OD_

> How would you create a native GUI app on Linux for either Gnome or KDE, considering that GTK and Qt are not allowed by this definition? >And yes, you may think: "Easy, if a GTK app runs on Linux its native, if it runs on another platform, it's not". Does that mean JavaScript apps for Gnome[1] can be called native, because they have officially blessed bindings to the underlying framework/platform and are fully integrated with GTK?

Actually, yes, by definition a javascript app written with gobjects is native to a Gnome desktop. It fully integrates with the standards of the system be it text boxes, keyboard shortcuts, general behavior and widget look. The most important, even more than our personal little preferences, is that a native app can be accessed by things like screen readers which is the only way for a person with a disabled sight to use a computer. Anything not written with GTK on Linux is going to be a black box for Orca. In fact webapps would be less of a pain than a compiled app that uses a random crappy cross platform toolkit. While the web's accessibility could do with some improvements, it's still better than the absolute nothing that cross platform toolkit represents.

Sometimes devs put extra effort into making cross platforms apps accessible but they're the exception rather than the norm : https://www.parhamdoustdar.com/2016/04/03/tools-of-blind-pro...

The reason being is that native apps get "most of the work" done for them for free when they use the native tools to make apps, while cross platform apps require a severe amount of work to get them to talk to screen readers correctly.

Android Studio seems to be gaining on that side despite the original platform being pretty poor. And of course Sublime Text is absolutely unusable in that scenario.

Some apps do crossplatform the right way, although they're rare: they have have a platform-specific GUI rather than use a generic cross toolkit. Transmission is a solid example :

https://transmissionbt.com/

The app has a Cocoa, GTK, Qt, TUI and Web end user interface. It's native on all the officially supported OSes. There's a non-native, Qt-using windows port but it's a third party fork and not supported by the main devs.

But sublime isn't really a native app either. When did we start corrupting the meaning of native? When electron apps appeared, and we wanted to divide "compiled" versus "interpreted webapps" on the desktop?

Cross platform toolkits, be it proprietary, one-off like Sublime's, or things like Qt, GTK, WxWidgets, Java Swing, were NEVER considered native. Just because an app is written in C or C++ doesn't make it platform native.

Textmate is a native editor for MacOS. Sublime is not.

From what the developer has stated on reddit, it's more like he wants to aggressively make changes on the filesystem right now, before any attempt at mainlining into the kernel, to not end up like btrfs, which in his view, was mainlined prematurely.

The cheese graters cost between two to four times the price of an iMac depending on the era we're talking about (price fluctuations of the PowerMac/Mac Pro). Counting the fact that you do need to buy an external monitor to go along with it. That counts for something.

Apple never had a usable entry level desktop computer tower. Something with high performance on consumer class CPUs, rather than Xeon and ECC ram. The Mac Mini was always crippled to keep it from competing with the iMac and cheese graters among people who want something better performing.

The iMac is popular because it's the best performance to price ratio. Not because the form factor is any good. For the longest time the entry level MBP (and unibody Macbook before then) was also Apple's best selling laptop and they only recently cut it out from their line-up and replaced it with the Air as their entry level offering. The Air will also exist for as long as they keep selling the current Macbook at those prices because most people are not willing to spend 1449 euros on a machine that barely performs better.

The suse folks adopting btrfs says more about suse than it says about btrfs. I still remember in the past how I got tricked into believing ReiserFS (3, not the 4 that never made it into the kernel) was a good filesystem despite the broken fsck, the lack of defragmenting tools and many other issues listed there : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS#Criticism It was also the only time I've had a FS really eat my data after forced shutdowns (cutting off power). They kept pushing ReiserFS as the default until 2006, 5 years after the release of ext3 which added journaling to the ext family of filesystems. Ext3 was a much better filesystem all around. Suse only switched to ext3 because of the controversy with ReiserFS's author and the uncertain future of Reiser4, not because they admitted that ReiserFS was bad.

I will not make the mistake of putting any worth to suse's words again. Doing it again with btrfs shows they really have a knack for going edgy with filesystems while absolutely no other linux distribution is willing to recommend btrfs.

I trust the Red Hat guys to show more care and this is what they had to say only a year ago about btrfs:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/37l2mf/i_am_matthew_...

"The btrfs developers keep telling us that it's not ready, so we're following that. (From one of our storage exports: "Btrfs will be ready in two years. The problem is, that's also going to be true next year, and in two years....") We try to be first where we can, but not at the cost of data loss for users.

-- Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Lead"

Doesn't look good to me.

As long as RH or Debian do not start recommending btrfs one cannot give it consideration in good conscience.

Some of the niches that the 3DS owned up until now might be disrupted by the Switch though. I'm one of these old school (as in, thoughtful turn based combat, whether tactical ala FE or FFT, or more about party building and dungeon exploration like SMT and Etrian) RPG gamers who bought the 3ds solely games like the Fire Emblem, Etrian Odyssey, Shin Megami Tensei, Devil Survivor series, and of these, Atlus has already announced that the next major sequel to SMT will be on Switch instead of 3ds. The DS and 3ds up until now had all the major games of the series (Strange Journey, IV, IVA). It's nice to see the series go back to a more powerful console, we have missed seeing those demons animated in 3d the way they were in Nocturne on Playstation 2. Can't say I will miss the 3ds if the other game series follow suit.

Fire Emblem also traditionally had home console releases alongside portable gamesystems, but the Wii U flopped too hard for niche games to have much room. Concentrating developer efforts on a single console that does both portable and home, large screen play is a smart move for Nintendo.

The SNES is not underpowered compared to the genesis if you compare them as a whole and not just spec for spec like comparing mhz on a CPU. Console hardware is made for running games and are not general computing devices. The snes hardware had many hardware supported graphical modes that allowed it to push the envelope without relying on a beefier CPU, the most famous of which is Mode 7 which allowed the pseudo 3d you see in games like F-Zero, the FF world maps, Mario Kart, Secret of Mana, Super Mario RPG and so on. And then there was this very common practice on SNES to embed coprocessors and DSP on the game cartridge, which is what allowed the graphical effects of Star Fox and Yoshi's Island notably. There was no such practice on the Genesis.

> The list of Super NES enhancement chips demonstrates the overall design plan for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, whereby the console's hardware designers had made it easy to interface special coprocessor chips to the console. This standardized selection of chips was available to increase system performance and features for each game cartridge. As increasingly superior chips became available throughout the SNES's vintage market years, this strategy originally provided a cheaper and more versatile way of maintaining the system's market lifespan when compared to Nintendo's option of having included a much more expensive CPU or a more obsolete stock chipset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_...

As far as graphical capabilities were concerned, the SNES ecosystem was definitely more powerful. By the time Sega considered the idea of extending the Genesis with the 32X it was already too late into the console lifecycle to matter and flopped (very close to the release of the Sega Saturn and 1 to 2 years before the Nintendo 64, depending on your region [NA, EU, JP]).

There was also the Sega CD but all it did is enable a library of not-games pseudo-interactive movies.