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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

In engineering land, I want to point out that 90%+ of the applications I use are actually desktop applications. Perhaps the majority of developers work on web apps (questionable), but certainly the majority of tools I, my team, and colleagues use are desktop apps.

- editors for code and text

- presentation and writing tools

- CAD software

- Music software

- Schematic / EE software

- Voice/Video chat applications

- All IM clients

- Web browsers for casual reading

- All games

In B2B or management land, most the applications are, indeed, web-based.

- Google drive

- Internal business tools @ my place of employment.

Still, I "use" those much less than 10% of the time, and most of them are simply web forms.

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Many even prefer email or similar clients to be desktop apps. This seems like an important part of the conversation that is being left out: the more complex the task that the app is handling, and the more memory-intensive, the better fit it is for a desktop app.

That said, as web browsers get better at memory management and safe hardware access (e.g. WebGL / WebGPU) I expect this list of tools that "must" be thick to dwindle.

> Many even prefer email or similar clients to be desktop apps.

"Many" ?"even"? You make that sound like "many, as opposed to most", and "even, i.e. an exception".

I haven't had a job yet -- at least not this century, can't quite recall before -- where the standard e-mail client was anything other than the Outlook desktop client. The Web UI, if in use at all, has always been distinctly secondary, "If the real Outlook doesn't work, try this"-style. (Hmm, how old is Outlook? Must have been something else in the 90, at least the early ones...? And as a TA at Uni before that it was a TUI-thingy from IBM, but then OTOH maybe that doesn't count as a "real job".)

> I expect this list of tools that "must" be thick to dwindle.

The reason daliy-use tools must be "thick" is that in such tools you want a nice UI with some flow to it, so that it becomes in effect invisible. And fucking Web pages that masquerade as "applications" just don't have or do any of that. So let's hope this mania ends soon and your list, far from dwindling, starts to expand again.

> Still, I "use" those much less than 10% of the time, and most of them are simply web forms.

90% of them are various clunky ticket systems, (at least) one of which will invariably be JIRA. Preferably at least three or four of them in the same <10k staff corporation to do slightly different but basically similar things, which could all be done in any one of them.

Yes. Think of desktop as many thin slices of the cake.

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