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Linux is the reason Windows apps are bloated these days (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 321 points 11 months ago (41 children)

Electron is the only cross platform gui toolkit...

If you ignore QT, GTK and everything else.

I'm so glad that Microsoft makes an awesome cross platfor--- wait, no, but they contribute code to--- hmmm ... Hey, what does Microsoft do to make apps more portable again?

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  • [–] 160 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    The real reasons often are:

    • They want be able to hire much cheaper webdevs instead of software devs.
    • Electron has a lot of built-in data collecting metrics, which they urgently need for creating a real-life KITT.
    • Easy live embedding of content. Sure you can add your own solution, in fact I created ETML as a solution for this problem for my engine, all without any support for nasty scripting languages or convoluted stylesheets (style-inheritance in CSS turned me off from webdev even more than JS did). At best, it can be used for things like embedding videos on Discord, because no one else thought some universal approach, let alone one that disallows proprietary players. At worst, it's being used for ads.

    Also a lot of Windows-only apps are Electron apps, only because the manufacturer wants to go "fuck you", even putting protections into the code just in case you wanted to run it on Linux.

    EDIT: Forgot the "live embeds" reason.

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  • [–] 75 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    one of the funniest (and sadly accurate) things i've heard said about linux backwards-compatibility is that its most stable API is Win32. you can run really old windows software on wine because they support stuff even windows doesn't anymore.

    of course this is because the expectation is that you can just recompile old software to work on new systems, which is not really a thing on window.s

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    The most stable system is one that is out of support. No updates == No breakage! 😄

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago* (18 children)

    Flatpak
    AppImage
    Snap

    Hell, let's not forget
    Python Perl
    Java
    POSIX

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago (17 children)

    The first 3 are Linux only. It's irrelevant.

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  • [–] -3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (16 children)

    Also each is pretty bad in terms of usability and practicality, either losing integration because "containerized" or taking GBs of space or both.

    Edit: guys relax, I'm not a linux hater, I use it daily. But windows does have a unified environment, which makes deployment so much easier, while linux doesn't. And that's a problem since you either have old broken apps on distro repositories, or impractical, potebtially bloated, and even more fractionated environments like those I mentioned. They are patches and we should work towards a more standard environment, not adding more and more levels of abstraction like electron does.

    Even Torvalds says it so.

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    AppImages can get quite large because each app is self-contained, but the "losing integration" part is nonsense these days for any of these formars. That's why we have portals, and if those aren't enough you can still give the app full permissions.

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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Appimages are usually quite reasonable in size, it's Flatpak that usually require 2/3 GB per app since every package has its own version of KDE/Gnome or other runtimes so every app still has to download a new one.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    That's simply not true, if the required dependencies are already downloaded they get used by every Flatpak app. If you have three apps requiring the Gnome 46 libs those only exist once.

    I don't know where this myth about Flatpaks always being gigabytes in size originates from or why it's so persistent, but it's wrong.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    I'm not saying that's not true.

    I'm saying I've almost never downloaded a Flatpak that didn't require a new dependency downloaded.

    When I removed all my flatpk some time ago, I had: Steam, Viking, Discord, FreeCad and Flatseal to manage them. All of them and their dependencies used something arounx 17 GB of disk space (most of which was of course several versions of dependency runtimes), and that was after I removed all the unused runtimes that forn some reason it doesn't remove after I uninstall or they are upgraded.

    I'm sure if I installed more Flatpaks, some dependencies would eventually be reused, but you still need a good collection of them at any given time. So in pracrice you still need a lot lf space unfortunately.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago*

    I don’t know where this myth about Flatpaks always being gigabytes in size originates from or why it’s so persistent, but it’s wrong.

    Alright, here is ~25 GUI apps flatpak vs appimage:

    • 6 GiB flatpak.
    • 2.7 GIB appimage.

    This is if you have a filesystem with transparent compression, If you do not have such filesystem (ext4), then it is more like 15 GIB vs 2.9 GiB lol.

    This comparison is missing the flatpak equivalents of kdeconnect, deadbeef and a few CLI tools that I have on right btw, flatpak-dedup-checker for some reason doesn't check the /var/lib/flatpak/repo directory which is usually another +1GiB in best case scenario.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    In my experience the issue is different flatpaks depending on different versions of gnome platform or mesa or whatever, so you have multiple versions of the same library.

