Oh boy yet another "slow death of the PC" take
I do most of my work on a real computer
For millions, there's no viable alternative and never will be
Thinking that because you and your coworkers do that sort of thing means everyone does is literally the false consensus effect in action.
@Elizafox Just the amount of peripherals that are essential yet irreplaceable for me alone is causing me to stay on PC
@esp I need a real keyboard and monitor. There's no way I'm writing code on a phone. I've tried it. It's awful.
@Elizafox oh god with the amount of typos I get on a phone I can't imagine typing code on a phone.
@esp special characters are the worst
@Elizafox it takes 3 clicks to get to the [
@Elizafox or, presses.
@esp then there's getting to nums...
I use my phone in bed and on holiday when I don't need to get anything done of value.
I use my computer for real work and gaming.
@Elizafox tbh I find using my phone for shitposting/passive consumption a bit clunky; if I want to read aimlessly I have to get a bigger screen; not because of eyesight, but because managing a shitlourde of tabs and hitting small links on a touchscreen is not at all fun
@Elizafox Hello I sit behind a triple monitor desktop PC setup for most of my day. Nothing else can replace that.
@Elizafox hot take: a macbook is a PC
@Elizafox Aren't most of these just based on PC sales being SLOWER than they are?
Because most people who can afford a PC already have one, and gaming has driven capacity up that the rate at which you need to upgrade is pretty darned slow at this point?
Phone sales are dropping, too, since in spite of His Jobsness's snide comments about people who /use the same phone for five years/ people just aren't that excited about new models.
(Hopefully Google's new HAL will make phones longer lasting)
@Elizafox Err, than they WERE.
@Azure @Elizafox
Yeah. The death of moore's law has affected PC sales at a fifteen year delay & the only thing that should be surprising is that it took fifteen years.
But when people say "the death of <consumer product>" they often mean "the unprofitability of <manufacturers of consumer product>" , not "the lack of users of <consumer product>". Because capitalism.
@glaurungo @enkiv2 @Azure
You'll be able to run 4 Electron apps at once.
@alcinnz @Azure @Elizafox
When moore's law was in effect, it could interact with ballooning software bloat in order to push people into buying a new PC more often, when they could afford it.
Now, a brand new PC is not more powerful than a 5 or 10 year old one, while software bloat continues unabated. So, the connection is broken.
@enkiv2 @alcinnz @Elizafox DOES it continue unabated?
There are, arguably, two things that people tend to call 'bloat'
(1) Things I, personally, don't use. (We'll ignore that, though people complain about it a lot with regard to kernels having devices they don't care about, etc.)
(2) Overhead from less abstemious development styles, dynamic languages, etc.
I feel like we've sort of topped out at (2). We've had more use of dynamic languages generally (people distributing things in Python)
@enkiv2 @alcinnz @Elizafox Once we hit Electron (which really only requires Lots of Memory at this point, processors don't need to get faster to deal with it) we're at a point where developers would have to go out of their way to add more bloat at this point.
So I don't /think/ there's any natural progression that would make the average consumer need, say, a faster processor.
@Azure @alcinnz @Elizafox
It's not just lots of memory. The number of layers of indirection involved in drawing a GUI by manipulating the DOM means doing so requires more cycles than drawing the same GUI from the same scripting language using a conventional UI toolkit. But, yes, it doesn't appear to be getting worse in the recent past.
I would argue that Electron appeared & web apps took off after moore's law ended though. We might just be in a lull.
@Azure @alcinnz @Elizafox
Dynamic languages present a more or less sensible tradeoff: you can actually develop faster when your language is friendly to iteration, and garbage collection helps a whole lot with that, as does a type system you don't need to fight with (though as discussed the other day, we don't *need* dynamic types for that -- type inference will substitute just fine).
DOM manipulation is both slower & more cognitive load than a traditional GUI toolkit though.
@enkiv2 @alcinnz @Elizafox Oh, sure. I don't argue that targeting the browser makes sense /in the same way/ that using a dynamic language does.
People do that, notionally, for portability.
Though that makes me wonder why instead of Electron taking off a good dynamic language with bindings to Qt didn't take off instead. It seems like it should give you all the advantages of Electron.
@Elizafox When I can run NumPy and a webserver on my iPad, I may migrate full time. Not a day earlier.
But I do go on trips and meetings with just my iPad now.
@tek @Elizafox The thin line between a laptop and tablet is blurring these days with laptops coming with detachable touchscreens and tablets with keyboard as an accessory. Laptops are also getting lighter and more energy efficient.
I might shift when #emacs works flawlessly on a tablet. Maybe Librem will make it possible.
@Elizafox imo 'the desktop' isn't a terribly meaningful thing... are we predicting the slow death of the large screen, the slow death of the keyboard, the slow death of interchangeable pc-compatible components, or the slow death of GNU/Linux? all proprietary software is constantly anticipating its own slow death because it can't be forward-ported without emulation or RE
@martensitingale @Elizafox
I think in this case we're talking about the form factor wherein a case with easily replaced components is paired with a large screen & keyboard -- i.e., the kind of thing you'd use a spreadsheet on.
@martensitingale @Elizafox
Related: I really wish the Starfire form factor came into vogue
For me, phones and computers coexist and can't replace one another.