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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck. They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop.

The onboarding funnel: Only a concern if you're trying to grow your user base and make sales.

Conversion: Only a concern if you're charging money.

Adwords: Only a concern if, in his words, you're trying to "trounce my competitors".

Support: If you're selling your software, you kind of have to support it. Minor concern for free and open source.

Piracy: Commercial software concern only.

Analytics and Per-user behavior: Again, only commercial software seems to feel the need to spy on users and use them as A/B testing guinea pigs.

The only point I can agree with him that makes web development better is the shorter development cycles. But I would argue that this is only a "developer convenience" and doesn't really matter to users (in fact, shorter development cycles can be worse for users as their software changes rapidly like quicksand out from under them.) To me, in my open source projects, my "development cycle" ends when I push to git, and that can be done as often as I want.

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To me, I prefer desktop apps because I KNOW when I've upgraded - it either said "upgrade now?" and did it, or, in the olden days, I had to track it down, or I installed an updated version of a distro, which included updated apps, so I expected some updates.

There are some things that NATURALLY lend themselves to a website - like doctor's appointments, bank balance, etc - but it's still a pain when, on logging in to "quickly check that one thing" that I finally got the muscle memory down for because I don't do it that often, I get a "take a quick tour of our great new overhauled features" where now that one thing I wanted is buried 7 levels deep or something, or just plain unfindable.

For something like Audacity (the audio program), how the heck does it make sense to put that on a website (I'm just giving a random example, I don't think they've actually done this), where you first have to upload your source file (privacy issues), manipulate it in a graphically/widget-limited browser - do they have a powerful enough machine on the backend for your big project? - then download the result? It's WAY, WAY better to be able to run the code on your own machine, etc. AND to be stable, so that once you start a project, it won't break halfway through because they changed/removed that one feature your relied upon (no, not thinking of AI at all, why do you ask? :-)

Of course, I'm also an old-school hacker (typed my first BASIC program ~45 years ago), so I have a desktop mentality. None of this newfangled 17-pound-portable stuff for me :-) And phones are at best a tertiary computing mechanism: first, desktop, then laptop, then phone. So yes, I'm clearly biased. Not trying to hide that.

You touched on the one thing I hate most about infrequently used websites. The inevitable popup to "explore our new features." Hell no, I don't want to do that. I haven't logged on in six months, so I'm obviously here now with a purpose in mind and I want to do that as quickly as possible and then close the tab.

Might as well use another site if it's going to be all different since the last time. That's a big reason I use local apps, because I control when (and if) they get "upgraded" (and can roll back if I don't like them).

Most apps that wrap websites like that will force me to update to be able to continue using it

> For something like Audacity (the audio program), how the heck does it make sense to put that on a website (I'm just giving a random example, I don't think they've actually done this), where you first have to upload your source file (privacy issues), manipulate it in a graphically/widget-limited browser

I understand it was just an example, but you'd be surprised how far browsers have come along with technologies like Web Assembly and WebGL. Forget audio editing, you can even do video editing - without uploading any files to the remote server[1]. All the processing is done locally, within your browser.

And if you thought that was impressive, wait till you find out that you can can even boot the whole Linux kernel in your browser using a VM written in WASM[2]!

But I do agree with your points about lack of feature stability. I too prefer native apps just for the record (but for me, the main selling points are low RAM/CPU/disk requirements and keyboard friendliness).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47847558

[2] https://joelseverin.github.io/linux-wasm/

Sure, but taking your video editor example, what advantages does an in-browser app provide over a native application like DaVinci Resolve, other than portability and not needing to install the application, in exchange for reduced performance, a clunkier interface, and reduced integration with the rest of the desktop platform?

And if this is such a compelling value proposition for full-featured desktop productivity applications, why didn't Java Web Start set the world on fire?

> Sure, but taking your video editor example, what advantages does an in-browser app provide over a native application like DaVinci Resolve

It's the issue of friction. Also, good webapps are often _better_ than native apps, as they can support tabs.

> And if this is such a compelling value proposition for full-featured desktop productivity applications, why didn't Java Web Start set the world on fire?

