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>They could port Unity to SF if they wanted, but what apps are you actually going to launch then What apps do people actually use on Ubuntu today? All the Ubun

>They could port Unity to SF if they wanted, but what apps are you actually going to launch then What apps do people actually use on Ubuntu today? All the Ubuntu users I know just use it to run a web browser, and maybe a few other things that can be trivially moved into the browser (IRC, text editing, ssh). Native software is dead. Move to Open Web Standards and you won't have to worry about platforms changing core libraries and breaking all your apps ever again.

s_kilk 14y ago
Personally: Web browsers, Emacs, Terminal, LibreOffice occaisionally. That's about it.
- stephenr 14y ago
  And what do you use in the terminal?
  - s_kilk 14y ago
    Everything that's not a web-browser ;)
    - stephenr 14y ago
      Hence "native software" isn't dead.
jiggy2011 14y ago
I think saying native software is dead might be a little premature, I could give you a list of the native software I use in Ubuntu but it would be quite a long post.
k_bx 14y ago
Firefox, Emacs, Terminal, KeePassx, Skype, Empathy, Chrome, Clementine, Tomboy, gcalc, vlc, transmission, sound converter, steam, gedit, evince (pdf viewer), virtualbox, kolourpaint, gimp, libreoffice, thunderbird, dropbox, cheese, alarm, system monitor, VPN client, screencloud. That's just from recent apps.
- dylangs1030 14y ago
  Don't forget Eclipse and vim :)
  - k_bx 14y ago
    I'm sure there's a lot I didn't mention. I've also reinstalled Ubuntu recently (I "upgraded" from 12.10 to 12.04 LTS :), maybe some apps are just not installed yet. p.s.: meld, kdiff3, pgadmin3, sublimetext2
noarchy 14y ago
I use Sublime Text, Intellij, Eclipse, along with LibreOffice, Firefox, terminal, and a handful of other things. I'd be doing the same if I was using a Mac or Windows machine.
Shorel 14y ago
> Native software is dead. Apart from Hacker news and reddit, I need nothing online, and in fact I hate to use the browser when a more suitable native option is available. May be it is different for the million social apps in phones, but I don't need them nor care about them.
dylangs1030 14y ago
With the exception of BBEdit and Creative Suite 6, I have just about every staple of my Mac OS X environment in my Ubuntu workspace. Sure, I don't have cool things like Evernote or Writeroom or Text Wrangler. But when I need to hunker down and get the job done, I do have my Eclipse, Emacs, vim, Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Gimp, Gedit, VLC, etc. For every app in my Mac OS X dock, there's at least one native substitute on my Ubuntu boot. And it's just more fun to work on sometimes. There are errors you sometimes encounter which are simply easier to debug on a linux terminal than a Mac terminal in my experience.
rayiner 14y ago
> Native software is dead. That's quite a leap considering that the big movement of late has been towards native apps (in the context of tablets/phones), and considering that everyone hates it when someone releases an iOS or Android app that's simply a web app in a wrapper. Also considering that much effort is being spent on things like PNacl to get native apps to run over the web. Web apps still suck compared to their native counterparts. And as long as that's the case, native apps aren't going anywhere.
- anon1385 14y ago
  >That's quite a leap considering that the big movement of late has been towards native apps (in the context of tablets/phones) That was a few years ago, the industry has moved on since the iPhone. I can't think of any exciting new native apps in the last few years. Were there even any native apps at all created by the last batch of YC companies? >Also considering that much effort is being spent on things like PNacl to get native apps to run over the web. PNacl is not going to take off, and rightly so: it's Google's attempt to lock the web into their own proprietary platform. >Web apps still suck compared to their native counterparts I disagree. I don't have to worry about saving, I can use them from any computer anywhere in the world and continue what I was doing. I don't have to worry about updates. My system won't get compromised because I forgot to install a vital security upgrade for app X Y or Z. My app won't suddenly get deleted from my computer because the OS vendor decided to censor it. I don't have to worry if it will run on my system, or work out what dependencies I need to install. It will always just work.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Since when is "created by the last batch of YC companies" the benchmark for the direction the industry has been moving? How about: Apple spent the last few years making a huge amount of money pushing a new platform for native apps (iOS). Google and Microsoft followed suit with Android and Windows 8. That's been the story of the last few years. The big movement has been towards tablets, and tablets have been a vehicle for native apps. Re: web apps sucking--many of the issues you mention are solved on iOS/Android, and can be solved by backup mechanisms like Dropbox.