    I have plenty of storage though so I don't care that much.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

    losing integration because “containerized”

    Bollocks. I've seen that many times with Flatpak (can't speak for Snap), and every single time it was either because the packager failed to set up permissions or because the user messed with permissions that the application needed. Break off the tip of a screwdriver and it will no longer function as a screwdriver.

    And I know you're talking out of your ass because AppImage isn't even sandboxed.

    taking GBs of space

    That part is true and accurate, and for a very good reason: dependency pinning. System packages can break if they don't have the correct versions of shared libraries. If a package requires a very old version of a library, and doesn't link it statically or supply it with the package, it can misbehave, have missing features, or refuse to even start. Flatpak (and probably Snap too, can't speak for it) solves that by letting the packager specify (pin) the exact version of a dependency. If five separate packages require five different versions of the GNOME application framework, then they will download five separate packages of the correct version. AppImage solves it by being monolithic: everything is packaged together into a single executable.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child) 
    losing integration because “containerized”

    Bollocks. I’ve seen that many times with Flatpak (can’t speak for Snap), and every single time it was either because the packager failed to set up permissions or because the user messed with permissions that the application needed. Break off the tip of a screwdriver and it will no longer function as a screwdriver.

    Well then I guess you haven't tried to get a password manager like KeepassXC to work with a Flatpak browser, because none of the solutions I've seen are "fix the permissions".

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

    I don't know if it's still the case, but up to a couple of years ago, Flatpak was configured so that externally mounted folders were not accessible. I discovered that when Steam on flatpak refused to install games on my hdd, and it was quite frustrating to figure out how to enable it. Still, it's difficult to criticize how "bloated" are electron apps (they are) when I need to download 2GB or runtime for an 80MB telegram binary

    Snaps integration is even worse as I've seen browser extensions state they straight don't work on snap's browsers. Also desktop integration on gnone (even files drag and drop between snaps) are broken on the ubuntu installations I tried.

    Appimages have the least drawbacks and are my preferred methods between the three (at least they take less storage space than an equivalent Flarpak for some reason, but are still broken sometimes), yet they still miss a central package repository, and that's a big problem.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)

    yet they still miss a central package repository, and that’s a big problem.

    https://github.com/ivan-hc/AM

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    It's a package repository, but I would hardly call it "central"

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    Well, upstream is now considering either merging or just pointing to the AM repository because it is bigger and better maintained.

    https://github.com/AppImage/appimage.github.io/issues/3595

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (11 children)

    .net
    .net cli apps are cross platform and can be portable :p
    Gui in .net isnt fully cross platform ( maui is everything except linux ) but frameworks like avalonia ( .net ) and imgui fix all that :')

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Thanks for reminding me why Maui doesn't support Linux. I saw Maui mentioned in an earlier comment and was baffled why KDE would make something not working that doesn't work in Linux. It's because Microsoft stole the Maui name from KDE: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-KDE-MAUI

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    @DacoTaco @MoogleMaestro there is a port of mono winforms implementation to modern dotnet and it's really works:github.com/DanielVanNoord/Syst

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (4 children)

    Winforms of all things haha. Eeuw xD
    But thats flipping awesome and i love it! I know xamarin was wpf being cross platform with mono, but thats a dead horse thanks to microsoft haha

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    @DacoTaco Yes, it's Microsoft decided to kill classic win32 widgets and any XAML support in Mono, forcing new WinRT platform and not providing any GUI support in netcore. It's sad that nobody made some crossplatform WPF implementation for modern dotnet, Maui is not incompatible with existing source code, IIRC

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    It’s sad that nobody made some crossplatform WPF implementation for modern dotnet

    That's basically Avalonia UI.

    I believe Uno Platform is similar, but less of a WPF variant, and closer to Xamarin or MAUI in the style of Xaml that they use.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    @hdsrob >That’s basically Avalonia UI.no, avalonia cannot help you run existing applications. Also. Avalonia is a crap, taking minutes to parse xml crap on poor hardwareYes, there are many implementaion of WPF-like UI, but no implementation of existing Windows UI.mono's winforms allows you run existing winforms apps without single line change or even without recompiling (just replace related System.Windows.* assembies)

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    Does not MAUI compile to Linux, just that you need to compile on Windows?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    Nope. The ui framework doesnt support linux at all. None of its cross platform claases and enums have linux. Its stupid because .net and aspcore just work on linux...

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