Just thinking about cloud apps like Microsoft 365, Dropbox etc. and how we now have a generation that doesn’t know what performance looks like.
That’s pretty sad.
I have a 10 gig pipe to my *desk*, running an ultra low latency enterprise network stack, with high-end current generation hardware and the majority of my work is done in… electron and web apps.
By god it’s depressing.
Confused as to how this translates to “Windows is shit, use Linux” to some people. But I’m quite literally using Linux and MacOS.
This isn’t an OS issue, it’s an issue of us allowing non-native applications to be the norm, allowing technology monoliths to dictate if an application works on a given day.
Dictating performance. When something ran slowly we used to re-home it onto faster hardware or upgrade components. Now we have “no matter how fast your device is, you’re gonna get shit performance”.
Waiting a second or more for an action to complete may be acceptable to some, but it’s a problem we solved around 2002.
@SecurityWriter These multi-platform environments are killing the app experience. All in the name of more profits (lower costs). None of them come close to the experience a native app provides. The industry has been making this mistake for decades though (I remember Java being heralded as the solution back in the early 2000s, only the actual result was an abysmal user experience on every platform).
Our machines have become more and powerful, and our UX gets worse and worse. 😞
@SecurityWriter @Bluedonkey I would not blame java on that.
That is largely an issue with a vast majority of java devs suck.
@SecurityWriter No idea what goes through some folks heads... these apps are the same no matter the OS ... which is kinda the point and kinda the problem.
Finding good apps written by intelligent folks is bliss ... I've found a few on iOS recently and they're a joy to work with. I just need to convince them to write Linux versions.
@SecurityWriter Performance of native apps is also dead.
SwiftUI is slower than React.js. Opening uncached views in macOS's Settings app has 1-second lags on the top-of-the-line hardware.
Presumably-native Apple Music macOS app is slower and clunkier than Spotify's Electron app.
Music and similar cloud-driven and streaming apps may be more dynamically rendered, with server-provided specs and content, than you realize. Network has a big impact. Been true for decades. Apple has lots of variation in their app quality and performance, sadly. For many reasons.
While well-written interpreted GUI apps can be fast, they are memory monsters. In general, they are orders of magnitude more expensive, time+space, than a native app.
SwiftUI is, like web, an attempt to trade-off developer ease-of-use for performance. It has similar problem: dynamic interpreters. It seems to have many design flaws, hard to use, sketchy reliability.
Native Apple apps started to suffer with new GUI layout constraints system. Many devs refused to learn how to use it properly. Swift itself has pitfalls, not all at compile time. Objective-C could be blazing fast, but was widely hated.
Many devs still don’t know how to write for network.
Former native Apple dev. I retired a few years ago.
@8r3n7 @SecurityWriter Constraints were truly awful. As limited as HTML table layout (no wrapping), but with worse usability. Blaming devs for not learning it is Apple's blindness to how bad it was. It wasn't worth learning.
I insisted on using Cocoa when Aqua had pixel-perfect design that was impossible to fake. Then it got flattened into an iOS imitation. If I'm going to have plain text gray buttons, I can implement them with CSS. DevTools are way way better than anything in Xcode.
@8r3n7 @SecurityWriter Apple stopped caring about HIG. Released half-assed Catalyst ports. Mixed iOS and macOS design. It completely lost quality and coherence.
There's no way to make an argument to follow native design, when Apple themselves don't know what native even is.
CSS is very powerful, and relatively easy these days. Chrome Dev Tools are excellent. I think this alone keeps Electron as an attractive option, even for macOS-only apps.
OK you have strong opinions.
I'm not going to defend all of the real problems with the Apple ecosystem. I'm not happy with how most of it turned out, either. I simply had a really great time building native apps in the aughts and early tens, and never enjoyed the cowboy environment of web tech. Please don't judge.
I won't argue. I wish things had gone in a different way. I personally hate web UI layout tech. But that's just personal preference. I think it's important not to confuse preference for objectivity, but to each their own.
I thought constraints was a reasonable attempt. App UI—where "app" is, traditionally, something constrained to all four sides of the window—has different needs than web UI—which traditionally did not care about the bottom, because it had to account for arbitrary text flow.
