“This is not the computer for you”

That sounds flippant, but it's the visceral reaction I have to trying to do everything on iOS (iPads are a little better than iPhone in this regard, but still have the "everything through a keyhole" feeling).

That said, tiny viewports are not really the main problem, since obviously a modern iPhone has far more resolution than almost any monitor available in 1990, or even 2000. It's more that most exploration and creation is not doable on an iPhone, by design.

My original point, though, was that seeing new grad software developers who have never had any non-externally-directed interaction with a computer made me realize why we have to show them how to use the shell in a terminal, and why they seemed to have no particular curiosity about any software thing not directly related to the task that they're doing. For new grads who aren't curious, finding that something they're doing doesn't work due to architectural issues or some nonobvious combination of bugs prompts neither asking for help nor a deep dive into what the problem could be. Asking for help is basically cheating, to them, and they've never before encountered real problems that weren't explained in the text, handled by their group partner, or trivially stack-exchangable (remember, this realization was 2019, and therefore before common LLM usage). At standup after standup, they report making progress on working through the moderately complex ticket they picked up, but in fact, nothing useful is happening. Sometimes people like this can be shown the way, and then become functioning and capable developers and troubleshooters. Sometimes not.

Anyway, /old-man-rant.

The most important one is that an app's lifecycle can be different than a web browser. You don't always keep a web browser open, but you might want to keep Discord open regardless of what you do with the web browser. That kind of lifecycle management can be tedious and frustrating for a regular user.

Discord's electron app has many features that its web app doesn't such as "Minimize to system tray", "Run at startup", "Game/media detection", "In-game overlays" etc.

Even PWAs can't have most of these features, so that's why we have to deploy an entire browser suite per app nowadays.

RDP: Every time a native notification pops up, I get disconnected (usually the notification is about something I've been doing, such as starting a self-hosted server or running winget via unigetui). It randomly disconnects when I've been using it for more than a few minutes, even when there isn't a notification. All of this so far seems to be limited to Android's rdp client (the Windows app). For Windows built-in RDP client, my issue is that there's no way to make it resize the desktop like vmconnect does when you resize the window (and no way to proxy vmconnect connections easily for home use--I do not want to enable WinRM for the full system and figure out how to secure it, I just want a single PC on the LAN to be able to access a single VM conveniently, preferably able to log in as different users)

But there's issues with ssh (and likely WinRM/ps remoting, though I haven't used it) as well: with Linux you need to use sudo, but with Windows there's apparently no CLI requirement; ssh runs elevated (though apparently you can change this; I make do with connecting to a running psmux session that's not elevated). So far as I know, there's no way to elevate without the GUI being involved (admittedly I haven't looked since I started using ssh with Windows).

Linux? Connecting to Linux works perfectly. I can't use xrdp or ssh or vnc or forwarding x11 over ssh or [other] and they work perfectly. I used to use x2go before Wayland, and despite the pain of actually getting it working even that worked better; XDMCP required some amount of setup, but it was awesome (too bad there's nothing that efficient with Wayland); xpra looks great, but either didn't exist or I was unaware at the time. The only issues with Linux remoting are, again, Windows-related (it's seemingly impossible to get vmconnect enhanced session to work properly with Linux at all on Fedora 43; the things I've found online don't seem to work for me).

So this is only for the kids who are obsessed not just with computers, but brand-new computers. Which is a different demographic.