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Comment by BobbyTables2 | Hacker News Reader

For decades, people ran word processors and graphics editors locally.

Now it’s in the cloud on a damn webpage.

With recent RAM and storage price disruptions, I feel like we’ll go to go back to an equivalent of everyone having a dumb Wyze terminal with the real “computer” in the cloud… Only difference is the dumb terminal will have color, be wireless, and portable.

And I really hope I’m wrong…

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I’d like to think that people will move back to native, but sadly there’s only one viable platform for native app dev, Apple. I base that statement on the highly fragmented Linux ecosystem and the fact that Microsoft are appear to be actively hostile to windows users. I leave Android out of the picture because of the continual and legally proven trust breaches of the owner.

It does suck. Though Android’s owner does appear to be afraid of Graphene OS so maybe there’s hope.

Yep, this is because for decades Apple has looked for ways strong local clients can add value in the form of bespoke hardware and software capabilities, while Microsoft has looked for ways commoditised generic clients can extract value.

Fragmented doesn't mean you can't make native apps.

GTK, QT, FLTK or TK apps coexist peacefully on linux the same way apps made with Cocoa, JUCE or whatever own internal proprietary toolkit apps run and coexist on MacOS.

Linux is not really fragmented anymore, there is a lot of distros but they're all compatible with each other. Flatpak solved app distribution and systemd standardized the lower levels. If you build something on Ubuntu it will almost definitely work on Fedora and Arch with no code changes. 10 years ago that was impossible.

So a Chromebook?

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