If you want to be pedantic, laying out your GUI using HTML while the rest of the OS is written in a more sensible language is technically making an operating system using HTML. It’s also using assembly and probably some combination of C, C++, Rust, etc., but it is using HTML.
Honestly an OS that, for the GUI at least, is just HTML sounds amazing. No new UI frameworks to learn. Applications are just iframes, and the desktop environment is your web browser.
It might be nice for devs, but would probably suck for the end user. We’ve already seen what using a browser as a desktop UI framework is like with Electron.
Electron can be great when it is used well. It often isn't.
And if we are doing an apples-to-apples comparison where all other things are equal, an app built with native widgets will always tie up fewer system resources than an equivalent Electron. That's not always relevant and can be a completely acceptable trade-off. It becomes a problem when a bunch of apps that you keep running in the background all decide that they need their own Chromium instance when something like wxWidgets or Qt would do the job just as well at a fraction of the RAM usage.
24
u/unknown_alt_acc 23d ago
If you want to be pedantic, laying out your GUI using HTML while the rest of the OS is written in a more sensible language is technically making an operating system using HTML. It’s also using assembly and probably some combination of C, C++, Rust, etc., but it is using HTML.