Because it relied on Java and SWING, which were a disaster for desktop apps.

> Also, good webapps are often _better_ than native apps, as they can support tabs

All the native apps I use support tabs, its a basic feature of the macOS windowing APIs https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nswindowtab...

This is a relatively new API, and the native apps that I use still don't support it properly. There are also things like middle-clicking to open things in new tabs, and being able to bookmark locations.

Portability and not having to install the app is a huge advantage. Especially on operating systems where there aren't any decent choices. Take Android for example, the Play Store is full of rubbish and adware-riddled apps, finding a decent app in there is like looking for a needle in a haystack. And whilst FDroid exists, most of the apps there are pretty basic in general, especially wrt this example (video editing).

Putting aside the video editing example for a bit, consider the photo editing web app Photopea, which is an excellent alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Linux is in urgent need of a Photoshop-like editor (and no, GIMP doesn't cut it), but Photopea does a decent enough job for many amateurs and even some pros. For a lot of these folks, Photoshop is one of the last things stopping them from switching to Linux, so apps like Photopea fill that gap. And guess what, Photopea works great on Android too.

Another use case is restricted environments where you can't easily find and install apps, eg immutable distros, or work computers. I use Photopea on my work PC quite regularly for light editing, because MS Paint sucks, and my role doesn't really justify going thru the hassle of getting the approvals to get an editor installed. So like it or not, web apps have their place.

> Linux is in urgent need of a Photoshop-like editor (and no, GIMP doesn't cut it), but Photopea does a decent enough job for many amateurs and even some pros.

How is Photopea better than GIMP? How is it better than Krita?

- Photopea's UI is very similar to Photoshop - same tool layouts, similar iconography and even has the same keyboard shortcuts, which makes a seasoned Photoshop user feel right at home. And while you can make GIMP look somewhat like Photoshop using thirdparty scripts (like PhotoGIMP), it still falls short considerably. In some ways this is even worse as it leads to an "uncanny valley" scenario.

As for Krita, its UI is of course a lot better than GIMP, but unfortunately it's mostly skewed towards digital illustration and art creation (and it's great at it!), but less towards photo editing/image manipulation.

- Photopea has the best .PSD support of the three, which is pretty crucial for people wanting to switch from Photoshop.

- Possibly the most important feature that Photoshop users depend on these days is Content-Aware Fill and Magic Replace for object removal and background patching. GIMP lacks native functionality for this (although there are thirdparty plugins, but I haven't used them so can't comment on that). As for Krita, once again Krita lacks these tools - and most retouching tools in fact - as it's more geared towards digital art creation rather than image manipulation.

Not having to install is huge avantage in corporate environmeent where user can't install nor run binaries that have not been approved by IT dept.

Haven't used VidStudio but Pikimov is definitely worth a mention too:

https://pikimov.com/

> To me, I prefer desktop apps because I KNOW when I've upgraded - it either said "upgrade now?" and did it, or, in the olden days, I had to track it down, or I installed an updated version of a distro, which included updated apps, so I expected some updates.

Yeah, but as a maintainer it's the opposite, isn't it? I don't have to worry about supporting version current - 3 in the Polish version of Windows because you're always running the version I've deployed in the environment I've deployed it in (I mean, yes, I'm oversimplifying given the frontend component, but that's still a much smaller surface).

This blog post benefits a lot from understanding where the author was at that point in their career: They had gained notoriety for their writing about their Bingo Card Creator software, but were moving on. After this they went on to build Appointment Reminder, a webapp that grew to a nice MRR before being sold off. Both were nice little indie developer success stories.

I grew up reading his writings and learned pretty quickly to read them as "this is what I'm thinking right now in my life" even though they're written more as authoritative and decisive writings from an expert. Over time he's gone from SEO expert to $30K/week consulting expert to desktop app expert to indie SaaS expert to recruiting industry expert to working for Strip Atlas. It was fun to read his writings at each point, but after so many changes I realized it was better to read it as a blog of ongoing learnings and opinions, not necessarily as retrospective wisdom shared from years of experience on the topic even if that's what the writing style conveys.

