Native apps meant "for Windows and Mac only". While JavaScript has its problems, nontechnical members of my family are happy to run Ubuntu and get done everything they need to get done, because the browser can do it, because of JavaScript.

And instead of making cross-platform native software toolkits to ease that burden, the industry decided to reinvent the entire von Neumann architecture in interpreted JavaScript and dub it “assembly,” whatever that means. Then since you’re already in a browser at that point, why not phone home and say hi, and anyone who dares to instead suggest that software operate without an Internet connection is told “just stop” because the “market has spoken” and absolutely no progress was made in software engineering until the pointless backlog that nobody looks at was pointlessly filled by pointless, automated telemetry.

Industry practices collapse under the weight of their own complexity and people argue on HN about it with absolutely no context on the real issue, just presupposed bugbears like “privacy”. Video at 11.

JavaScript is the single worst thing to happen to computing in its history. Maybe not the language itself - it’s fine enough for its purposes - but the industry deciding that its purposes overlap with a wildcard glob is a huge mistake that we will be paying for long after everyone in this conversation is deceased. It’s annoying that you credit that situation to JavaScript and laud it given what else comes with doing everything in a browser (enabling the surveillance economy, inadvertent network dependencies, computers running at about 5% ability, etc etc)

> enabling the surveillance economy, inadvertent network dependencies, computers running at about 5% ability, etc etc

I can give you computers running slower. As for the surveillance economy, I am not sure why you think that installing someone else's crap on your computer is preferable compared to running that crap in your browser and blowing most of it away every time you leave the site (or blowing it away completely by clearing your browser's storage). As for network dependencies, websites are now perfectly capable of running offline, while native apps may need network access for doing anything useful as much as a browser app does.

As a developer, I would rather write once and run everywhere. As a user, I would rather not install hundreds of megabytes of someone else's "apps" that could have been a web page on my computer, other than the bare necessities that I am comfortable with. Nor do I particularly care to update those installed apps locally, downloading hundreds of megabytes more or having the risk to run into software version issues. Having vim on my machine is fine. Having Facebook, or Twitter, or Reddit is not.

> And instead of making cross-platform native software toolkits to ease that burden

They exist since decades, but apparently C and C++ are even more hated than JavaScript.

No, they don’t. If they did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Since you’ll probably pedant me with several names I can already think of, it’s worth remembering that existing does not imply easing burden nor being useful beyond a README and a weekend jog.

I could teach you with 30 year experience writing GUIs, but most likely that would require listing several names that you already know.

So lets spend ourselves some time that you can get yourself improving your Electron skills instead.

Linux community can only blame themselves, it is the only platform without a full stack for native development, unless we are speaking about X Athena Widgets, left behind UNIX several decades ago.

Each distribution is a snowflake, and now GNOME even considers UI design tooling something worthwhile killing in name of GtkBuilder with raw XML, exactly what UI/UX designers have asked for.

So everyone pays the cost for a handful of Linux users?

I mean, even if you were fine with that, nowadays pretty much everything is available on Linux too and crossplatform development tools for native applications existed for decades already.