Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? by seventh-chord on Sunday May 17, 2020 @02:43PM (#23214202)

The "<resource> is cheap" mantra also really only makes sense if you are writing server code, where you yourself pay for all the memory your code will ever use. If you deploy code to a large number of users it makes little sense. If a million users start your app daily, and your app has a 5 second load time and uses 300mb of ram, you are wasting over 50 days of user time, and hogging close to 300 terabytes of ram.

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Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? by hobofan on Sunday May 17, 2020 @04:09PM (#23214960)

So you are telling me that I can easily exchange development time which I would have to pay for end-user resources, which I would not have to pay? Sounds like a great deal.

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Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? by dialamac on Sunday May 17, 2020 @04:16PM (#23215027)

In a fair society it should be taxed as an externality. There is a real environmental cost associated with software bloat.

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Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? by hobofan on Sunday May 17, 2020 @04:34PM (#23215199)

Then I hope we would also tax the bad UX of the competing 20-year old Frankenstein applications, which lead to slower business processes (= more resources used as well).

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Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? by pkalinowski on Sunday May 17, 2020 @04:33PM (#23215185)

People pay with electricity, uncomfortable temperature and fan noise, wasting time working on slow apps.

Apparently, they trade off still worth it, as many electron apps are popular despite these issues. Many times there is electron app or nothing.

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Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? by p_l on Sunday May 17, 2020 @06:24PM (#23216060)

Your last sentence hits the nail - many users don't have a choice in selecting the application, and due to industry fads can't expect to have a better option.

I can make a great chat system that uses fast native client, but it won't change the fact that Corporation A paid for a slack license and won't switch to mine.

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Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? by swiley on Sunday May 17, 2020 @09:53PM (#23217374)

In a fair society closed software would be illegal and people wouldn’t tolerate this kind of stupidity.

No need to hack it with taxes.

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Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? by CawCawCaw on Sunday May 17, 2020 @10:59PM (#23217836)

> In a fair society closed software would be illegal

What?

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Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? by mrweasel on Monday May 18, 2020 @06:30AM (#23220635)

People also takes it a bit to far. Sure, RAM is cheap enough, but if your application requires 64GB of memory you may start having other issues.

We have customers who requires servers with 64GB+ memory, of single applications. This is running on VMs in VMWare. If a ESXi host crashes, you'd want VMWare to migrate your VM to another ESXi host, but that becomes somewhat tricky if you need to locate one with 64GB of available memory. Unless of cause you're way over-provisioned, which is actually pretty expensive. More realistically VMWare will start moving a ton of VMs around to put all those with little memory usage on other hosts, in an attempt to find 64GB for your VM. This takes time.

It can be difficult to explain to people that really this should look at their memory consumption, if nothing else to plan for fail-over.

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Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? by MattGaiser on Sunday May 17, 2020 @07:00PM (#23216328)

Waste the company does not have to pay for is not waste as far as they are concerned. Customers rarely notice that kind of waste either, or at least not enough to do anything about it.

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Re:Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? by CJefferson on Sunday May 17, 2020 @05:50PM (#23215829)

But, I am traiding my time for my user's CPU and RAM, and evidence suggests many users are willing to pay the CPU and RAM to get more apps with more features.

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