Re:Ask HN: Right to Repair for Software?
by 5e92cb50239222b on Friday January 27, 2023 @06:29AM
(#34544904)
I started writing yet another rant about how most HN users don't care about the rest of the planet, but then thought better of it. Long story short: way more people on Earth are using cheap (and thus low-power) hardware then you probably think. And it isn't necessarily old.
Re:Ask HN: Right to Repair for Software?
by _Algernon_ on Friday January 27, 2023 @06:22AM
(#34544871)
Try running eg. Libre Office and gdocs on a 10+ year old laptop. The difference is night and day. And that is a web app which should not be particularly demanding (essentially text entry).
Re:Ask HN: Right to Repair for Software?
by pca006132 on Friday January 27, 2023 @10:28AM
(#34547076)
No, google docs is not just text entry, it is much more complicated than that due to synchronization and they did not try to optimize it well IMO. Text entry, even with highlighting and rich text, can be fast with web app, see VSCode and markdown applications for example.
As an example, see Atom vs VSCode. We thought building a code editor with electron will lead to something slow like Atom, but m$ later proved that it is possible to build something fast. Perhaps not as simple as native, but it can be done.
Web apps is better than native as they are automatically running the latest version, platform independent (windows, mac, linux, android, ios), in some sense more secure. Instead of asking people to write more native apps, I think we should rather ask them to write more quality web apps if they don't need native capabilities.