What is the benefit of everything being web based over setting up automatic building of traditional packages for existing OS or building containerized packages EG flatpak.
Because creating cross platform apps has always been really difficult. And creating web pages that work cross platform is less difficult.
If your objection is that it's inefficient and sometimes leads to bad quality output, I'd agree. But it's the option with the least friction so people gravitate towards it, we might as well make it work better.
It always depends on the use case. A good example for an application being better because it is web-based is vscode. With code-server the possibilities are almost endless.
This was revolutionary for me as a developer.
That's remote development, and you don't need a web-based UI to do it. There's also JetBrains IDEs, any terminal editor over SSH, and probably plenty of other editors I haven't looked into.
Yes and no. There are some differences which make vscode superior to tmux/screen, ssh/fuse or rdp/vnc/nomachine based solutions.
- incredibly easy to setup (only a browser is needed) and use everywhere. Even management compatible.
- can be automated easily with ansible and/or docker
- remote pairing without a third-party cloud in between
- plug-ins just work even when being used remotely
- headless chrome can be proxied to the webview of vscode (a real browser running remotely in your browser)
Almost everything mentioned can be done with the tools you suggested BUT IMO it is not as smooth then just using vscode. This is coming from an arch (using arch BTW) / i3 guy.
My opinion, I tried to make a quick side project, not for money,just to help someone. So the idea is what is the tool that takes me less of my free time and works for doing the job, fuck look and feel I need buttons and test only, I am also on Linux but the app needs to be cross platform and I will not buy Apple shit or Windows to do this, I done the project in Electron , I don't love it, I think is kind of a shit architecture, a duck-taped thing but it does the job for me.(also I personally prefer GC languages over c/c++ and Python syntax is not for me).
But if you pay me tons of money I would build you native apps, on my free time and money I will use a shitty toolkit that does the work it suppose to do. IF Microsoft would not be an evil and stupid company maybe we could all have been now making cross platform C# apps but the bastards really wanted it to be Windows only, nice job MS.
If your objection is that it's inefficient and sometimes leads to bad quality output, I'd agree. But it's the option with the least friction so people gravitate towards it, we might as well make it work better.