| > bandwidth Why would I download a text editor every time I wanted to use it? Even VS Code is stored locally, ready to be used off-line. But let's not pick an Electron app for _everything_ we want to do: last time I checked, Notepad++ does all of what I listed, and more. > memory requirements Yes, this can be a problem and is a sure sign of bloat. Meanwhile, I think we're bad at picking our software: why do we just sit back and accept stuff like this? I've got 8 gigs of RAM in my dirt cheap home laptop and I can run Gimp, GNumeric, Firefox and watch a movie at the same time just fine, with plenty of RAM left to spare. For professional use, requirements are and have always been higher: hence the $15k workstations of yesteryear. I think we're doing a bad job at promoting that the use of native software would likely have the outcome of higher productivity and lower hardware costs, because that would probably mean we're putting our own cushy web coding jobs on the line, too. > battery life There are still some hard limits we have to take into account. Even if I for some reason did have to work with both programming and Photoshop on a 3 hour plane ride (I luckily do not), I don't think the answer to my problems would be to switch to "ed". |
>Why would I download a text editor every time I wanted to use it?
To give a serious answer: The web is literally that. And I suspect the success of the web is in a major way due to Windows' lack of streamlined package manager, as the installation ("loading") of a webpage is about a second, whereas the install time of an average Windows program involved potentially several minutes and clicking "next" several times.
Fast install times helps with discoverability - if you can click a link and "install" a browser in under a second, it becomes pretty trivial to try out ten browsers in under two minutes and encourages experimenting. Plus, you'll have reasonable expectation that you won't have to spend time cleaning up the cruft left by unwanted IDEs you don't plan to use.
Also, the install time issue also applies to updates. Web pages mostly don't have an "updating..." loading popup like e.g. Steam has every time there's an update.
Note: I am NOT advocating we all switch to web browsers. I AM advocating that we try to make our package managers a couple of orders of magnitude faster.