Ari_Ugwu

For what it's worth I used VSCode as a ARM build on a Chromebook with crouton. It was fine. I think it cost me $150 used.

> cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud.

Come on with the hyperbole. Electron is effectively (nipped) as it is most usually just the shortest path to giving apps a persistent offline option outside of the browser sandbox. I don't know of _any_ electron app that isn't also a dedicated web app. VSCode is embedded as an editor in a few online code sandboxes.

Electron apps will almost certainly be replaced with PWA akin to the MS strategy. Shared run time, distributed via a 'store' of some kind, etc. It's an arc that we are in the middle of.

I get it, the world needs a better solution. However there isn't one. There isn't even a #2 best option. Electron's success is just the industry's continued failure.

You'd think Google would be close with Flutter, but Flutter doesn't run in the browser. So, fail.

Are there any options you'd suggest using _over_ Electron?

Every couple months an electron thread pops up and gets the same bashing.

The world very much needs electron and that's why it exists. jQuery was the same way forever. People just complained _constantly_ that we should be advancing the spec and using built in calls. That jQuery was some sort of bloated misstep. Well, we're still waiting for web components to be standardized more than 15 years later.

So as I understand it, people that don't like electron would rather us use _nothing_. Thus providing _no_ stepping stone to what should rightfully come next.

I see the same thing with electric cars. They aren't perfect _now_ so why invest in them at all? Why even explore an avenue that could lead to other innovations if it isn't _perfect_ out of the gate? 91% of the world population don't even own cars!

Kind of wish they hadn't released a teaser for something so heavily anticipated and with so few public updates. Really sets the bar higher than it needs to be.

I also understand this critique but feel it's a bit hollow. Or at least I feel that despite billions of dollars in available funds the big software producers failed to create a solution that is better. They are simply unable or unwilling despite having the resources and a lock on the top engineering talent in the space.

I wish and hope that MS moving Edge to chromium is to provide a single host level run time for PWAs. It's a space they have flirted with and seem to be inching towards more quickly.

Also note that there is nothing keeping developers from adhering to Mac UI conventions that I know of. That's not a fault of Electron at all.

tl;dr - If Javascript and electron are winning it's because others are continually _failing_.

I'll throw in my two cents on top of this:

* SPAs: Microsoft has a vested interested in porting a lot of code to SPA applications. Teams being the latest example.

* Windows is dead, long live Windows: A desire for a lighter version of Windows in the near future running on ARM and you suddenly have existing dev tools and code moving to a Chrome OS like environment with little fuss.

* Edge: Is jumping over to chromium and wishes to support existing chrome extensions. What blazor may also allow are some pretty sophisticated download-once applications also coming through that 'store(?' with first class support.

* Linux Love: If linux is the rural America of 2016 then MS is Trump. OSX and Google seem to be locking people in and MS is trying to give more choices.

* Windows is Dead, part 2: Can't stress this one enough. Giving enterprise developers and teams a way out of the legacy sandbox seems to be key.

tl;dr - Re-cut the Star Wars scene of 'Luke I am your father' to Nadella and myself. Change the response to 'Yesssssssss! <hug>'

People say this but I've tried many times to add themes, make tweaks etc. Can we give some 'distro' makers a little credit? I couldn't make Pop_Os if you gave me 10 years....I know cause I've been trying for 15.

They should buy elementary OS.

System_76 borrowed heavily from elementary OS to create Pop_Os which is a dream. Now that I'm saying it I hope they just swallow a little pride and become a major contributor to Pop_Os.

Every devops and net admin I know would wiggle with joy to be issued a Dell XPS 15 + Pop_Os tuned with PowerShell and other MS tool chains fully supported.

For the longest time I assumed MS would buy Ubuntu.

I'm not a .NET dev currently running PopOs on my XPS 13. VS Code is my primary editor for all things. If MS released a desktop that looked this good and came batteries included for their tool chains and services I'd hop in a heart beat.

My only guess is that doing so would lower consumer confidence in the corporate space? I know Chrome books are making a push there and the psychological factor of "it's not Windows" does seem to be a competitive advantage for MS (for now).

This comment wasn't substantive and really just attempts to hijack a sound discussion with a form of divisive reasoning I thought was contained solely within the comments of Fox News.

Arguing that the general groups of faceless people you've marked as the problem do not present evidence when you yourself have provided none is....ironic?

Who are these people you despise so much? Let's find them and make them wear something that will allow us to see them for the enemy they are. Right?

Love is the answer.

Blerg. Then also an apology. You did say that your post was in your _opinion_. I chose to engage. You were kind enough to respond and expand on your opinion. If I missed that and used a needlessly harsh tone then please know that was not my intent. At least not originally.

