Comment by benhurmarcel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benhurmarcel | Hacker News Reader

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There are more and more paying/professional-quality software that is available on Linux, mainly due to the popularity of Electron and subscriptions:

- Companies choose Electron to reduce the cost of supporting Windows and Mac, which has the side effect of making Linux supported easily even if the market isn't there. People sure like to complain about Electron but it has been very beneficial for Linux desktops.

- Selling Linux software has always been hard, mainly due to piracy and a widespread aversion to closed-source software within Linux users. With subscription business models being more popular/acceptable nowadays, which comes along a requirement to be always-online, such services are more easily available on Linux too.

For example Linux has VSCode, Spotify, 1password, Bitwarden, Obsidian, Slack, Discord, Skype, Typora, Simplenote, Inkdrop, Wordpress, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Signal, Atom, Ghost… It has improved drastically from even just 10 years ago, when almost no popular software/service was available.

And that's not mentioning the general shift to using webapps instead of desktop apps (Google Workspace, Office 365, most email services, Jira, Github, Asana…), which obviously makes Linux much more viable.

Write once run everywhere has really become a reality with Electron in a practical sense that wasn’t ever quite as real before.

A lot of mudslinging about performance but for a devoted team it’s very possible to build a solid web app.

Love what it’s done for software

Would you not consider Java as write once run anywhere? I mean, that was basically its whole selling point.

I feel its popularity is more to do with one stack everywhere, than say, some groundbreaking tech idea.

All that aside, I must agree. Electron, however you view it, has greatly boosted linux compat among popular applications.

One stack everywhere is not a ground breaking concept since Java did it from an architecture stand point, but Electron is doing it in a new and unique way: one stack across across desktop, web, mobile - device classes instead of just architecture / OS. Same concept applied differently as I see it.

> Would you not consider Java as write once run anywhere? I mean, that was basically its whole selling point.

No, frankly. Java GUI apps on Linux back in the day were often a complete disaster unless it was an open source app with a large Linux dev base. GUI apps had to be written for and tested on all the various platforms they were going to run on. You could probably run simple apps using the oldest lowest common denominator graphics toolkits working without specific support, but those old toolkits were as clunky and ugly as hell.

Electron is far more out of the box on Linux than Java ever was.

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