So I agree that the advice in the post should be taken entirely in context of pursuing the specific goals he was pursuing at the time. The less your goals happen to align, the less relevant the advice becomes.

>This blog post benefits a lot from understanding where the author was at that point in their career

This, I like his writing, and am subscribed to his Bits About Money newsletter which gives a lot of info about how payment processing works, but your comment is spot on about the writings being influenced by his current work and the current place he is within his life. Hopefully everyone thinks about those sorts of things when reading articles like this, regardless of author because it's a common issue.

Going further, if you're a hobbyist, you're probably instinctively prioritizing the aspects of the hobby that you enjoy. My first app was a shareware offering in the 1980s, written in Turbo Pascal, that was easy to package and only had to run on one platform. Because expectations were low, my app looked just as good as commercial apps.

Today, even the minimal steps of creating a desktop app have lost their appeal, but I like showing how I solved a problem, so my "apps" are Jupyter notebooks.

My coworker showed a Jupyter notebook with ipywidgets and it looked just like an app. A good CLI using FastAPI's `typer` looks a lot like an app too.

> Analytics and Per-user behavior: Again, only commercial software seems to feel the need to spy on users and use them as A/B testing guinea pigs.

KDE has analytics, they're just disabled by default (and I always turn them on in the hopes of convincing KDE to switch the defaults to the ones I like).

I see a lot of this sentiment amongst developer friends but I never could relate. Its not that I'm against it or something but it just doesn't move me personally.

Most things I create in my free time are for my and my family's consumption and typically benefit immensely from the write once run everywhere nature of the web.

You can launch a small toy app on your intranet and run it from everywhere instantly. And typically these things are also much easier to interconnect.

They're also ubiquitous for creative works, i.e. the sort of things a small set of people spend much time on, but is not something most people use. Examples:

  - CAD / ECAD
  - Artist/photos
  - Musician software. Composing, DAW etc
  - Scientific software of all domains, drug design etc

Adobe Photoshop, the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editing, is was first example of a perfectly fine commercial desktop application converted to cloud application with a single purpose - increased profit for Adobe.

Master Collection CS6 still works excellently, and is now (relatively) small enough to live comfortably in virtuo. Newer file formats can be handled with ffmpeg and a bit of terminal-fu.

Slicers for people doing 3D printing too (don't know if webapp slicers are more common than desktop app slicers though).

Desktop publishing.

Brokerage apps (some are webapps but many ship an actual desktop app).

And yet, to me, something changed: I still "install apps locally", but "locally" as in "only on my LAN", but they can be webapps too. I run them in containers (and the containers are in VMs).

I don't care much as to whether something is a desktop app, a GUI or a TUI, a webapp or not...

But what I do care about is being in control.

Say I'm using "I'm Mich" (immich) to view family pictures: it's shipped (it's open source), I run it locally. It'll never be "less good" than it is today: for if it is, I can simply keep running the version I have now.

It's not open to the outside world: it's to use on our LAN only.

So it's a "local" app, even if the interface is through a webapp.

In a way this entire "desktop app vs webapp" is a false dichotomy, especially when you can have a "webapp (really in a browser) that you can self-host on a LAN" and then a "desktop app that's really a webapp (say wrapped in Electron) that only works if there's an Internet connection".

I quit all social media, cancelled Spotify and whatnot and I am hella thankful for the Strawberry media player as a desktop app as it allows me to play all the music i actually own. I love desktop apps.

I generally agree. If you're not doing it for money you don't technically need most of these things. But if you see open source as more than “here's the code” some of them matter. Support will find you, via GitHub issues, emails, or DMs. Analytics is really important because it shows whether the software works for people besides you. Without money you usually do not have playtesters or a UX designer, so you get fewer useful bug reports. Frustrated users rarely take the time to write a detailed issue.

>To me, in my open source projects, my "development cycle" ends when I push to git, and that can be done as often as I want.

If development ends at a git push and users are left to build/fend for themselves (granted this is a lot of open source), then yeah not much difference, but if you're building and packaging it up for users (which you will more likely to be doing if your project is an app specifically) then the difference is massive.

