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> booked tickets for a flight or bought a home or a car or watched a cat video Would you install a native app to book a flight? One for each company? Download

> booked tickets for a flight or bought a home or a car or watched a cat video Would you install a native app to book a flight? One for each company? Download updates for them every now and then, uninstall them when you run out of disk space etc I can ask the same question about every other activity we do in these non-native apps.

pjmlp 1y ago
I have installed all them on the phone, so yes. Unfortunely several of them are glorified webviews. I am old enough to have lived through the days Internet meant a set of networking protocols, not ChromeOS Platform. And on those days hard disks were still bloody expensive, by the way.
- rglullis 1y ago
  > I have installed all them on the phone, so yes. Isn't your phone providing a sandbox, a distribution system, a set of common runtime services, etc to get these native apps functional? You don't have to squint your eyes to realize that this thing we call "document browsers" are doing a lot of the same work that Apple/Google are doing with their mobile OSes.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    You mean like Windows Store, Mac App Store, apt, yum/dnf, emerge,....? All the OS frameworks that are available across most operating systems that don't fragment themselves into endless distributions?
    - rglullis 1y ago
      > don't fragment themselves into endless distributions? My dear Lord! In what world are you living in? Take a look at all of the "mobile apps" you installed on your phone and tell me which of those would ever devote any resource to make a apt/rpm repository for their desktop applications. Even the ones that want to have a desktop application can not figure out how to reliably distribute their software. The Linux crowd itself is still at the flatpak vs AppImage holy war. Mark Shuttleworth is still beating the snap horse. The Web as a platform is far from ideal, but if it weren't for it I would never been able to switch to Linux as my primary base OS and I would have to accept the Apple/Microsoft/Google oligopoly, just like we are forced to do it at the mobile space.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        In the world we build for ourselves, a worse is better mentality world.
        rglullis 1y ago
        > a worse is better mentality world. Seems like your preferred world is the totalitarian "choose any color you want as long as it is black" one, where everything is perfectly optimized and perfectly integrated into a single platform.
        btreecat 1y ago
        > > a worse is better mentality world. > > Seems like your preferred world is the totalitarian "choose any color you want as long as it is black" one, where everything is perfectly optimized and perfectly integrated into a single platform. Idk, I have a feeling they would be anti systemd too
        rglullis 1y ago
        I am not so sure. Both Pottering and pjmlp are German.
        pjmlp 1y ago
        While I live in DACH region, my passport carries another flag.
        pjmlp 1y ago
        Yep, think different.
        rglullis 1y ago
        I don't know if you are serious or just trying to evade the discussion. Two questions: 1) What is the primary OS for your desktop? 2) Would you sincerely make the argument that a world where everyone submits to a single design (Apple-style) would be better than an "organic" world where the barrier of entry is lower, but less "optimal"?
apitman 1y ago
You're doing all these things with web apps also, it's just that the browser orchestrates it for you. But for some reason this takes 20M lines of code, which creates a moat that prevents browser competition.
- yellowapple 1y ago
  Any sufficiently-capable graphical application runtime* contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a web browser. (* including every web browser)

pjmlp 1y ago

I have installed all them on the phone, so yes. Unfortunely several of them are glorified webviews. I am old enough to have lived through the days Internet meant a set of networking protocols, not ChromeOS Platform. And on those days hard disks were still bloody expensive, by the way.

rglullis 1y ago
> I have installed all them on the phone, so yes. Isn't your phone providing a sandbox, a distribution system, a set of common runtime services, etc to get these native apps functional? You don't have to squint your eyes to realize that this thing we call "document browsers" are doing a lot of the same work that Apple/Google are doing with their mobile OSes.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  You mean like Windows Store, Mac App Store, apt, yum/dnf, emerge,....? All the OS frameworks that are available across most operating systems that don't fragment themselves into endless distributions?
  - rglullis 1y ago
    > don't fragment themselves into endless distributions? My dear Lord! In what world are you living in? Take a look at all of the "mobile apps" you installed on your phone and tell me which of those would ever devote any resource to make a apt/rpm repository for their desktop applications. Even the ones that want to have a desktop application can not figure out how to reliably distribute their software. The Linux crowd itself is still at the flatpak vs AppImage holy war. Mark Shuttleworth is still beating the snap horse. The Web as a platform is far from ideal, but if it weren't for it I would never been able to switch to Linux as my primary base OS and I would have to accept the Apple/Microsoft/Google oligopoly, just like we are forced to do it at the mobile space.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      In the world we build for ourselves, a worse is better mentality world.
      - rglullis 1y ago
        > a worse is better mentality world. Seems like your preferred world is the totalitarian "choose any color you want as long as it is black" one, where everything is perfectly optimized and perfectly integrated into a single platform.
        btreecat 1y ago
        > > a worse is better mentality world. > > Seems like your preferred world is the totalitarian "choose any color you want as long as it is black" one, where everything is perfectly optimized and perfectly integrated into a single platform. Idk, I have a feeling they would be anti systemd too
        rglullis 1y ago
        I am not so sure. Both Pottering and pjmlp are German.
        pjmlp 1y ago
        While I live in DACH region, my passport carries another flag.
        pjmlp 1y ago
        Yep, think different.
        rglullis 1y ago
        I don't know if you are serious or just trying to evade the discussion. Two questions: 1) What is the primary OS for your desktop? 2) Would you sincerely make the argument that a world where everyone submits to a single design (Apple-style) would be better than an "organic" world where the barrier of entry is lower, but less "optimal"?

apitman 1y ago

You're doing all these things with web apps also, it's just that the browser orchestrates it for you. But for some reason this takes 20M lines of code, which creates a moat that prevents browser competition.

yellowapple 1y ago
Any sufficiently-capable graphical application runtime* contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a web browser. (* including every web browser)