>But what does distributed mean in this context? The older Jetbrains IDEA IDE is a monolithic local application. E.g. it does both UI navigation _and_ batch p

>But what does distributed mean in this context? The older Jetbrains IDEA IDE is a monolithic local application. E.g. it does both UI navigation _and_ batch processing work like source code indexing. Fleet is re-architected to be "distributed" aka "client/server" style into a "lightweight" frontend + "heavyweight" backend. E.g., the frontend does UI navigation and basic syntax parsing but the backend (which can be on remote servers) can do full codebase indexing. As a bonus, the code index database can be shared by many frontends. Code indexing for huge repos (e.g. 1 million LOC) takes a very long time and is one of the complaints of classical IDEA IDE performance being sluggish. Take the "code indexing" example and extend it to other "heavy" backend batch processes like linting, testing, etc. The backend can also be in the cloud. As a footnote, Fleet is also a competitive response to MS VSCode by having collaborative features. But my comment mostly answers the "distributed" aspect. Related articles that also have the client+server diagram: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3664112/jetbrains-fleet-the-future-of-ides.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3664112/jetbrains-fleet-th... https://blog.jetbrains.com/fleet/2022/01/fleet-below-deck-part-i-architecture-overview/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/fleet/2022/01/fleet-below-deck-pa... >frontend + backend is not distributed, but it definitely is client/server architecture EDIT to clarify: the "distributed" is describing "distributed application" of client+server ... like 1st sentence of wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client%E2%80%93server_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client%E2%80%93server_model