But it's all a grey area now. The world has moved to mostly consuming content, not producing.
Apple needed something that worked on all different screen resolutions and pixel densities, and they wanted it to be deterministic. It is more powerful than flexbox, but it did require a large investment for devs.
Developer UX was a blind spot for Apple. Always has been.
Please don't be angry if you disagree with any of my perspectives. If I am wrong, it's really not a big deal.
@8r3n7 @SecurityWriter Sorry that I sound cranky. I still use macOS, and I mourn loss of my formerly favourite dev platform.
Constraints didn't support breakpoints/reflow, so you had basically a fixed layout that could squish a little.
The entire software development world suffers greatly from a lack of diversity of (healthy, vibrant) options. If you see my other reply to the OP, I blame it on cultural and economic incentives, over which the average developer has little or no control.
I do think it's interesting how much passion has had to be redirected to toy environments, since they are the only safe space to explore certain aspects of craft, especially the need to have strong limits, to define a creative space where one must work really hard to solve problems elegantly.
There is little need for elegance in modern free-form development environments. Unless you are making truly performance-intensive experiences, like games. But who makes boundary-pushing games alone or in cozy teams? The culture of AAA games is a whole other thing.
I personally have given up on software development, for now, for cultural and technical reasons. Not even a hobbyist. More interested in society and human nature, now.
This is a pointless tangent, but I think the web and mobile operating systems contributed more than MacOS and Linux.
Companies write applications in React, and then they can offer a browser version and a React Native version for Windows, Android, and iOS which are all bigger markets than Linux and MacOS.
The real problem is that resource-efficient software isn't winning in the market. I don't think capitalism will ever have a solution to that.
@firebreathingduck @JmbFountain @SecurityWriter This has been true for a very long time. I remember my co-workers in the early 2000's logging into Gnome or KDE and then going to make coffee while the system got around to presenting them with a usable environment. Logging into FVWM took ~1 second, even then. Very few switched away from Gnome/KDE.
I have to use O365 at work now (yes, it's shit), the web apps are more stable and faster than the native apps on Windows :-/
@SecurityWriter I may just try to unplugging my box from the network, or perhaps with a proxy known only to a web browser, to see if this speeds up apps.
We need a ‘hall of shame’ for apps that block UI responsiveness on network requests.
> Waiting a second or more for an action to complete may be acceptable to some, but it’s a problem we solved around 2002.
This really resonates every time I use the new Win11 File Explorer - handful of seconds to traverse each Sharepoint-synced directory. It makes me scream thinking at the amount of time wasted globally due to a single organization negligence.
@paco @SecurityWriter @Viss
Teach them how to speed wait. I took a speed waiting course and I can now wait an hour in only twenty minutes.
Plus even my old '286 had a jumper for 'zero wait states' that made it faster.
@SecurityWriter lets add another layer inside k8s where we'll add four new js frameworks and then subdivide an unneeded memcache layer on another host because the db server on this one is topping out the ram, then run the whole thing in one region of azure on another continent!
oh, whats it do? its just phpinfo()
@SecurityWriter
I remember when Ubuntu started putting everything into Snap containers where I was able to directly compare native apps with their sandboxed counterparts. And nowadays everything comes in flatpaks. Suse thinks about releasing SLES 16 as Just a bunch of Docker containers running in Podman...
No, this is not an OS issue indeed.
@kazriko they’re definitely trying to, but running into a lot of problems. After years of saying “it’s impossible” within about 6 months, they’d turned around this:
I too, also have all self hosted services and local NAS/SAN, but it’s a much harder sell, especially to public sector which largely have a ‘Cloud first’ mandate.
Today, we are taking the next step in strengthening our European digital commitments to empower our customers with greater choice, more control over their data privacy and the most robust digital resilience we have ever offered. Building on our 42-year history as a company in Europe, we are expanding our efforts with Microsoft Sovereign Cloud....
@kazriko Can we assure the nextcloud supply chain? Would we be compensated for impact or damage caused by their software?
That’s the problem.
I love nextcloud, but there’s a lot of steps between it existing and being usable in a mature organisation.
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