771
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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[–] 149 points 11 months ago (16 children)

Meanwhile Microsoft makes the start menu with React

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  • [–] 129 points 11 months ago* (14 children)

    I try not to let considerations get in the way of doing great work.

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  • [–] 37 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    That is the most punchable response I've seen in a while.

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

    When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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

    Punchable is a bit far, probably wanna tone it down a bit, big guy.

    Just kidding, but it's only funny and also is it this guys fault?

    I don't even know if it's true, but in any case, the guy who tasked a react (native) developer on the start menu is responsible (not the developer).

    Example: If I managed a product and hired a python developer and told them to do x, they would likely use python, right? (In this scenario, It is I the manager wjo failed everyone, not the developer).

    Also the other commenter is correct. It's like the common saying "use the right tool for the job". The saying doesn't make sense, because the right tool is always the one you know how to use..

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago*

    Punchable is a bit far

    Didn't mean that literally 😁 I just thought it was funny to describe a written response as punchable. But the response was annoying.

    It might not be the developer's fault, but him practically defending the choice by completely dodging the performance aspect is irresponsible to me. It's like he's ashamed to discuss it. Or doesn't have the knowledge to?

    A good developer should speak up and say that they might not have the skill set required for the task. That's my opinion. Either that or learn the ropes but flag for extra time needed.

    the right tool is always the one you know how to use..

    100% disagree. There are more suitable tools for certain jobs.

    Hello I am looking for a job as a surgeon. Okay what tools do you know? Jackhammer. That's the only one you know? Yup. Mmkay then that's the right tool for surgery in your case, can you start Monday?

    🫠

    Imagine someone using Java to write a program that just runs several other commands in sequence. That should really be a script, and the developer should learn a sufficiently suitable shell scripting language.

    But yeah, ultimately I agree, it's not his "fault". Especially if he flagged this to be something a bit out of the ordinary, and his manager(?) insisted. Then it's 100% not the guy's fault, for sure ong.

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

    "I am a react developer"

    I thought we are supposed to be language-agnostic after 3rd project.

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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! πŸ˜„

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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

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

    losing integration because β€œcontainerized”

    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 β€œcontainerized”

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

    I hate the Windows API so much. There are like 100 million function that all start with a capital letter and take a kajillion arguments just to do the most simple thing imaginable (see CreateThread). And there are twenty different typedefs for the same type (PSTR, LPSTR, tchar* all point to char*). Also all variables and function arguments should start with their types, like hWindow if the window is a HANDLE.

    I hate this joke of a programming interface so much, I hope everyone sticks to programming with POSIX and platform-agnostic libraries.

    EDIT: And also, did I mention that if you want to use it, you get all of it or none of it? It's literally a single header file named Windows.h. You get just that and take it or leave it.

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    • [–] 176 points 11 months ago

    that's a lot of words to basically say "i'm a fucking idiot".

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    [–] 77 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    They must really like the taste of leather.

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    • [–] 155 points 11 months ago

    Wow, that's some serious misinformation.

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

    Tell me you have no idea how software development works without saying it...

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago

    Tbh, it's not entirely wrong, which is the reason why it works so well as rage bait.

    It's really not about Linux, but it is about supporting anything and everything out there with a single app. Use Electron and you can have the same app running on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, your car, your game console, your smart fridge and in a website.

    Of course the result sucks, but if you can cut development effort into a fraction while also supporting systems that you would have never supported otherwise, that's not a bad deal for businesses.

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    • [–] 64 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (10 children)

    This is such a hilariously bad take. I like how "I can't use Win32 on Linux" morphed into "re-write the whole app in Javascript just so I can use Electron."

    Meanwhile, Wine and QT are like: "am I a joke to you?"

    I'll add that (IMO) a lot of applications are becoming increasingly malicious, although less-so in the desktop space. I'm happy that devs like this are forced to quasi-sandbox their crap into a browser. Actually, if anyone knows how to crack into an Electron app in order to restore local plugins, user-scripts, and sandbox security controls, let me know. Or just liberate the guts into a local web app instead so I can use a real browser? This trend could be very useful for local security if those features become available.

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

    I can code in C on all 3 (more if you include BSDs). You would not believe how amazing my skills are to avoid platform specific dependencies in a language that predates all these OS.

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

    How do you deal with platform specific stuff? I am talking about desktop API and friends. (If that's even a thing in your problem space). /gen

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

    I only just realized the Proton and Electron naming schemes lol

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

    This is not even mental gymnastics at that point.

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

    What kind of shit for brains asshole is still defending Windows in 2025?

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  • [–] 21 points 11 months ago

    And what kind of slavering mouth-breathing teoglodyte doesn't understand that Hannah Montana Linux negates all of these issues, will suck your dixk without hesitation, and lets you read news from four days from now.

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    • [–] 52 points 11 months ago

    He's a magician, because reading this, I aged 10 years and grew a metastatic tumor.

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    [–] 47 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Aren't Qt and GTK cross platform? I have Dolphin and Kate running on my Windows work laptop.

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

    As is wxWidgets and others.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago*

    Dear god, I had to write wxWidgets/C++ for Win32 last year for work and it was horrific. Never again, back to modern web standards for me. The irony is that it was justified as being "cross platform" but we never got around to actually making it work on Linux. Makes no sense, it should have been an internal web app. (Admittedly, this was for law enforcement software and they seem to love windows.)

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    Yeah, he doesn't know what he's talking about. There is a shitload of frontend developers that specialize in web standards and technologies. Electron was developed to take advantage of that deep pool of frontend developers. The side affect, is that other OSes can just support electron and they get the developers and the applications for free. Which has been a major boon for Linux users and those looking to escape Microsoft's vendor lockin strategy. Today might be different, but in the past, nobody was intending to support Linux by creating electron apps. If they cared so much or it was so important, they would have been using Qt and GTK prior to Electron.

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    • [–] 46 points 11 months ago

    Lame attempt at ragebait.

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    [–] 93 points 11 months ago*

    (Apple as a platform is so closed that it couldn't be influenced by this utter crap and the developers can use the OS native API's.)

    A hidden gem of stupidity and nonsense in the already pretty dumb tirade.

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    [–] 38 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Okay, how does this dude explain native Linux apps?

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

    Thank God this guy got disliked to hell.

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    • [–] [S] 37 points 11 months ago

    Amongst the apps mentioned as bloated on Windows were Teams, Discord (major offender) and WhatsApp. The latter is a curious case because a Universal Windows app existed (now being deprecated I guess?) that was more memory efficient than the Web wrapper.

    And in case, someone in interested there is a terminal client for WhatsApp (and Telegram) called nchat. Sure, it is not at feature parity with web client (images is a big problem, for obvious reasons) but the simple fact that a third party client taking so little resources exists is a damning indictment of Meta. It shows that resource efficient clients are possible (provided the parent company junks the metaverse).

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