What’s your guys general thought on how everything is web based now? For me, I don’t really like it. I would just rather have an actual program that runs. But I am merely a user, not a programmer.
It’s better than everything being exclusive to Windows, but I’d much rather everything just ran natively on Linux…
I generally prefer native local applications wherever possible, and for a long time I was against the movement to web based tools. That is until one thing changed. I moved to a different department at work. In this different department, I am issued with a Windows 11 laptop that is extremely locked down. It cannot run any executables aside from those whitelisted. I cannot run anything as administrator. If I need anything new whitelisted, I need to write a full page justification, get an endorsement from my manager, and then it can take over a year to get approved (but most likely will be immediately denied).
Obviously one thing it can run is MS Edge. All of the company tools and systems are webapps on the intranet, accessed via Edge. Now I’m grateful there are so many high quality browser based webapps around.
A bit too broad to give a specific answer from my side.
Overall, I prefer web based over apps, because I can CSS hack and if necessary JS hack them.
Web also means it doesn’t litter my PC or mobile phone or tablet. And that it can’t fetch more data than it needs or I want it to have access to.
Bad software is bad software, no matter if it’s installed or on the web.
For a lot of things I would rather have something web based than app based. I hate having to download some random app from some random company just to interact with something one time. Why do all restaurants, car parking places etc require apps rather than just having a simple site. Not everything should be native first IMO.
Yeah there are pros and cons. Desktop apps are not sandboxed. Mobile apps are often missing features and are annoying to install. Websites often have poor performance or janky UX on mobile, and you need to be online, and you don’t have control of their availability.
I think the best option depends on what the thing is - ordering food from a random pub? Web site. Video editing? App.
As a dev: for all their flaws, web apps are easier to distribute, portable, and have a lot of support in frameworks. They also require little infrastructure in most cases.
As a user: web apps run without installing anything, are mostly portable between my browsers of choice, and run in a sandbox to protect my computer.
Probably 90% of my needs can be served by a web app if it is well designed. If I can’t have a web app, I will look for a flatpak version and failing that I will look for it in my distro.
+1