Agreed, desktop frameworks have been getting really good these days, such as Flutter, Rust's GPUI (which the popular editor (and more importantly a competitor to a webview-based app in the form of Electron) Zed is written with), egui, Slint and so on, not to mention even the ability to render your desktop app to the web via WASM if you still wanted to share a link.

Times have changed quite a bit from nearly 20 years ago.

Agreed.

And his point about randomly moving buttons to see if people like it better?

No fucking thanks. The last thing I need is an app made of quicksand.

God damn that drives me up a wall! Mozilla is a terrible offender in this regard, but there are myriad others too!

The user interface is your contract with your users: don't break muscle memory! I would ditch FF-derivatives, but I'm held hostage by them because the good privacy browsers are based on FF.

Stop following fads! Be like craigslist: never change, or if you do then think long and hard about not moving things around! Also if you're a web/mobile developer, learn desktopisms! Things don't need to be spaced out like everything is a touch interface. Be dense like IRC and Briar, don't be sparse like default Discord or SimpleX! Also treat your interfaces like a language for interaction, or a sandbox with tools; don't make interfaces that only corral and guide idiots, because a non-idiot may want to use it someday.

I really wish Stallman could be technology czar, with the power to [massively] tax noncompliance to his computing philosophy.

I generally despise "web tech" as it is today. Browsers are not application platforms!

You should probably accept the fact that browsers are indeed application platforms. I'm not saying they should be, or that they are good at that role, but they absolutely are, at this point in time.

> only a concern if you're charging money

No, it's a concern if you care about impact. Improving commercial profits is one kind of impact that is relevant to for-profit corporations, but there is also impact like "improving user privacy" or "helping lower-income people manage their finances with a free-as-in-beer product". This impact can be measured and the feedback can be used to improve the product according to non-profit, non-commercial goals.

There are also people who build open-source software as a hobby and couldn't give two shits whether other people use it or not. More power to them. For those people, you are correct. https://book.iced.rs/philosophy.html comes to mind.

Then there are projects like Streisand (maybe a bad example, I see it has since been archived, but it came to mind) that want to change the world in some way. Those projects very much do need to care about metrics like, how many people are downloading the software, are people opening GitHub issues, are we obscure or is our target audience talking about us, hopefully positively but if not, how can we improve that? Value must always be worth the cost (even when the code is free, it must be worth the time to download, give it a try, give it CPU/RAM, maintain/upgrade the installation) - are we giving users value or are they churning?

It might blow your mind but even non-profits hire people with MBAs (and universities offer programs for MBAs that focus on non-profit management), precisely because some organizations focus on non-financial impact.

its just waaaaaay easier to distribute a web app

For some things a desktop app is required (more system access) or offers some competitive UX advantage (although this reason is shrinking all the time). Short of that user's are going to choose web 95% of the time.

This points to our failure as an industry to design a universal app engine that isn't a browser.

Counterpoint: is the web browser not already fulfilling the "universal app engine" need? It can already run on most end user devices where people do most other things. IoT/Edge devices don't count here, but this day most of their data is just being sent back to a server which is accessible via some web interface.

Ignoring the fragmentation of course; although that seems to be getting less and less each year (so long as you ignore Safari).

Yes. But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language).

The impact on people's time, money and on the environment are proportional.

> But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language)

Does it? Have you compared a web app written in a sufficiently low level language with a desktop app?

Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser. Even fairly decent-looking ones, not your Doom or Quake!

And if we're talking about simple GUI apps, you can run them in 10 megabytes or maybe even less. It's cheating a bit as the OS libraries are already loaded - but they're loaded anyway if you use the browser too, so it's not like you can shave off of that.

> Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser.

What about in QML, which uses Web technologies like CSS, JS and even basic HTML? The whole KDE Plasma 6 desktop is built around these technologies now and I (and many others) consider it light and high-performance.

If you saddle up those technologies in the full browser everything then it will get larger, yes, but nothing requires you to do this, just as nothing requires providing your app as a full-fat Fedora install when a distroless container would have sufficed.

