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I remember the 90s when both mac and windows crashed on a daily basis. When was the last time you saw a legitimate BSOD that didn’t involve hardware failure? When was the last time you had to reset the PRAM on your mac just to get it to boot?
Thats actyally very good point. Our phones x100 or x10K more powerful and complex than computers from 90s, but always works and very-very rarely need reboot.
Kernels have gotten better. Professional tools have gotten better. Everything on Linux has gotten better. Compilers and drivers too.
Everything else is built by the lowest bidder and is absolute garbage. And unfortunately, it’s what most people interact with all day long.
Eh.
This “everything else” are stuff that previously didn’t even exist. There used to be only professional tools and a few games, now you have an app (or multiple apps) for everything.
And I’ll take a garbage program over one that doesn’t exist.
Fair point. Maybe there’s only ever been so many good software folks, and they are all working on the same stuff they used to.
Yes. Case in point: there are at least 10 Lemmy iOS apps. I’ll give you ten guesses on which ones are actually native Swift…
There are a quite a few Android apps in progress too. How many are written in Kotlin?
Are any of them out of Test Flight yet?
Jerboa is a native android app, so that’s nice.
Yet it still feels sloppy (and I couldn’t find why to the defense of Jerboa, I skimmed through the relevant code but couldn’t find immediate issues and there’s an open issue: https://github.com/dessalines/jerboa/issues/445)
I don’t get why, with so much hardware power we still have these issues…
Voyager isn’t native and it’s good. I’m not totally sure what the hate is for React Native for apps like this. It’s an abstraction over Swift, it’s still Swift under the hood isn’t it?
In my experience, Voyager is still pretty buggy too. For example, try editing a post then go to do anything else after the fact. I always have to restart the whole app when I go to edit a post I made. They have a ton more features than anyone else but there are still tons of bugs.
react native is another layer and lags behind the dev of swift by at least a year. This is a huge problem for new api’s like SwiftUI, in my experience. Ps. Native is ALWAYS better than an approximation of native.
everything went down when we allow web technologies be part of the desktop, everything electron or any other incarnation is an abomination
Amen. I miss actual desktop applications
I have the feeling, that this age will come back in one way or the other (and I have the feeling Rust and Webassembly will be involved ;))
Not FOSS but commercial software is. The apps just get more bloated and want to suck even more data with each update. Then there is the sites that have hundreds of trackers and third party cookies from everywhere and need 1gb to display 🙄. OK maybe not 1gb but you get the gist.
Electron apps created with React can definitely push the boundaries of what ‘acceptable’ memory usage is.
Electron apps created with React can definitely push the boundaries of what ‘acceptable’ memory usage is.
I have a pet theory that webview-based apps are popular only because currently there is absolutely no usable multiplatform desktop GUI framework. Therefore, developers have to resort to the one thing that works: load a webpage in a web browser.
Even React Native feels like a kludge in a way it converts React components to UI components.
Yep totally unheard of for foss software to get worse. Gnome 3 and kde 4 for example were universally acclaimed.
I think that the post author just neglects that software has become mindblowingly complex compared to the days of yore, if you put together all the features of netscape + win 3.11 + wordperfect + whatever other thing they were using in the 90s at any given point you don’t get 10% of the complexity of a contemporary productivity app (say outlook) let alone a full operating system.
It’s clear that the more complex something is the more things can break. It’s like complaining that F16s are worse than consumer 40€ drones because the former require maintenance every few hours of flight while the latter don’t.
But if all you need is a drone and all anyone makes is an F-16, that is a shitty mismatch. I don’t need an outlook that does all that shit, I just need to check my email, or at least set up a filter to send everything to the trash.
I don’t need teams to do document management, I just need to chat with my team. I’ll resend a document if it is needed for any reason. Companies are adding useless bloat to all of these things and then breaking the core functionality because they’ve made things hard. This is not progress.
Edit: fixed some iOS auto-incorrect. Apologies for any incoherence before.
Everything is getting worse as companies are exclusively trying to squeeze more money out of everyone rather than build good products or services. Everything is done by fewer more overworked workers, with shittier components and features that are designed to extract money out of you rather than be useful or “good” (my favorite example is BMW’s subscription based seat warmers.)
That’s really what’s going on.
Back in the days, people took the time it was necessary to write the software. And managers trusted the engineers to say when it’s ready or not.
Nowadays, the software world is managers going “yes we know the database’s gonna blow up over the weekend without the query optimizations, but we want to build this new feature before the end of the week. We can deal with the database when it blows up over the weekend, that’s why you guys are on-call.”
I did not make this up, I’ve actually heard this. This is why modern software is so fucked up, not because we can’t handle the complexity, because reliability and quality just isn’t prioritized at all anymore. Gotta dish out new features every day and you’re not allowed to work on fixing known critical bugs.
This hits close to home.
Yes. At least since late '90s, and certainly the last 2 decades.
I blame the rise of frameworks, libraries, and IDEs. It’s easier for someone who knows nothing to throw some software together and ship it. In the good old days, all software had to be written by someone who knew what they were doing, often in difficult tools. You had to think ahead and write code correctly, because you couldn’t just ship patches every week.
And as junior devs get replaced by AI, there won’t be any experience for any of them to learn how to do that.
