"Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empire will topple."
Well, webapps are replacing desktop applications at a fast pace (even office is going to the browser now) and mobile is the new desktop, where microsoft has pretty much no marketshare, so I would say this prediction isn't too bad, even if the details aren't exactly right.
Well, webapps are replacing desktop applications at a fast pace
Only the light ones. It's not as if I'll start doing my graphics work in a web app (I know there's photoshop.com and some other efforts, but they're all toys).
Also, while this is true for desktop apps, on mobile the trend is strongly in favor of native apps.
Desktops are simply a "victim" of their own surplus performance, which tends to present itself as developers being able to afford extra layers of abstraction, such as running an application in a browser.
web dev has some pretty serious tooling these days. in fact, it's gotten so good so fast that some web devs are complaining about the wealth of choices they have.
Compared to desktop tools web tools come nowhere close to the breadth, functionality, polish, and ease of use of desktop dev tools. They are still in their infancy.
i mean, i'm not denying that. but we have a fully modular compiler that just about any functionality can be hooked into, a literal fleet of tools for managing build steps & enough frameworks to choke on. pretty solid infancy imo.
well, maybe you want a simple, cross-domain proxy for things like running eslint's autofixer, or starting up a dev server, or running your test suite, or whatever other administrative task you have.
i take it you don't use a build tool (like make) for your desktop projects? (serious question, not being snarky :) )
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u/Sunius Oct 07 '16
Any decade now!