Plain Javascript can be very fast and still come at relatively low resource demands and the same is true of HTML and CSS. Many "plain desktop-native" applications often end up reinventing their own variants of HTML and CSS in the course of designing the U/I anyways.

It's better, but it's still quite bloated, to be honest. Linux is generally more memory-hungry than Windows because of how modular it is, and having no Win32 equivalent really hurts. Although they've started doing UI in React Native over there too...

Qt is much lighter than your Chromium-based stacks but all the waste kind of adds up.

"just as nothing requires providing your app as a full-fat Fedora install when a distroless container would have sufficed" Containers are hungrier than running stuff on bare metal...

Yeah, React Native is apparently how Claude Code operates (even on terminal) so it wouldn't surprise me to see it being useful in a native GUI context as well, if we can get more bindings than Skia.

> Containers are hungrier than running stuff on bare metal...

Containers are tremendously lightweight compared to VM. You might as well point out that running a full multiuser security-protected OS like Linux is hungrier than running on bare metal with DOS too. It's just as true, and even proportionally as true.

In any event a full Fedora container with all packages installed is going to be tremendously larger than a distroless hello-world "built" around Alpine, for instance, even though they both use container technologies. Same applies to Web technologies, you can certainly go and easily add a lot of waste using them but they are not themselves inherently wasteful.

I believe Firefox use separate processes per tab and most of them are over 100MB per page. And that's understandable when you know that each page is the equivalent of a game engine with it's own attached editor.

A desktop app may consume more, but it's heavily focused on one thing, so a photo editor don't need to bring in a whole sound subsystem and a live programming system.

>Counterpoint: is the web browser not already fulfilling the "universal app engine" need?

Counter-counterpoint: Maybe it's time to require professional engineer certification before a software product can be shipped in a way that can be monetized. It's to filter devs from the industry who look at browsers today and go "Yeah, this is a good universal app engine."

This was cathartic to read thank you

I think a browser is an inverted universal engine. The underlying tech is solid, but on top of it sits the DOM and scripting, and then apps have to build on top of that mess. In my opinion, it would be much better for web apps and the DOM to be sibling implementations using the same engine, not hierarchically related. You wouldn’t use Excel as a foundation to make software, even though you could.

Maybe useful higher-level elements like layout, typography, etc. could be shared as frameworks.

You are thinking along the same lines as me. The fact that the first thing to be standardized was HTML made it a fait accompli that everything had to be built on top of it, since that "guaranteed" <insert grain of salt> cross vendor compatibility.

There are many alternate histories where a different base application layer (app engine) could have been designed for the web (the platform)

No. We did, it is the browser.

"The Browser" has turned out to be a pretty terrible application API, IMO. First, which browser? They are all (and have been) slightly different in infuriating ways going all the way back to IE6 and prior. Also, a lot of compromises were made while organically evolving what was supposed to be "a system for displaying and linking between text pages" into a cross-platform application and system API. The web's HTML/CSS roots are a heavy ball and chain for applications to carry around.

It would have been great if browsers remained lightweight html/image/hyperlink displayers, and something separate emerged as an actual cross-platform API, but history is what it is.

They're not that different, and it's a pretty good platform and pretty easy to program for. That's why it won.

It didn't win. It just survived long enough. The web is a terrible platform. I haven't ever shipped a line of "web code" for money and I plan to keep it that way until I retire. What a miserable way to make a living.

Perhaps you're taking the npm/react/vercel world to be the entire web? I agree that that stuff is a scourge. But you can still just write html and Javascript and serve it from a static site, I wrote an outline in https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/web-programs.html which I frequently link to coding agents when they are going astray.

When I was a kid I was running websites with active forums and a real domain name, and I did it with vBulletin and my brain. Someone bought the domain name and website off of me, haven't touched web tech since. I did use Wt at an old job once, but the "website" was local to 1 machine and there were no security concerns.

I wouldn't say that react is what's wrong with the web. I would say that the web is what's wrong with react.

I envy your pure soul. I am one of many who has had, at times, been coerced through financial strain to write some front end code. All I ask for is, when the time comes, you try to remember me for who I was and not the thing I became.

