[adrianton3]

> booked tickets for a flight or bought a home or a car or watched a cat video

Would you install a native app to book a flight? One for each company? Download updates for them every now and then, uninstall them when you run out of disk space etc

I can ask the same question about every other activity we do in these non-native apps.

[pjmlp]

I have installed all them on the phone, so yes.

Unfortunely several of them are glorified webviews.

I am old enough to have lived through the days Internet meant a set of networking protocols, not ChromeOS Platform.

And on those days hard disks were still bloody expensive, by the way.

[rglullis]

> I have installed all them on the phone, so yes.

Isn't your phone providing a sandbox, a distribution system, a set of common runtime services, etc to get these native apps functional?

You don't have to squint your eyes to realize that this thing we call "document browsers" are doing a lot of the same work that Apple/Google are doing with their mobile OSes.

[pjmlp]

You mean like Windows Store, Mac App Store, apt, yum/dnf, emerge,....?

All the OS frameworks that are available across most operating systems that don't fragment themselves into endless distributions?

[rglullis]

> don't fragment themselves into endless distributions?

My dear Lord! In what world are you living in?

Take a look at all of the "mobile apps" you installed on your phone and tell me which of those would ever devote any resource to make a apt/rpm repository for their desktop applications.

Even the ones that want to have a desktop application can not figure out how to reliably distribute their software. The Linux crowd itself is still at the flatpak vs AppImage holy war. Mark Shuttleworth is still beating the snap horse.

The Web as a platform is far from ideal, but if it weren't for it I would never been able to switch to Linux as my primary base OS and I would have to accept the Apple/Microsoft/Google oligopoly, just like we are forced to do it at the mobile space.

[johnisgood]

> The Web as a platform is far from ideal, but if it weren't for it I would never been able to switch to Linux as my primary base OS

As my old IT teacher said: you can use the browser on any OS. She also implied it requires no special skills, which is true if you are limited to the browser for the majority of the time.

So... are you saying that you are able to use Linux because all you are using is the browser?

[rglullis]

> are you saying that you are able to use Linux because all you are using is the browser?

No, I am saying that the browsers provide a fallback for the applications that I need but do not have a native counterpart, and therefore I am not stuck with Windows or MacOS.

Without the web as a platform, I'd have to leave Linux the moment I got to a job that required Slack/Jira/Teams.

[pjmlp]

In the world we build for ourselves, a worse is better mentality world.

[rglullis]

> a worse is better mentality world.

Seems like your preferred world is the totalitarian "choose any color you want as long as it is black" one, where everything is perfectly optimized and perfectly integrated into a single platform.

[apitman]

You're doing all these things with web apps also, it's just that the browser orchestrates it for you.

But for some reason this takes 20M lines of code, which creates a moat that prevents browser competition.

[yellowapple]

Any sufficiently-capable graphical application runtime* contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a web browser.

(* including every web browser)