The point I'm trying to make is that you do seem to be making this A > B comparison without caring about the quality of those hours. Again, it seems to present the argument in a way that echoes the concerns I've heard. "A" simply starts off with an advantage in how you keep presenting it.

There doesn't seem to be room in your opinion or examples for a pilot with 3k hours flying commercial vs someone with 5k hours flying as a hobby on the weekends. 3k is simply less that 5k, right? You don't care _how_ they spent those 5k hours...simply that they have them?

If you agree that this is a ridiculous over simplification in order to prove my point then we may be on the same page.

The very nature of your comments makes me envision a women on the other side of your hiring decision wondering why she couldn't get you to focus on the _quality_ of the work and stop fixating on the _quantity_ of time spent doing it. Because that is exactly what I'm trying to do now.

Many people here have echoed the fears and complaints I've heard on this topic. Simply that somehow taking parental leave at all puts you at a disadvantage. Or puts you in a position where you have to explain yourself.

I feel like what is being done here is to [ironically] force an equality of outcome on every metric _except_ the one that swings the argument.

The very nature of equality of _opportunity_ means to me that it doesn't matter at all that I took time off. Am I qualified? Do I have demonstrable expertise? References? Education? A unique perspective?

You may be generally curious about my year off but the idea that it somehow invalidates _any_ of my other qualifications feels silly and limits my opportunity based on external factors which don't impact my ability to do the job. It's just that you don't seem to fit the world view of others so it's suspect.

_This_ is the complaint: that a talented professional coming back to the work force loses out not because of ability but because of violating social norms.

What if I don't stop believing them?

Your comment is written in such an off putting manner that I wonder if it must be satire.

You've dictated, generalized, and disparaged with every sentence.

Even if I wanted to agree with the presentation is so ugly that I recoil.

This aligns with my understanding. I applaud every experiment in this space. We just don't seem to know enough about ourselves for folks to speak as confidently about these terms and their impacts as we do.

As I'm raising my kid I'm amazed at how important just keeping her curious and oriented towards the unknown is. Just teaching her how to manage her own emotions and external frustrations. Even at a very young age I see parents conditioning their male children to physically _push_ through problems and frustrations but the girls are so often taught to communicate and understand their feelings _before_ acting. This then seems to really influence the types of activities they are introduced to and ultimately excel at.

If I'm being honest with myself when my emotional intelligence finally caught in my 30s it was a bit embarrassing. I just didn't have a good skill set for dealing with frustrations which weren't physical.

</ramble>

This is my guess and the one I'm excited about:

Azure is a cash cow. Windows brings in money but is increasingly difficult to monetize _and_ its increasingly difficult to keep bringing legacy app support forward and stay competitive.

PowerShell, .NET Core, and MS SQL are all happily running on Linux.

By all accounts WSL entered the market with little drama is pretty great to use (IMHO).

The idea of doing a native SSH from WSL into a Linux container on Azure running a bootstraped 'MS' version of *nix with official support for a discounted price compared to a Windows VM is certainly appealing.

I would run MS Linux as a dev environment in a heart beat. MS would do well to _not_ to brand a desktop and just run a very clean gnome or plasma default.

Then a dedicated app store can really push PWAs like Teams,Skype and fully manage the interop layer for other apps that need a little more hand holding (wine, mono, etc).

tl;dr - I'm into this.

We're almost there. With a little more work people might be able to enjoy cloud servers in their own homes and businesses. What would we call these ultra fast local machines able to 'serve' up content? 'Server' feels a bit on the nose. Perhaps 'Home Cloud: Secured by Blockchain'.

</snark>

Thank you for this. While I love a good old nerd round of 'stump the wizard' I also appreciate someone pumping the breaks with some realism.

Some security conversations get to the point where it's stringing together a highly unlikely chain of scenarios requiring multiple pivots, multiple concurrent failures (stochastic or otherwise), and a state sponsored actor in order to slap a 'do not use' recommendation on something.

If companies like Nike can run _Magento_ and educational sites still require Flash then I can use JWTs. Maybe...

Agreed 100%.

<rant>

Full disclosure I'm a bit of an MS fan boy as they have paid my bills for going on a decade. That being said, I want a solid AR product more than I want my team to win [so to speak].

By comparison, I tried Hololens in a decently controlled demo and was blown away. The idea that Windows 10 UWP apps would 'just work' also seemed to promise an immediately useful product, and mature dev pipeline. Then I started seeing fluff pieces for Magic Leap which were also hit pieces against Hololens. This was when Magic Leap was little more than a gobble of wires in a basement and a demo no one was allowed to see. It made me mad but really just confused me.