[1] Some of the issues you mention are imagined (OS vendor deleting apps from your computer). Finally, you fail to address the actual point, which is that web apps suck at what they do. The most popular and commonly used web app is probably Google Docs, and it's total shit. It's so shitty that I'm pretty sure AbiWord in 1998 was a better product than Google Docs circa 2013. I can't remember font rendering shittier than Google's PDF viewer in the last decade, and that's going back to GTK 1.x here. It's a cute trick that's helpful in a pinch, but it still sucks compared to even shitty native Office competitors. [1] It's telling that arguably the most well-known YC company's product is fundamentally based on making it easy to integrate native apps with cloud storage.
mbq 14y ago
Native will never die, and this is because there is a fundamental problem with webapps -- they lay on a wrong abstraction, a document delivery system. To this end, they will always require huge amount of hacks to overcome its restrictions (security issues, browser overhead and bugs) and to emulate stuff native apps gather for free from OS, like file systems, cross-process communication, i18n, networking, device access, compositing, UI look&feel and so on. About breaking cross-platform apps... there is simply a better solution -- open, solid protocols. If a protocol solves some problem, it will get great apps on all platforms and will be supported for years, outliving dozens of closed solutions (think of e-mail, jpeg, ssh, pdf, ftp, csv or BibTeX).
- anon1385 14y ago
  The web has totally changed compared to just a few years ago. The things you mention were once issues, but are solved now :) >security issues web apps run in a secure sandbox. Native code is insecure by comparison. Users don't trust native apps. >browser overhead irrelevant in the age of multi GHz CPUs in your phone > bugs native platforms have bugs too >file systems most people don't need a file system at all when they have the cloud, but it's there if you need it http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/filesystem/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/filesystem/ >cross-process communication http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/ http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/ >i18n libraries for that will come >networking Websockets, WebRTC etc >device access anything common or mainstream is already available (cameras, microphones, gps, accelerometers etc) > compositing https://www.khronos.org/webgl/ https://www.khronos.org/webgl/ >UI look&feel The freedom to create your own UI without being constrained by platform conventions is going to open up many new and exciting UI paradigms now that we finally get a true open and free market in interface ideas. >About breaking cross-platform apps... there is simply a better solution -- open, solid protocols protocols and file standards won't save your app from breaking when the OS vendor kills the framework you are using
  - gngeal 14y ago
    "web apps run in a secure sandbox. Native code is insecure by comparison." Of course it is safe. You have at least two options: software sandboxing (NaCl, Vx32, OS-based sandboxing...) or proof-carrying typed assembly. Of course, the first option is complicated by the horrible state of the most prevalent hardware architecture available today, but that's something to be fixed in the future anyway. "irrelevant in the age of multi GHz CPUs in your phone" Oh, thank you very much. You're perpetuating the trend of "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" with this kind of thinking. "native platforms have bugs too" And studies confirm that the amount of bugs is largely proportional to the LOCs. The web-based approach, however adds a few million lines of code to something that would have, say, tens of thousands at most on its own.
homeomorphic 14y ago
> Move to Open Web Standards and you won't have to worry about platforms changing core libraries and breaking all your apps ever again. Instead the user has to worry about whether or not the many libraries bundled by the webapp are all kept up to date by each and every app developer. Gone will be the days of shared libraries and centrally managed security updates for those. And don't suggest that webapps are secure because they run in a sandbox. Just wait, as more and more people move their work to webapps, more and more flexibility will be demanded. Soon you'll have to pierce sandboxes because AppA needs to throw data to AppB with a little Python script you wrote inbetween. Then the security issues will come, as will the library incompatibilities, and we'll be back where we are now, except the heterogeneous world of today will be replace by a JS monstrosity with browsers playing OSs.

