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Comment by Discordian93 | Hacker News Reader

Outlook is now basically an Electron app, they've deprecated the old desktop Outlook in favor of a port of the web app to desktop, so it's basically just Excel remaining.

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Yeah, that's because Microsoft can see the writing on the wall. They don't want Windows to die, but they know the whole OS is at a point where it's probably inevitable that it will.

Developers don't want to use Windows anymore. They all want to run Linux because servers do. Ballmer was right about one thing: It was about the developers.

Microsoft can't compete with Chrome at the K-12 level. A Chromebook is a fraction of the cost at twice the runtime, so nobody is going to learn Windows growing up. There won't be a generation of new ready-trained Microsoft consumers every year.

And the average consumer? Oh, they're running an iPhone and maybe an iPad that's it. If Apple were really smart they'd have released an iPhone screencast dock, but Apple still thinks the iPhone doesn't need multiple user profiles. However, even with Apple's stupid behavior, they're losing their core consumer audience.

Steam is tired of Microsoft, too, so they're pushing for compatibility. Video games are either cross platform, console exclusive, or easy enough to emulate. If nVidia's graphics drivers weren't so proprietary, it wouldn't be nearly as difficult.

The big holdouts are the same people that kept COBOL a live programming language in the 21st century: The business office folks.

Microsoft has missed the boat on smartphones, tablets, budget laptops, smart TVs, video game consoles (which is a little surprising), server-side infrastructure, development, and now AI. Their market prospects right now are Millenials and older that don't want change, people who need exactly Excel or Outlook, and PC video gamers that aren't interested in change. Their best product is VS Code and it's free, their second best product (SQL Server) is pricing people out, and their third best product (.Net) is also free.

At this point I think they're mainly hoping Adobe doesn't jump ship.

> Developers don't want to use Windows anymore.

I mean, did they ever?

I've been programming just since ~2010, but I've only ever saw majority prefer macs due to hardware (with exception being late intel macs) and linux on the regular PCs.

With exception of game devs, I've not seen person who _happily_ defaults to windows, not due to fact that they have to because of company policy or because company is too cheap for an Apple device.

Yes, developers used to like Microsoft. That was where all the money was, and Visual Studio was an extremely good IDE in the late 90s and early 2000s. And at the time, Microsoft's documentation was the best. C++, VB, and then .Net development combined with Sql Server (then a budget option) was a very enticing stack. Using ASP instead of Perl or ColdFusion or PHP was also attractive.

At the time Mac was still largely dominated by PowerPC and Classic OS. And Linux was still seen as an OS for hobbyists and universities. It was not taken seriously until well into the 00s and the 2.4 kernel. Sun was struggling with Java, and the unices were well into their decline from the 80s.

I would say that the transition was how much better Apache was than IIS when it came to operational and security issues.

> Outlook is now basically an Electron app

And it's horrible.

Electron apps also basically don’t work in Wine. I miss having Evernote on Linux.

Wouldnt it be possible to extract the files you need and sort of "repackage" it for linux?

I have no idea how electron apps look "internally" but it doesnt sound too bad.

Sort of like you can unzip .deb files and use them somewhere else, if what i heard was correct (never tried it myself)

Not my area of expertise so I could be wrong but Electron apps just use Chromium underneath (which already works on linux), so in theory it should be easier to get them running on linux than a native Windows app

If the Electron app is pure JS with no native extensions it can be doable. However, many Electron apps contain platform-specific js code, since features for stuff like Dock on Mac and Taskbar icons on Windows differ. Electron apps like Notion also contain native extensions - compiled C/C++/Objective-C code that are platform specific. For example in Notion, we use sqlite via better-sqlite3 (potentially replaceable since it’s open source, but will need more work than “just” repackaging js), but we also write our own native support libraries to use OS-specific APIs for microphone recording in meeting notes feature.

I have seen many people porting such apps, like there is aur package for notion, figma

It's cool that arch users give porting Notion a valiant effort. But as I predicted, custom native extensions will be [a problem](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/notion-app-electron#comme...):

> Could it be possible to make the relatively new AI meeting notes feature to work?

> Right now I get the following error when I click the "start transcribing" button:

    Error occurred in handler for 'notion:get-media-access-status': TypeError: s.systemPreferences.getMediaAccessStatus is not a function
        at /usr/lib/notion-app/app.asar/.webpack/main/index.js:2:631015
        at WebContents.<anonymous> (node:electron/js2c/browser_init:2:87444)
        at WebContents.emit (node:events:524:28)

Thank you for the thorough reply :)

I really like the comments on HN, they are very often really interesting and you actually often learn something new that actually matters.

How is that even possible? I expect you have to go out of your way to make it platform dependent, are you sure?

Electron is basically just a GUI framework. The application itself can be arbitrarily complicated, nothing stops you from building a Java + .NET + C++&COM app that includes three Windows Services that interfaces with the Electron runtime just for UI.

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