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Comment by konart | Hacker News Reader

I hope you are joking. I have Fedora 34 with Gnome 40 right now on my gaming PC as a second system and I can barely find two windows (not even apps, just two windows) that can be defined as "nicely done". Everything else is terrible. Even worse once you start looking for apps on he net. Everything that is not Electron-base is simply ugly, constructed without any thought about UX.

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Not joking. Everything Electron is actually the opposite: ugly. It doesn't blend well at all (maybe macOS Electron is a bit better). Native GTK apps are beautiful, which one you don't like? Only applications that are not on latest GTK might look out of place, but I am talking all the new stuff, from Calendar to Maps.

You might have hit on a solution here: Electron, or, ideally, a really nice mobile-first web browser with access to APIs provided by the underlying Linux OS.

I’m essentially imagining a phone OS that decouples the front-end and backend design. Implement the apps as APIs. Implement the UI using HTML5 so more designers can use their existing skills to contribute & the GUI layer can be replaced more easily. The experience would be a refinement of pulling a Docker image and opening a browser to use it on localhost.

Edit: a mobile OS also needs a really nice mobile-first shell app. People do so much with text messaging now that I think they might be open to it…

Flutter or something similar + your backend of choice.

There's a prior attempt in the form of Firefox OS, which tried to push the “Web technology as driver of local UI” thing. Some cursory looking around suggests that webOS may also have done this, but I'm not as sure (it would make sense from the name).

You're basically describing WebOS and FirefoxOS.

WebOS lives on as LuneOS (and runs on the pinephone), but FirefoxOS effectively went closed source and became KaiOS.

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