[wayneftw]

> You can actually make an application that looks decent and isn't a pile of shoehorned libs with an HTML engine.

As if desktop OSes aren't full of "shoehorned libs" and non-native rendering engines among other cruft...right down to standard i/o interfaces that all processes use, which are based on the idea of a Teletypewriter.

> I lost years waiting to have a decent way to develop desktop applications for Linux. After 20 years no one could get their shit together...

That's funny because after using an Arch based desktop system (Manjaro) for a few years, I'd never go back to the Windows/Mac way of doing things on my main workstations. Imagine having to search the web to find a download page and/or get walled into someone's idea of a garden in order to find apps? Yuck!

And what apps exactly am I missing? Photoshop? Because when I moved to Linux every app I needed from Windows or its equivalent was already here - Chrome, VS Code, Beyond Compare, Android Studio, Gimp, Pinta, LibreOffice, Postman, Thunderbird, Slack, Spotify, Discord, OBS, FreeRDP, VLC Media Player and the list goes on... Barrier, a decent Notepad replacement (Mousepad - which is better than Notepad), MySQL workbench, Azure Data Studio (for SQL Server), etc. etc. etc... All that and my OS stopped getting in the way of me doing things like Docker, Node/NPM, bash scripts and many other such things that are bolted on and poorly supported in Windows/Mac.

I guess when you argue with people who think the Mac desktop toolkit is any good...well I don't expect to get anywhere here. I mean, the fact that you pretty much have to use Objective-C or Swift to even interface with them is already a huge detriment. Once you get past that you only have to deal with the normal missing features and anti-developer stuff that Apple throws at you. I'll take Win32 and C# any day over that garbage, but beyond that - I love HTML for desktop apps. The rendering engine behind Chromium is the most advanced in the world and it can do things that desktop toolkits couldn't dream of offering.

> BUT the Linux community never proved they can deliver a product.

The only reason a quarter of developers are on a Mac is because Linux laptop drivers aren't always great. It has absolutely nothing to do with GUI toolkits or any perceived lack of apps. It's so easy to build apps for every platform now with Electron - the vast majority of people don't care what their desktop apps are built on and that's why Electron is pretty much eating the world, not Flutter.

> It's simply not in their nature and it's OK, but don't cry about when some evil conglomerate rolls up in town and gets all the action.

Yeah, I'm sure people will complain that there's a new way to build apps especially if it's perceived as "better" than Electron (which I doubt it will be), but I guess we'll see. Currently I there aren't any popular Flutter apps and none of the desktop software that I see people use at work were built with Flutter.

[anaganisk]

Photoshop and Gimp are worlds apart. If you're not a power designer/user, GIMP is horrible to be part of your workflow. Depending on the user( mostly developers). Linux in its current state is a NO for the people who want AAA Games and Adobe/Affinity Toolset. And many of the apps you mentioned are Electron Apps which are what commenter mentions about. Dont get me wrong but usability/readability of linux way apps dont come anywhere near other OSs because they're primarily designed by developers not design teams. I dont blame them. But to be a mass desktop alternative, linux has some climbing to do.

[bscphil]

> Dont get me wrong but usability/readability of linux way apps dont come anywhere near other OSs because they're primarily designed by developers not design teams.

I think this claim harms your overall point (which I agree with). I can't think of any Linux programs (other than Calibre) which I have serious problems using. Furthermore, they tend to be extremely fast because they're very lightweight. The entire VLC package from my distribution is only 13 MB, and VLC is a rather large program by Linux desktop standards. Even Gimp is extremely simple and intuitive to use (to anyone who isn't a complete noob with graphics concepts), it's just extremely lacking in features and polish compared to Photoshop.

If you stick with the point that AAA games and Adobe are still a "no", you have a fine point. I've found that 99% of the games I want to play are actually available for Linux, these days, but that probably speaks more to my tastes than anything else.

[wayneftw]

Gimp is certainly not the best, which is why I use Pinta for simple workflows. If there's some feature missing from Pinta, I use Gimp.

> ...usability/readability of linux way apps dont come anywhere near other OSs...

As a web dev - almost all of the apps that I needed from Windows were on Linux and the usability is exactly the same.

Personally, I don't care if Linux is ever used by the masses though. I'd probably prefer if it wasn't. I also don't care if AAA games ever come to Linux. I keep Windows machines around for that. I also have Macs for doing stuff with Apple iThings.

There is no obsession within me to do everything on the same machine. I don't need my phone to do stuff that my desktop does. My laptop is used for meetings and has almost no software installed on it. My Windows machines are used for entertainment. My Linux machines are for work. For devs, if you really, really need Photoshop you can run it in a VM. I don't see the big deal with that - it was a selling point for Apple's Intel Macs for a long time.

So, outside of AAA games (which devs largely don't need for work) and Photoshop - what am I missing?