Look at caniuse, if you see green boxes on all the current version browsers. Than you are good to go. If not, wait until the feature is more widely supported.

Remember Flash? The big tech companies felt a threat to their walled gardens. They formed an unholy alliance to stamp out flash with a sprinkle of fake news labeling it a security threat.

Remember Livescript and early web browsers? It was almost cancelled by big tech because Java was supposed to be the cross platform system. The web and Javascript just BARELY escaped a big tech smack down. They stroked the ego of big tech by renaming to Javascript to honor Java. Licked some boots, promised a very mediocre, non threatning UI experience in the browser and big tech allowed it to exist. Then the whole world started using the web/javascript. It caught fire before big tech could extinguish. Java itself got labeled a security threat by Apple/Microsoft for threatening the walled gardens but that's another story.

You may not like browsers but they are the ONLY thing big tech can't extinguish due to ubiquity. Achieving ubiquity is not easy, not even possible for new contenders. Pray to GOD everyday and thank her for giving us the web browser as a feasible cross platform GUI.

Web browser UI available on all devices is not a failure, it's a miracle.

To top it all off, HTML/CSS/Javascript is a pretty good system. The box model of CSS is great for a cross platform design. Things need to work on a massive TV or small screen phone. The open text-based nature is great for catering to screen readers to help the visually impaired.

The latest Wizbang GPU powered UI framework probably forgot about the blind. The latest Wizbang is probably stuck in the days of absolute positioning and non-declarative layouts. And with x,y(z) coords. It may be great for the next-gen 4-D video game, but sucks for general purpose use.

Flash had quite a lot of quite severe CVE; how many of those do you suppose are "fake news" connived by conspiracy (paranoid style in politics, much?) as opposed to Flash being a pile of rusted dongs as far as security goes? A lot of software from that era was a pile of rusted dongs, bloat browsers included. Flash was also the first broken website I ever came across, for some restaurant I never ended up going to. If they can't show their menu in text, oh, well.

As I recall, Flash and Java weren't so much security issues themselves, but rather the poorly designed gaping hole they used to enter the browser sandbox being impossible to lock down. If something like WASM existed at the time to make it possible for them to run fully inside the sandbox, I bet they'd still be around today. People really did like Macromedia/Adobe tools for web dev, and the death of Flash was only possible to overcome its popularity because of just how bad those security holes were. I miss Flash, but I really don't miss drive-by toolbar and adware installation, which went away when those holes were closed.

We have failed to design a universal app engine…except for the one that dwarfs every other kind of software development for every kind of device in the world.

Can a single webpage address & use more than 4gb of ram nowadays? I was filling 16gb of ram with a single Ableton live session in 2011.

How about a webpage shouldn't ever address & use even 4GB of RAM! :O

But that's the thing, if I'm doing audio and buying 128GB of ram for the sake of doing music with my sample libraries, and loading hundreds of parallel tracks and being able to scrub through them without lags or audio clicks, I absolutely want to be able to load them to play with them.

Via electron I’m sure it could. In the main browser it’s probably best to cap usage to avoid having buggy pages consume everything. Anything heavy like a video editor you’d rather install as an electron app for deeper system access and such.

But JS arrays are limited to 4GB. Size is defined to be a 32-bit int.

> design a universal app engine

You've reminded me of the XKCD comic about standards: https://xkcd.com/927/

Do you really want a universal app engine? If you don't have a good reason for ignoring platform guidelines (as many games do), then don't. The best applications on any platform are the ones that embrace the platform's conventions and quirks.

I get why businesses will settle for mediocre, but for personal projects why would you? Pick the platform you use and make the best application you can. If you must have cross-platform support, then decouple your UI and pick the right language and libraries for each platform (SwiftUI on Mac, GTK for Linux, etc...).

Please, for the love of all that is holy, not GTK.

Platforms and app engines are orthogonal concerns. I agree that platform guidelines are worth preserving, and the web as a platform solves it by hijacking the rectangle that the native platform yields to it. Any app engine could do the same thing.