s_kilk 14y ago

Personally: Web browsers, Emacs, Terminal, LibreOffice occaisionally. That's about it.

stephenr 14y ago
And what do you use in the terminal?
- s_kilk 14y ago
  Everything that's not a web-browser ;)
  - stephenr 14y ago
    Hence "native software" isn't dead.

jiggy2011 14y ago

I think saying native software is dead might be a little premature, I could give you a list of the native software I use in Ubuntu but it would be quite a long post.

k_bx 14y ago

Firefox, Emacs, Terminal, KeePassx, Skype, Empathy, Chrome, Clementine, Tomboy, gcalc, vlc, transmission, sound converter, steam, gedit, evince (pdf viewer), virtualbox, kolourpaint, gimp, libreoffice, thunderbird, dropbox, cheese, alarm, system monitor, VPN client, screencloud. That's just from recent apps.

dylangs1030 14y ago
Don't forget Eclipse and vim :)
- k_bx 14y ago
  I'm sure there's a lot I didn't mention. I've also reinstalled Ubuntu recently (I "upgraded" from 12.10 to 12.04 LTS :), maybe some apps are just not installed yet. p.s.: meld, kdiff3, pgadmin3, sublimetext2

noarchy 14y ago

I use Sublime Text, Intellij, Eclipse, along with LibreOffice, Firefox, terminal, and a handful of other things. I'd be doing the same if I was using a Mac or Windows machine.

Shorel 14y ago

> Native software is dead. Apart from Hacker news and reddit, I need nothing online, and in fact I hate to use the browser when a more suitable native option is available. May be it is different for the million social apps in phones, but I don't need them nor care about them.

dylangs1030 14y ago

With the exception of BBEdit and Creative Suite 6, I have just about every staple of my Mac OS X environment in my Ubuntu workspace. Sure, I don't have cool things like Evernote or Writeroom or Text Wrangler. But when I need to hunker down and get the job done, I do have my Eclipse, Emacs, vim, Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Gimp, Gedit, VLC, etc. For every app in my Mac OS X dock, there's at least one native substitute on my Ubuntu boot. And it's just more fun to work on sometimes. There are errors you sometimes encounter which are simply easier to debug on a linux terminal than a Mac terminal in my experience.

rayiner 14y ago

> Native software is dead. That's quite a leap considering that the big movement of late has been towards native apps (in the context of tablets/phones), and considering that everyone hates it when someone releases an iOS or Android app that's simply a web app in a wrapper. Also considering that much effort is being spent on things like PNacl to get native apps to run over the web. Web apps still suck compared to their native counterparts. And as long as that's the case, native apps aren't going anywhere.

anon1385 14y ago
>That's quite a leap considering that the big movement of late has been towards native apps (in the context of tablets/phones) That was a few years ago, the industry has moved on since the iPhone. I can't think of any exciting new native apps in the last few years. Were there even any native apps at all created by the last batch of YC companies? >Also considering that much effort is being spent on things like PNacl to get native apps to run over the web. PNacl is not going to take off, and rightly so: it's Google's attempt to lock the web into their own proprietary platform. >Web apps still suck compared to their native counterparts I disagree. I don't have to worry about saving, I can use them from any computer anywhere in the world and continue what I was doing. I don't have to worry about updates. My system won't get compromised because I forgot to install a vital security upgrade for app X Y or Z. My app won't suddenly get deleted from my computer because the OS vendor decided to censor it. I don't have to worry if it will run on my system, or work out what dependencies I need to install. It will always just work.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Since when is "created by the last batch of YC companies" the benchmark for the direction the industry has been moving? How about: Apple spent the last few years making a huge amount of money pushing a new platform for native apps (iOS). Google and Microsoft followed suit with Android and Windows 8. That's been the story of the last few years. The big movement has been towards tablets, and tablets have been a vehicle for native apps. Re: web apps sucking--many of the issues you mention are solved on iOS/Android, and can be solved by backup mechanisms like Dropbox.[1] Some of the issues you mention are imagined (OS vendor deleting apps from your computer). Finally, you fail to address the actual point, which is that web apps suck at what they do. The most popular and commonly used web app is probably Google Docs, and it's total shit. It's so shitty that I'm pretty sure AbiWord in 1998 was a better product than Google Docs circa 2013. I can't remember font rendering shittier than Google's PDF viewer in the last decade, and that's going back to GTK 1.x here. It's a cute trick that's helpful in a pinch, but it still sucks compared to even shitty native Office competitors. [1] It's telling that arguably the most well-known YC company's product is fundamentally based on making it easy to integrate native apps with cloud storage.

