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Comment by samsquire | Hacker News Reader

There was something magical about this era when I was a child downloading gameboy emulators like No$GBA.

I miss download.com

Is there fewer people making desktop software nowadays? It seems there is less software available. It's also very hard to be profitable and monetize software.

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I hated Download.com. It was buying up all my favorite download sites of the era and shutting them down without integrating their features. I think SoftSeek was my favorite and I'm hard pressed to find even a screenshot of it these days.

Off to look.

Yes, I was late '90s downloading enthusiast, and SoftSeek was the best one, particularly because every app had a screenshot.

https://web.archive.org/web/19991118153527/http://www.softse...

I feel like native desktop development has stagnated a lot in the past 10 years. But Electron and other frameworks have enabled hundreds of desktop software that are basically web tech based.

And all those frameworks add so much bloat.

Windows Calculator now consumes 12 MB of RAM. Sure, 12 MB is nothing when systems have 8+ GB, but if you think about the fact that it hasn't really changed much since Windows 3.1, you have to wonder why it takes a couple orders of magnitude more memory without having significantly more functionality.

I bet if DOOM were to be written today, even using the same assets, it would be a 2 GB install that consumed 4 GB of RAM while running.

For Doom, you don’t have to guess! There are half-dozen source ports that are still under active development - some of them have fairly high system requirements in terms of CPU/GPU/RAM for advanced graphical features, but they’re generally much smaller than 2GB in size. e.g. GZDoom is 16 MB, not including the game assets.

The bloat of abstraction is a small price to pay for the deathmarch of progress. When you look at the ever growing chasm that software needs to fill, it all makes sense.

Consider how the most modern computer most of us could even write an emulator for is over 40 years old. Abstraction is the only way we have a hope of meeting hardware where it has progressed.

Just compare the best game anyone could build with z80 assembly vs. Unreal Engine / Unity. It's easy to pick on a 12MB calculator app, but don't let that rob you of being truly humbled by what can be built today.

> Is there fewer people making desktop software nowadays?

Yes. Developing native desktop apps is more work (Win32 and Cocoa, who even knows those? you'll have to implement the app in both) and these days you'll have to go through the app signing bureaucracy even if you're not using app stores. And good luck with the monetization, especially if you're not distributing through app store or other and paying a huge share for it.

I make my living selling desktop software for Windows and Mac. Yes, there are definitely less of us than there were 15 years ago, when I started. But there are still plenty of niches where desktop apps are as good as or better than web apps. I use C++/Qt to stay away from the horrors of the native Windows and Mac apis and avoid bloat. Code signing isn't a big issue. I don't sell through any app stores. Getting noticed is an issue, but it always has been.

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