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Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

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Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#61

Post by com2kid »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #49
hedora wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The march toward systemd-electron continues.

This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.

> This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it.

Microsoft did this ages ago, they lost a big anti-trust trial over it.

Aside from that, people ship electron because it works the same across different OSs, if you just want to target one OS, you are better off using that OSs native dev toolkit. Although good luck finding anyone who knows how to write native apps for desktops anymore, and if you are on Windows, good luck figuring out what toolkit you are supposed to use now days!

And Linux has had the decades long problem of QT vs GTK.

So really the only platform with a native toolkit is MacOS, although when it first came out there were actually multiple toolkits to choose from there as well, and now days I think there is some argument over using Swift of not still (not sure, don't keep up).

Or you can just use Electron and skip the above mess entirely.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#62

Post by ajb »

VelesDude wrote: post #44
ajb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if the directX port ever saw the light of day. At that point the top brass were putting their hopes in the 'Network Computer' [1] and Set Top Boxes, so it may have shipped with one of those, or been intended to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer_Reference_Pro...

The NC is one of those things that feels like it was simply to far ahead of where the technology and the mind set of users was. Nowadays it would have much more traction thanks to SaaS. In tech, one step ahead is an innovator. Two step ahead is a martyr.

Yeah, this was back in the days of dial-up.

Chromebooks are effectively the modern NC

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#63

Post by FridgeSeal »

kaspm wrote: post #19
DowagerDave wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scaling software development has been THE vexing problem since day one. There's no doubt that the most efficient system fits in the head of a single person; the challenge is then what?

Efficient but not necessarily better. When I'm solo developing I go back later and I made some questionable decisions a team member would have identified.

My amusing if cynic take: it’s a function of the number of opinions about how to do it. A project can tolerate 2 easily, 3 in many cases, 4 and above is difficult terrain. To scale up team count, you need to increase the count of “unopinionated, doesn’t really care devs” to prevent too many opinionated devs landing on the same part(s) of the projects and conflicting. Put one or 2 on each pillar of the project - 3 tops if they work together excellently. If a project needs more bodies, drop in unopinionated devs. There’s enough bus factor that they catch each others code, but not so much that it grinds to a halt in communication overhead.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#65

Post by qwerty456127 »

com2kid wrote: post #61
qwerty456127 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.

> This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. Microsoft did this ages ago, they lost a big anti-trust trial over it. Aside from that, people ship electron because it works the same across different OSs, if you just want to target one OS, you are better off using that OSs native dev toolkit. Although good luck finding anyone who knows how to write n…

> people ship electron because it works the same across different OSs

Why does Microsoft build the very VisualStudio installer with Electron then?

To me it seems companies ship electron because it's easy to hire a JavaScript developer.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#66

Post by squarefoot »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #49
hedora wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The march toward systemd-electron continues.

This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.

> why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it.

Because it's a wrong approach to a problem that was solved decades ago by much smaller and faster system libraries for UI development.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#67

Post by tedunangst »

mikepurvis wrote: post #50
qwerty456127 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…

Modern multi-user paradigms also have very weird ideas of what’s shared. Like, installing or updating software is the same permission tier as accessing another user’s documents, wtf?

Don't mind me, just updating the software you use to access your documents, nothing to see here, move along.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#69

Post by codebje »

calebpeterson wrote: post #40
codebje wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either software development teams are a wonderful metaphor for multithreaded code, or multithreaded code is a wonderful metaphor for software development teams. I'm not sure which.

Plot twist: the dining philosophers problem was based on a real-life software development team.

Each wants to claim a keyboard and a mouse, but due to new pair programming requirements set by management there is one fewer set of peripherals than there are developers.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#70

Post by [deleted] »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #49
hedora wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The march toward systemd-electron continues.

This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.

[deleted]
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