> the web as a platform solves it by hijacking the rectangle that the native platform yields to it

That's a terrible solution that preserves nothing. Try using a screen reader with an app rendered onto a rectangle.

Steam is pretty close.

> its just waaaaaay easier to distribute a web app

Let's also remember that it's infinitely easier to keep a native app operational, since there's no web server to set up or maintain.

No DNS, no DDOS, no network plane, no kubernetes, no required data egress, no cryptographic vulnerabilities, no surveillance of activity... It's almost like the push for everything to go through the web was like a psyop so everything we did and when was logged somewhere. No, no, that's not right.

>or offers some competitive UX advantage (although this reason is shrinking all the time).

As a user, properly implemented desktop interface will always beat web. By properly, I mean obeying shortcut keys and conventions of the desktop world. Having alt+letter assignments to boxes and functions, Tab moves between elements, pressing PageUp/PageDown while in a text entry area for a chat window scrolls the chat history above and not the text entry area (looking at you SimpleX), etc.

Sorry, not sorry. Web interface is interface-smell, and I avoid it as much as possible. Give me a TUI before a webpage.

To be fair, probably most of us here on HN write software to put food on the table. Don’t pooh-pooh our careers.

He didn't pooh-pooh anyone's careers.

The way it's worded comes across that way.

I have spent a good deal of my life writing software to put food on the table. I didn't interpret any of what he wrote in the way you describe. Perhaps you could explain why you did.

Both can be true: we can have different preferences about what we're doing to put food on the table and what we're doing when we build something on our own for other reasons.

To me it's not the same. I earn money doing software work for my employer, but I'd never think about creating a paid application myself. Feels icky to me.

Attitudes like these is why non-developers don't want to use open source software.

These concerns may not matter to you, the developer, but they absolutely matter to end-users.

If your prospective user can't find the setup.exe they just downloaded, they won't be able to use your software. If your conversion and onboarding sucks, they'll get confused and try the commercial offering instead. If you don't gather analytics and A/B test, you won't even know this is happening. If you're not the first result on Google, they'll try the commercial app first.

Users want apps that work consistently on all their devices and look the same on both desktop and mobile, keep their data when they spill coffee on the laptop, and let them share content on Slack with people who don't have the app installed. Open source doesn't have good answers to these problems, so let's not shoot ourselves in the foot even further.

I'm a seasoned developer and I frequently come across OSS projects where I spend half an hour or more in "how the fuck do I actually use this"-land. A lot of developers need to take the mindset of writing the documentation for their non-tech grandma from the ground up.

LLMs to the rescue

It's the principle.

Or they can just, y'know, not do that. Because they don't owe you, or anyone, anything.

Of course, but presumably if you're launching something you want people to adopt it so spend some time on documentation.

Don't presume that. People release OSS for all sorts of reasons, and you cannot assume anything. You also are not owed or entitled anything. If a maintainer wants to do something, they will. If they don't, then they won't, even if that thing might net them more users. It's not for you to decide, or even gripe about.

This presupposes that the OSS creator even wants users in the first place, which might not always be the case as it could be personal software; and that these users actually want these features, as many do not want analytics, ads, and A/B tests in your app.

I guess in the same way that one might presuppose a boat wants water?

If a piece of software doesn’t have users and the developers don’t care about the papercuts they are delivering, I would argue what they have created is more of an art project than a utility.

Science research without obvious practical application can still be important and valuable.

Art works without popular appeal can become highly treasured by some.

Open source software doesn't have to be ambitious to be worthwhile and useful. It can be artful, utilitarian or a artifact of play. Commercial standards shouldn't be the only measure of good software.

It's more like building your own boat then someone else coming along and saying it'll never compete with a cruise ship because it doesn't have a water slide and endless buffet; sometimes, things in the same category can serve wholly different purposes.

>Attitudes like these is why non-developers don't want to use open source software.

Good! It's not for them! They can stay paypigs on subscription because they can't git gud!

If my user cannot install software in their own computer then I do not want their money. They have issues they need to work out on their own and they might be better off saving their money.

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