[elliotlarson]

I totally agree with this. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I feel like Electron is really helping here. I've been a Mac user since 2003, but built an Ubuntu based desktop recently. The fact that I can run Figma, VSCode, Slack, etc. means it's actually a workable solution. I know Electron is slow, but I don't think producing native software for Linux is economically viable or commercially interesting for a lot of companies. But if a company is building with Electron, I get the impression that it's not a lot of extra work to support Linux and it means the platform actually gets an app. Ironically, I think this will make Linux a more reasonable choice for day to day work and will eventually result in increasing the economic viability of producing software for the platform.

[bitexploder]

I love to hate electron. We all groan about it. But it does bring critical apps I use every day to my desktop. I wish these multi-billion dollar companies like Slack could stomach real native clients, sure they can afford it at a barely noticeable hit to profit, but I’ll take it ya know.

[lytefm]

I agree and think that web apps and the SaaS model in general help Desktop Linux adoption a lot.

Office 365 provides good enough Web Apps to get by without having a native Office installation. I don't have any commercial Desktop Software that I'd need specifically for my work: CRM, issue tracker, Documentation, Figma,... - all available in the Browser.

[toastal]

Personally, I wish PWAs were generally better supported so I could skip the Electron bit and could install the same app on my phone. Being a part of the main browser gives better resource handling, better sandboxing that Electron allows but I would prefer most apps didn't have, and access to the extensions I want. Too bad Firefox killed off SSB (site-specific browser) before it even launched.

[extraAccount]

PWA's only work when you are connected to the intenet for most of the time. Which is not guranteed on mobile. It is fine for some apps which need a connection to be usable like a messaging or a banking app. But others like productivity apps are useless. Sometimes the browser crashes on mobile as well.

At that point might as well make an app.

[brundolf]

That would work for Slack and Spotify, but not for VSCode. PWAs can't get file system access as far as I know.

[jiggunjer]

Wasn't Java supposed to solve the platform problem?

[9front]

Java was supposed to "write once, run anywhere". Instead it became write once, debug anywhere.