for a broad audience that must run locally, you have to support windows because that's where 80% of the users are. You should support OSX because that's where 15% of the users are. That's two codebases…

Your postulate that it is electron or nothing is wrong from the very start.

You postulate that I said that, which is wrong.

> IT shouldn't be a default, but if it's that or nothing-- as it often is when it comes down to limited resources-- I think it's better than nothing.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not. It's certainly an option that's very efficient for dev resources, which is often the primary limiting factor. It's certainly the only real option if you've already got a team of web developers, which is very common.

The current state of commercial software supporting linux with native apps is a pretty good indicator of how companies are viewing this equation. The amount of resources it takes to make a native java app is vastly different than the amount of resources it takes to make a native electron app. If you don't understand how that would be something that would open the possibility of supporting linux in many cases, I'm not sure what to tell you.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#216

Post by FirmwareBurner »

Dalewyn wrote: post #202
zer0zzz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most underrated feature of windows probably ever.

It really is mindblowing that Windows 11 is still capable of running 32-bit programs written for Windows 95 , that's 28~29 years of backwards compatibility and environmental stability. If we look back to programs written for Windows NT 3.1, released in 1993 , and assume they run on Windows 11 (because why not?) then that's 30 years of backwards compatibility. Did I say mindblowing? It's downright mythological what Mi…

There's no guarantee that all the older apps from the Windows 9x/XP days will work today, as some apps back then, especially games, made use of non-public/undocumented APIs or just straight up hacked the OS with various hooks for the sake of performance optimizations. Those are the apps guarantee not to work today even if you turn on compatibility mode.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#217

Post by pizza234 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #133
abhinavk wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had read somewhere that Win32 (via Wine or Proton) is the most stable target for Linux right now.

>Win32 (via Wine or Proton) is the most stable target for Linux right now Tangential, Winamp 2.xx from the '90s runs and plays MP3s just fine on Windows 11 today. There are better apps for that today, but I still use it because nostalgia really whips the llama's ass. Pretty wild that the same thing is not the norm in other OSs. Even wilder is that I still have my installed copy of Unreal Tournament 99 from my childho…

> If that's not stable, I don't know what is.

What is? An immense amount of resources (developers) poured into developing live patches to make applications work on each newer version of Windows (or helping the application developers fix their applications). It's an interesting conceptual grey area - I don't consider it backward compatibility in a strict sense.

This is documented in the book "The old new thing" by Raymond Chen (it's possible also to read the blog, but the book gives an organic view).

It's fascinating how far-sighted Microsoft was; this approach, clearly very expensive, has been fundamental in making Windows the dominant O/S (for desktop computers).

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#218

Post by nmz »

zjp wrote: post #5

Maybe I'm just too ignorant to know the pattern that determines whether I need to specify 'dev' and 'version' on a package or some random trailing '1' or '0', but the first linux distro with a sensible and consistent naming scheme for packages is the one that wins my heart. `libgnutls-dev` `libgtk-3-0` `libwayland-server0` `libxcb1` `libx11-6` `libffi-dev` `libncurses5-dev`

There's gobolinux, which in my view solves everything and isn't as complicated as nix... nobody cared.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#219

Post by zlg_codes »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #174
zlg_codes wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who uses Linux as a daily driver, I can recognize these gargantuan apps a mile away and stay away from them. They are absolute hogs of system resources, and for something simple like Etcher there's no excuse. Things like Electron are good for devs but bad for users. We have more computation power than ever and yet programs still run slow.

Oh, it gets better. Even the default Weather app shipping with Windows 11 is also an Electron pile of trash that uses ~520 MB of RAM. Just let that sink in. 500MB of RAM just to show you the weather forecast for the day and week. That was my entire system RAM of my Windows XP gaming rig. Same for the Widgets app, it's not only bad because it shows you news and ads when you open it, it's worse because it's also, you g…

Good lord, that's crazy, haha. You'd think with all of their different frameworks, one would have been more suitable than starting from scratch with a browser tab, jeez.

I recently upgraded to 10 because of Steam requiring it in a few weeks, and it's been an adventure. Lots of crashes and restarts that I didn't ask for. I really don't know who exactly modern Windows is for, because I'm a gamer and programmer and it's not been good for either of those tasks...

Windows 7 was solid and I almost never had issues out of it. It booted and got out of the way.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#220

Post by ben-schaaf »

blt wrote: post #99
360MustangScope wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo, I think that Flutter is one of the best ways to make native Linux applications at the moment. It can look just like a GTK, macOS and Windows app and you have a more enjoyable experience.

Don't know it, but from the website it looks mobile-first and intended for simple apps like Spotify. Don't get the impression that I could build something like Blender or Kdenlive with it. Maybe my impression is wrong, but I would hesitate to use a framework for a purpose that the developers consider fringe.

To be fair you can't use any gui toolkit to make something like blender. It's all custom.
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