Fast forward. The Magic Leap launches and it's lacking against most of Hololens specs and experience. The worst part of _that_ is it doesn't force MS to innovate to compete on price/features. Which makes me afraid that MS will keep it priced for the industrial clients that are currently adopting it and not deal with this nonsense in the consumer space and who can blame them?

Now a new round of paid pieces and promises of content contracts are rolling out. Even more upsetting cause when you _really_ dig into the details the _honest_ answer from anyone seems to be that Magic Leap is not really for even alpha/beta adopters.

Hololens 2 is supposed to be improved across the board and add a 70 degree FOV. Not perfect but a step towards the 130 degree sweet spot I'm waiting for.

Folks smarter than me explained that Hololens locked the FOV to 35 degrees because the math it's expotentionally harder when you start dealing with the natural curve of the eye + the curve of the headset lens + real world overlays. So I get it's a tough problem to crack if you don't tether it to an i7 gaming rig like the Meta 2.

If Hololens can just get down under $1k I think MS will own the market for awhile. _If_ they don't drop the ball....something they do with such frequency that it makes me wonder if the Illuminati is real.

</rant>

Do people really hate Microsoft _so_ much that they'll let someone defraud the industry, and pay for pieces that are on the verge of lying just so they can support something else?

This. Though I will say, in my opinion tech companies are more or less wild animals we pretend are domesticated.

Nothing is free.

Facebook continues to do good for people. Twitter as well. These are invaluable communication channels for many people.

I imagine this problem will get fixed about the same time my physical spam mail stops arriving. I'm not holding my breath, given that I can _say_ something to my wife in the privacy of our own home and get a cold call or physical mailing about it a few weeks later.

I try to encourage people to pay for the services they believe in. Whether you love or hate Microsoft for $6.99/mo you can get Office, (decently private) email, cloud storage, and Skype. Hate Skype? Don't blame you but from there you can get a phone number that you can give out and keep your personal number just for family/emergencies.

This sends a powerful message to folks trying to build a better mouse trap. It is _very_ hard to produce a free service that competes with these folks but if we show we're willing to pay for privacy then maybe we'll start to see competitive innovation in that space again.

Now that I have a family it inspires rage that my phone rings constantly from spammers and I might ignore a call that's time sensitive and important.

Some companies have all the right ideas and for whatever reason still can't execute.

Adobe AIR beat things like Electron and PhoneGap to market by years. IMHO the issue with Adobe is this insistence on 'open' still having various vary opinionated elements. Adobe Air for example had a lot of good ideas but still attempted to evangelize Flash and ActionScript. I _think_ MS is trying to pivot of that grave now with .NET Core. Time will tell if the Mono-to-Wasm or .NET Core Native projects have legs.

I was so very excited about Adobe Air and wrote a production application with it in 2009.

I _think_ a sweet spot for WASM data processing. The data visualization space should explode once I can with data in the browser at near native speed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR

I've used Patternfly for rapid prototyping for the last 1-2 years. I share all of your frustrations.

What makes Patternfly stand out for me is that incorporates opinions from enterprise dashboards/line of business apps. If it stays true to this and solves all of it's project management and code quality issues it could leap ahead of most other frameworks. I need whiz bang examples of composed components almost more than I need the component library itself.

As a back end developer here is the work flow that is eased by a library like Patternfly:

1) Someone develops or exposes an API. 2) A team wants to dog food a potential new solution built on top of that API and shop it around. 3) Someone gifts them a single developer and a bucket of hours to see what they can do.

In this instance I need a stable library that looks good and doesn't require me to wade through the front end too much. Patternfly fit that niche for awhile. However do to the slow dev cycles I've moved to Semantic UI and I'm just building my own component library out of that. Arguably the route I should have taken from the start but Patternfly let me ship stuff I wouldn't have otherwise in the time I was allowed.

</ramble>

That is very fair. However you are disagreeing with something I stated was my very humble opinion. I didn't mean for it to be an analysis. More of a story shared at a pub as to why I don't fish off a particular pier anymore.

I suppose I have a bias. I don't see the value in studying him, or in picking apart these postmortem campfire tales. Aside from (and I say this whimsically); to analyze and better understand the horror that we intelligent human beings are capable of allowing.

I don't envy titans of industry any more than I envy celebrity for this reason. They seem to be our social experiments. We are lucky to have them and luckier still that fewer than most become real devils.

