[Dylan16807]

> it shows how little desktop environments have advanced/bloomed

Are you suggesting it should be built in to a desktop environment and not a separate program? Why?

> how deeply cargo-culted that whole space is

Desktop environments? I don't understand this point at all.

> This should be trivially easy to implement without visiting the web.

By "should" are you critiquing the author, or do you not think it's easy for some reason?

[maccam94]

Back in my Windows XP days I had an app installed called Desktop Sidebar[1], which would be exactly the place I'd want all of this functionality today. Or in some kind of widget layer, like with MacOS. Hmm it's been a long time since I thought about desktop customization, maybe I should see if there is anything similar for GNOME these days.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20120527201322/http://desktopsid...

[jrm4]

Not critiquing the author at all -- what I'm saying is: There is absolutely nothing about this that requires a connection to the internet or to store any of this with a 3rd party. That's a liability.

This entire system could be done locally with a more "pliable" environment, but e.g. those of us who want something customizable would have to slog through bash scripts or emacs or something like that.

Instead of e.g. something that worked like the famed/mythical "modern Hypercard."

[Dylan16807]

A local piece of HTML works fine as a modern hypercard. Or various app platforms that give you a similar experience. As far as I can tell the pliability you want is already there.

[jrm4]

This is honestly the weirdest and most wrong thing I've ever seen anyone say on HN. The two are not remotely comparable. Like, you no, you can't drag and drop to create a calculator with HTML.

[Dylan16807]

I see.

I thought you were saying that making this work offline should be trivial. I didn't realize you wanted to replace the entire dev process, to have the end user make their own version from scratch.

So my reply was talking about the ease of installing a program that was developed like this but for offline use, not the ease of make-your-own.

You're of course right that making your own has no easy solution here. But that's a separate problem from working offline, and the way you talked about both problems at the same time confused me.

[RodgerTheGreat]

You can, however, have a single html document containing an editing environment that can be used to "drag-and-drop" together a calculator: https://beyondloom.com/decker/

[wyclif]

I very rarely see my desktop, since I almost always have a full-size terminal window with a split running, along with a browser window, Finder, VSCode, Preview, Pages, and other apps open. I think the use case this is designed for is people like that who are rotating between browser tabs a lot and not minimizing everything to see their desktop.