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Just found out that you can CTRL+T in fedora's installation GUI to browse web pages in firefox, amazing! (programming.dev)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 81 points 7 months ago (17 children)

What you discovered is that today's mediocre developers implement everything in web browsers, or web brower-like frameworks like Electron, and set them up to masquerade as normal applications, but with 100x the disk, RAM and CPU footprint.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    looking at you Discord. hell also looking at you vesktop, equibop, whatever "better" discord client is out there. majority are just electron web apps.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    Let's be honest, it's the easiest. I've been trying to write UIs in pure rust and python recently and let me tell you, it's a drag.

    Some frameworks don't even support writing your own components, some don't allow reusing parts of the UI, some don't even have proper layout engines you can modify, theming can be difficult, others dont have reactive values, most don't have a fast dev loop (make a change, see it, repeat), and so on. I've even tried using game engines like Godot and Bevy.

    We like complaining about Electron, but let's be serious, as bad as it is, the other stuff is worse.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Writing stuff in a proper gui framework using the tools we've had for decades is not really that bad, it's just not what all the tutorials are for. CSS can be an absolute pig to get things just so, or was until quite recently.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    CSS is terrible, no doubt about it, but the problem is exactly that: native GUI frameworks haven't changed in the way they work. Why else do you think electron became popular? Obviously there was reason for it

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I think it became popular because you can deliver the same app to mobile and desktop platforms. And because js gave people a very easy intro to development on the web so tons of people know it.

    I don't think it became popular because it was better at making an application on a single target. I've never made a webapp with the equivalent of GLADE or QtCreator so I don't know if it even exists - but those tools are very decent if you had a basic understanding of UI layout.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Then why can't QT provide the same benefit of delivering cross platform developing experience? See, that is the core issue. You write FOR the platform not for yourself. In the web space, the platform writes FOR you lest they want to break compliance with the rest of the web standard. When you are writing web application, you are writing program in a standard that the platform WILL follow instead of you following whatever the platform dictates at the time of their convenience

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    There are some good, new things in that space though. One example is Flet which lets you write Flutter apps in Python. It's quite fun to work with, and the same code can be deployed to multiple platforms, both desktop and mobile.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Only if you use electron. There are lots of light(er) weight alternatives.

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