alt Hacker NewsTo me, I prefer desktop apps because I KNOW when I've upgraded - it either said "upgrade now?" and did it, or, in the olden days, I had to track it down, or I installed an updated version of a distro, which included updated apps, so I expected some updates.
There are some things that NATURALLY lend themselves to a website - like doctor's appointments, bank balance, etc - but it's still a pain when, on logging in to "quickly check that one thing" that I finally got the muscle memory down for because I don't do it that often, I get a "take a quick tour of our great new overhauled features" where now that one thing I wanted is buried 7 levels deep or something, or just plain unfindable.
For something like Audacity (the audio program), how the heck does it make sense to put that on a website (I'm just giving a random example, I don't think they've actually done this), where you first have to upload your source file (privacy issues), manipulate it in a graphically/widget-limited browser - do they have a powerful enough machine on the backend for your big project? - then download the result? It's WAY, WAY better to be able to run the code on your own machine, etc. AND to be stable, so that once you start a project, it won't break halfway through because they changed/removed that one feature your relied upon (no, not thinking of AI at all, why do you ask? :-)
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> To me, I prefer desktop apps because I KNOW when I've upgraded - it either said "upgrade now?" and did it, or, in the olden days, I had to track it down, or I installed an updated version of a distro, which included updated apps, so I expected some updates.
Yeah, but as a maintainer it's the opposite, isn't it? I don't have to worry about supporting version current - 3 in the Polish version of Windows because you're always running the version I've deployed in the environment I've deployed it in (I mean, yes, I'm oversimplifying given the frontend component, but that's still a much smaller surface).
Of course, I'm also an old-school hacker (typed my first BASIC program ~45 years ago), so I have a desktop mentality. None of this newfangled 17-pound-portable stuff for me :-) And phones are at best a tertiary computing mechanism: first, desktop, then laptop, then phone. So yes, I'm clearly biased. Not trying to hide that.
> For something like Audacity (the audio program), how the heck does it make sense to put that on a website (I'm just giving a random example, I don't think they've actually done this), where you first have to upload your source file (privacy issues), manipulate it in a graphically/widget-limited browser
I understand it was just an example, but you'd be surprised how far browsers have come along with technologies like Web Assembly and WebGL. Forget audio editing, you can even do video editing - without uploading any files to the remote server[1]. All the processing is done locally, within your browser.
And if you thought that was impressive, wait till you find out that you can can even boot the whole Linux kernel in your browser using a VM written in WASM[2]!
But I do agree with your points about lack of feature stability. I too prefer native apps just for the record (but for me, the main selling points are low RAM/CPU/disk requirements and keyboard friendliness).
You touched on the one thing I hate most about infrequently used websites. The inevitable popup to "explore our new features." Hell no, I don't want to do that. I haven't logged on in six months, so I'm obviously here now with a purpose in mind and I want to do that as quickly as possible and then close the tab.