Wish I had a point for this ramble. I just feel like there is a terrible _cost_ to being someone like Jobs, Musk, Tesla, etc. A cost that doesn't seem to be adequately explained to them _or_ the people who revere them. They are the milk producing cows of productivity that we happily take out and slaughter for meat once they burn out. That we seem to love them just makes it all the more strange.

Yup. Xamarin is another tool I want to love. I'm also following the Blazor project (https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor) like it's my job.

I'm not so sure. Reading John Carmack's story (and others) it seems that Steve Jobs was able to convince people to enjoy the abuse and remember it with revery. That is a special kind of talent, but as others have mentioned it seems to attract and inspire the worst kind of corporate scum.

The places where it doesn't seem like an abusive relationship it most certainly seems like the way a feudal tyrant would be behave.

I will give you my very humble opinion:

The front end world is a land of sand castles. If you put in the work and care to make yours wonderful then I'm sure there is a sense of pride and accomplishment at what can be done with the tools.

However, the tide will come in and it feels like it comes in daily to threaten to wash away all of your work. You do not control the tide.

-----------------

By the above I mean that you will need to fully own the application life cycle management and realize that for as great as Typescript is virtually _none_ of the examples you see will be based in it and there will always be some level of disconnect between what you are doing and what most everyone else is doing.

I think Typescript is a great fit _if_:

a) You ship a part of the project that _only_ has to interface with your TS code post compilation/transpiling. For example a little proxy shim responsible for server round trips or the business logic that the front end devs will call.

b) You are using Angular.

Otherwise use whatever the core framework you adopt is using. Usually just ES6 + Babel + a nice linter + tests.

Hope that helps. I'm a C# dev and I've tried and failed to use TypeScript for years. Mainly because the buy in is usually for React/Vue/etc and the JS front end land is squirrely enough without my having to mentally translate every example I see into TS. I've come to terms with doing one mental switch during my day between logical tiers (front end, middleware, backend). I try to limit the additional context switching I have to do once in those spaces.

Hope that helps.

This. I believe we are ripe for another leap in math education, or at least computer science education. A new approach to teaching that in a generation will make current methods looks like rhetorical algebra.

I think this is a great example: https://github.com/Jam3/math-as-code

That page is a sort of rosetta stone for me after years of learning to code while also struggling with math notation. I find a similar fog lifts when I look at set theory through the lens of SQL and relation databases.

It amazes me that we still can't clearly demonstrate to children why math is important and instantly and universally instill a love and curiosity. Instead we have unforgiving educational models that are "well, you either get it or you don't."

It angers me to think of all the potentially _effective_ programmers who get their dreams squashed because they can't pass Calculus II (or other prereq.), and thus are literally not allowed to enroll in a programming course.

I didn't know about Karnaugh Maps but I use truth tables constantly in the design phase of tasks. Thank you very much for this. If you've found other tools like this please share. Not really related but for requirements I find gap and SWOT analysis to be vital tools as well as weighted pairwise comparisons. Throw in some UML diagrams and I start feeling good about things. These things impress far more people than they should.

</rant>

This is fine, but I tire of the obscure titles and needlessly leading writing styles. I often spend the first few paragraphs desperate for an abstract or any hint as to what I'm reading. Only in the end for it to be more exposition than idea. Click bait by another name.

My kingdom for an abstract.

To the best of my knowledge this will be PWAs delivered through the Windows Store. Not for example, Chrome/FireFox/Edge PWAs having better support within Windows.

As to what they'll fix/implement when. I only have my opinion which is - Microsoft has been chasing this dragon for sometime and they love to redefine and confuse terms as they go.

This link is the root of my confirmation bias though -> https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/142649/microsoft...

I feel like the 'M$' pejorative is a bit out dated and not really representative of Microsoft as a company anymore.

Apple, and Google practices as of late do seem sufficiently profit oriented to the point of poor consumer experience. Throw Facebook and Twitter in the mix for good measure. At the very least MS is no longer the only bully in the room....if they are still a bully at all.

I'm not sure I've seen quite as drastic a shift in fundamental thinking from a company as I've seen from Microsoft in recent years (under Nadella).

tl;dr - Any large and diversified (tech) company has so many powerful stakeholders within the company that decisions bubble up which are in the best interest of those stakeholders and their departments, not necessarily the consumer.

100% this. They will also be treating PWA (progressive web apps) as first class citizens. Same as everyone else.

Honestly, I think if they would just buy Nox (https://www.bignox.com/) and bake it into Windows 10/S as a side channel in the Windows store they would start to control the PC narrative again.

I'm currently on a slick Dell XPS 13, using the linux subsystem _and_ android apps through NOX without issue. This is also my dev machine and I get 9 hours consistently.