Native desktop apps are never coming back. It will either be Electron or mobile apps emulated on desktops.
Now, as I finish up this response to you in Safari, a native desktop app, remind me what were you saying about native desktop apps again?
† I don’t know what to call this editing paradigm. It’s somewhere between source-editing and WYSIWYG. Document markup nodes are rendered as their source syntax when your cursor is “inside” them, allowing for plaintext modification of the syntax; but then, when your cursor leaves a node, it switches to rendering as its formatted output instead. You can cursor back into the node to edit it more at any time. It’s pretty unique. It’s the editing style that Slack’s new input box wishes it had.
I think there will always be a category of people who prefer using native apps for performance, security, or access to OS features. Anecdotally I looked at the apps I have installed and I found out that I don’t have many electron apps on my Mac beside chat apps and VS Code. I suspect non tech-savvy people might have even less, since they do a lot more inside their browsers compared to before.
I’m not sure what you refer to when you say “native desktop apps aren’t coming back”, given that they never left t begin with.
So, perhaps, soon we will have PWAs instead of bunch of electron apps each carrying its own Chromium.
That is how they work across ChromeOS, Android and Windows, with Apple being the outlier for obvious reasons.
KDE3 did the same with KParts, but it was several times better.
It would be less efficient and more wasteful to continue things as normal where every program has its own Electron. People already use Electron type apps. New ones are being made every day. That's not going away. If Microsoft and Apple put this in the OS, it would decrease the user's resource utilization. It's a net win for everyone except maybe chip manufacturers.
As for desktop Linux, GNOME3 already works like Active Desktop did. The whole shell is JS (and the GObject mess down below). I have used a lot of desktop environments. I've been skeptical of the JS eating the world trend. But I have to admit it's smooth. I had bad experiences with KDE (Qt/C++). Not only does it look ugly, it segfaults constantly.
Would it have been better to make a desktop environment in something more, uhh, professional like Go or Java? Of course. But that's not what the crowd decided. There's nothing quite like React for native desktop GUIs. Regardless of your opinion of JS, you have to admit that the React way was a game changer. Since there are no alternatives, the path of least resistance is to simply use React as is for desktop applications, which is exactly what has happened.
I have to kill gnome-shell maybe once a week. That's a huge improvement over KDE.
Xfce to me is just too ugly to use. And it messes up my system with all these trash Xfce-only applications and mime associations (seriously what's exo-open and why is it still causing problems 2 years after I uninstalled xfce?).
Bloat is something only insiders care about. I care more about adoption of free software than I do about its quality in the academic sense. The way to get adoption is UX and looking nice. If you're trying to convince someone to switch from Windows, what would you show them, Xfce or GNOME3?
>GNOME3 is polished and works, Not even close. It uses huge loads of RAM while Budgie, while using the same technology, is far snappier. For a current user, I'd suggest Solus with Budgie.
> Native desktop apps are never coming back
I really hope you're wrong. This would be a terrible outcome for so many reasons. I refuse to use Electron apps on my personal laptop on account of the absolutely noticeable degradation of performance and battery life from using these Electron apps. Using vscode literally halved my battery life.
They never went away to start with, it is just a couple of Electron outliers out there.