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?
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.
Another reason is when developing the Web version first. Draw.io is a good example, where we get a bonus desktop(electron) version “for free” though the product was developed as a web app.
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
Python tkinter interfaces might be inefficient, slow and require labyrinthine code to set-up and use, but they make up for it by being breathtakingly ugly.
Ugh, and they’re just weird. I can handle ugly but ktinker popups go across virtual desktops and over other windows for some ungodly reason, and never seem to dismiss themselves properly
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
.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 :')
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
@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
Avalon is actually xaml and cross platform.
Personally id rather have a razor format of gui code, but xaml is a good second. Its basically what maui was suppose to be
@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 hardware
Yes, 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)
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
I said accessible not available. If you don’t know what it means, accessibility means integrating with the OS screen readers and other similar tools so that everyone can use your app, not only people by people with good eyesight, and capable of using a mouse.
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?
The real reasons often are:
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.
Another reason is when developing the Web version first. Draw.io is a good example, where we get a bonus desktop(electron) version “for free” though the product was developed as a web app.
Also works on mobile easier, just change some CSS
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
The most stable system is one that is out of support. No updates == No breakage! 😄
You can even do inefficient UIs in Python using tkinter, which is part of the standard library in python.
Python tkinter interfaces might be inefficient, slow and require labyrinthine code to set-up and use, but they make up for it by being breathtakingly ugly.
And now imagine yourself creating an UI in tkinter without an editor. Because that’s what I did. It was absolutely horrible.
Probably faster than me even deciding the bg color tho
I didnt care how it looked, because I only wanted for it to be finished fast.
Ugh, and they’re just weird. I can handle ugly but ktinker popups go across virtual desktops and over other windows for some ungodly reason, and never seem to dismiss themselves properly
It’s so portable! With maximal efforts we support both windows 7, windows 8.1 (but not 8.0), windiws 10 and soon Windows 11 !!!
/s
Flatpak
AppImage
Snap
Hell, let’s not forget
Python Perl
Java
POSIX
The first 3 are Linux only. It’s irrelevant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alright, here is ~25 GUI apps flatpak vs 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-checkerfor some reason doesn’t check the/var/lib/flatpak/repodirectory which is usually another +1GiB in best case scenario.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.
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.
I like having options
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.
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.
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”.
From what I’ve read it seems you shouldn’t run a browser as a flatpak anyway, as this somehow weakens the built-in isolation.
I think I originally read about this somewhere librewolf-related but can’t seem to find it now.
I did find this similar discussion: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/correct-way-to-install-browsers-on-linux-securely/27046/6
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.
Flatpak is good. I say that as both a user of them and a dev of applications that are published as flatpaks.
Lazarus gang, this is your chance!
.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 :')
@DacoTaco @MoogleMaestro there is a port of mono winforms implementation to modern dotnet and it’s really works:
https://github.com/DanielVanNoord/System.Windows.Forms
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
@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
Avalon is actually xaml and cross platform. Personally id rather have a razor format of gui code, but xaml is a good second. Its basically what maui was suppose to be
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.
@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 hardware
Yes, 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)
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
LOL, didnt know maui naming was taken before. Hilarious
GTK is not accessible anywhere other than Linux and is therefore not a serious option outside of Linux.
GTK is available for windows. https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/windows
It is. It’s just not particularly good outside of a X11/Wayland environment.
I think this being worked on though.
I said accessible not available. If you don’t know what it means, accessibility means integrating with the OS screen readers and other similar tools so that everyone can use your app, not only people by people with good eyesight, and capable of using a mouse.
I mean… Windows could probably contribute to GTK if they wanted to expose their accessibility APIs. This would in theory be a good use of time.
Thanks for the lesson