mbq 14y ago

Native will never die, and this is because there is a fundamental problem with webapps -- they lay on a wrong abstraction, a document delivery system. To this end, they will always require huge amount of hacks to overcome its restrictions (security issues, browser overhead and bugs) and to emulate stuff native apps gather for free from OS, like file systems, cross-process communication, i18n, networking, device access, compositing, UI look&feel and so on. About breaking cross-platform apps... there is simply a better solution -- open, solid protocols. If a protocol solves some problem, it will get great apps on all platforms and will be supported for years, outliving dozens of closed solutions (think of e-mail, jpeg, ssh, pdf, ftp, csv or BibTeX).

anon1385 14y ago
The web has totally changed compared to just a few years ago. The things you mention were once issues, but are solved now :) >security issues web apps run in a secure sandbox. Native code is insecure by comparison. Users don't trust native apps. >browser overhead irrelevant in the age of multi GHz CPUs in your phone > bugs native platforms have bugs too >file systems most people don't need a file system at all when they have the cloud, but it's there if you need it http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/filesystem/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/filesystem/ >cross-process communication http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/ http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/ >i18n libraries for that will come >networking Websockets, WebRTC etc >device access anything common or mainstream is already available (cameras, microphones, gps, accelerometers etc) > compositing https://www.khronos.org/webgl/ https://www.khronos.org/webgl/ >UI look&feel The freedom to create your own UI without being constrained by platform conventions is going to open up many new and exciting UI paradigms now that we finally get a true open and free market in interface ideas. >About breaking cross-platform apps... there is simply a better solution -- open, solid protocols protocols and file standards won't save your app from breaking when the OS vendor kills the framework you are using
- gngeal 14y ago
  "web apps run in a secure sandbox. Native code is insecure by comparison." Of course it is safe. You have at least two options: software sandboxing (NaCl, Vx32, OS-based sandboxing...) or proof-carrying typed assembly. Of course, the first option is complicated by the horrible state of the most prevalent hardware architecture available today, but that's something to be fixed in the future anyway. "irrelevant in the age of multi GHz CPUs in your phone" Oh, thank you very much. You're perpetuating the trend of "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" with this kind of thinking. "native platforms have bugs too" And studies confirm that the amount of bugs is largely proportional to the LOCs. The web-based approach, however adds a few million lines of code to something that would have, say, tens of thousands at most on its own.

homeomorphic 14y ago

> Move to Open Web Standards and you won't have to worry about platforms changing core libraries and breaking all your apps ever again. Instead the user has to worry about whether or not the many libraries bundled by the webapp are all kept up to date by each and every app developer. Gone will be the days of shared libraries and centrally managed security updates for those. And don't suggest that webapps are secure because they run in a sandbox. Just wait, as more and more people move their work to webapps, more and more flexibility will be demanded. Soon you'll have to pierce sandboxes because AppA needs to throw data to AppB with a little Python script you wrote inbetween. Then the security issues will come, as will the library incompatibilities, and we'll be back where we are now, except the heterogeneous world of today will be replace by a JS monstrosity with browsers playing OSs.