Aren’t Qt and GTK cross platform? I have Dolphin and Kate running on my Windows work laptop.
What kind of shit for brains asshole is still defending Windows in 2025?
Lololol
Abstraction layers? In MY messy pile of spaghetti ass code!?
It’s more likely than you think.
The real reason is it’s a pain in the ass to deploy software in Windows. It’s not like you can easily set up a server and put some packages on and have it just automatically apt update to that. Sure there’s some “Enterprise” servers you could set up (and pay license fees for) that might work somewhat like that, but it’s easier to just make it a web app and deploy to an internet webserver.
For product distribution, you need someone download an .exe, hope a virus scanner won’t block it, maybe pay microsoft to sign it or whatever, hope the user has a compatible version of windows, and maybe they can get some working software. But then you have to make some mechanism to handle updates and hopefully that doesn’t get blocked by some security software. So it’s easier to make your software a web application.
Also putting out windows native applications means you might not be able to enshittify it later since people could continue to use the old version forever. It’s weird to assume enshittification happens accidentally, but it’s actually what some companies want to do their software because $$$. They want applications they can enshitty later, they don’t make applications that may work on linux and whoopsie it just somehow got enshittified because of that… somehow.
But many times it’s just best solution. If an application doesn’t need access to anything on my system, I’d rather it be a web app. App does the thing I need, and when I’m done, I close the tab and we’re done. Why install more software on my system if I don’t need to?
Someone obviously missed their nap and is having a tantrum.
Since when has competition ever spurred innovation? Pff
Meanwhile Microsoft makes the start menu with React
Well, at least it’s React Native, seemingly. Also from what I’ve heard it’s only one section like rendering results from the web or some shit like that.
I try not to let considerations get in the way of doing great work.
“I am a react developer”
I thought we are supposed to be language-agnostic after 3rd project.
No way that’s real. Tell me it’s not real
That is the most punchable response I’ve seen in a while.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I feel like that reply would have fit better one comment level higher.
This is what’s wrong. Distilled.
He’s a magician, because reading this, I aged 10 years and grew a metastatic tumor.
I welcome other’s input but I thought this was a pretty clear cut case of Mac becoming popular. Why write a program for Windows and Mac when you can just make a website. Then Chromebooks in education sealed the deal.
Linux is only starting mainstream use now because of Europe’s push for digital sovereignty and windows 10 end of life.
Tell me you have no idea how software development works without saying it…
I read it twice and it felt like word salad.
Clearly rage bait
“Raaaaah my 10 year old no-name laptop with a second-rate CPU and 4 gigs of RAM runs Windows like dirt 'cos Linux raaaah”
My 13 year old Thinkpad runs Linux great ‘cos Linux…
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The user land API/ABI is stable to a fault in Linux. The kernel API/ABI is unstable.
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Companies are cheap. They hired web devs then tasked them with building a desktop application rather then hiring people to write native apps. They had a hammer and used it to fix every problem they had.
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macOS is just as affected by electron apps as a Linux is.
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Electron is horrible, but it does bring apps to many an OS once Chromium is ported.
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Open protocols or open APIs from the company would fix the non-native app problem.
The user land API/ABI is stable to a fault in Linux. The kernel API/ABI is unstable
It’s the other way around. The kernel API stable to a fault, the kernel ABI isn’t. If your application only relies on the kernel API you won’t have many compatibility issues. If you rely on userland stuff such as C++ stdlib, GTK, QT, Python, … Good luck.
I wasn’t clear and that seems to have cause some confusion. I was talking about the Linux kernel itself, and only the Linux kernel.
There are two sides to the Linux kernel: internal exposed to drivers and such, external syscalls exposed to the public. That’s what I was talking about.
All bets are off with 3rd party software. That’s just a general problem in software development. It’s not specific to Linux, and it’s why vendoring libraries is recommended.
This is why all the 3rd party software is frozen at a point-in-time with fixes backported in distros like Debian or RHEL. It fixes the problems of devs being mercurial. The distro is the SDK. It creates a stable base, and it works rather well.
Unfortunately, most software relies on libc and a compiler. Both of which can be problems, and both of which are external to the Linux kernel. There’s not much which relies on only kernel syscalls.
Further, if you get code into the kernel, anyone who breaks it needs to fix it. So it seems to me it’s only a problem if you’re trying to do something like maintain a proprietary driver without putting it into the kernel? Or something to that effect?
Basically. Out-of-tree drivers are annoying without an LTS kernel.
There are also out-of-tree drivers which don’t get mainlined for one reason or another even though they are FOSS. OpenZFS has this problem, and now so does bcachefs.
But the Electron Apps are resource intensive, namely RAM.
Well, RAM is dirt cheap anyways. /S
Edit: I bought this one for 180 in another site just a few months ago. It now costs as much what I paid for RAM, CPU + MOBO. Dodged a bullet not waiting for the black Friday “deals”
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I have this sudden urge to do an FLTK project.
(Apple as a platform is so closed that it couldn’t be influenced by this utter crap and the developers can use the OS native API’s.)
A hidden gem of stupidity and nonsense in the already pretty dumb tirade.
This is such a hilariously bad take. I like how “I can’t use Win32 on Linux” morphed into “re-write the whole app in Javascript just so I can use Electron.”
Meanwhile, Wine and QT are like: “am I a joke to you?”
I’ll add that (IMO) a lot of applications are becoming increasingly malicious, although less-so in the desktop space. I’m happy that devs like this are forced to quasi-sandbox their crap into a browser. Actually, if anyone knows how to crack into an Electron app in order to restore local plugins, user-scripts, and sandbox security controls, let me know. Or just liberate the guts into a local web app instead so I can use a real browser? This trend could be very useful for local security if those features become available.
I can code in C on all 3 (more if you include BSDs). You would not believe how amazing my skills are to avoid platform specific dependencies in a language that predates all these OS.
When I grow up I want to be like you
How do you deal with platform specific stuff? I am talking about desktop API and friends. (If that’s even a thing in your problem space). /gen
I only just realized the Proton and Electron naming schemes lol
Electron was developed to make Atom.
Add Lepton to the list!
Wow. I didn’t realize this until you pointed it out. Thanks. TIL.
Yeah they both end in “on”, duh
