Same here: my selection boiled down to Borg vs. Restic. I started with Restic because my friends used it and, while it was perfectly satisfactory functionally, found it unbearably slow with large backups. Changed to Borg and I've been happy everafter !
My 87 years-old dad has no idea what OS he runs and migrating a laptop to KDE gave him a stable system with none of the confusing commercial offers, uncontrolled upgrades and forced account creations.
Cheap instant all-terrain deployment trumps most other considerations, especially where technical onboarding is on the critical path to customer acquisition.
There are definitely advantages to companies. As an end-user, the only advantages I can think of are data centralization and device portability.
While we're talking about "webapps", generally, and not SaaS specifically... the two often go so hand in hand that it is the exception to see a webapp that is not also a SaaS product.. and as a consumer I kind of mostly hate SaaS.
With the above two advantages noted, lets look at the cons:
- Companies can, and routinely do, push unwanted UX changes on me without my opt-in. Pre-SaaS you would wait for a new version to come out and could see what the reviews were saying before deciding if you like the changes and want the new features. Now you're a guinea pig and get the new "features" whether they are a benefit to you or not.
- Forces me to have my data on someone else's computer
- The "other peoples' computer" issue means that if there is a software or a hardware failure that prevents me from being able to do urgent work that it is entirely outside of my hands and my ability to troubleshoot the majority of the time (though this is a double edged sword since for the average non-technical user it can be a big benefit)
- Can't work without an active Internet connection (though I'll concede that not having an active connection is becoming pretty rare these days)
- If the company goes out of business, say goodbye to your data in the majority of cases
- Often goes hand in hand with renting the software rather than paying a flat fee for a perpetual license. Given the choice, I will always opt for a perpetual license. I try hard to have as few recurring payments in my budget as possible. Utility bills are bad enough.
If, however, by "webapp" we just mean a desktop application that uses a DOM-based rendering engine then I couldn't care less. There are tradeoffs, but they are purely technical and rarely impact UX directly in the way that a general approach to software delivery and consumption does.
Except a lot of these are problems with so-called native apps too. My experience using MacOS for the better half of a decade ended with >80% of the software I paid for being unsupported. My options were to continue using a non-secure OS version or update to an environment where my software doesn't run anymore.
I think you're the last of a dying breed of users. The iPhone generation doesn't lose their internet connection, throw a hissy-fit when UX changes or even care all that much when data is on a remote server. They will pay for whatever is successfully marketed to them, and that company will be rewarded with success. This is what the App Store conditions users into wanting, if OnePass tells you to switch to their Electron app then you have zero choice in the matter.
My solution has simply been to never pay for software. Not native, not SaaS webapps, not Electron containers. It's all just one big scam when free alternatives to 99% of meaningful software exists if you're willing to eschew laziness.
I still have paid software from the 90s that I can run. And if things get really sticky due to OS incompatibilities, you can spin up an old version of an OS in a VM. The retro gaming community does really well at running software that is now 40-50 years old too.
I hear you about not paying for software. For most applications I use FOSS when possible. There are applications though where using proprietary is the lesser evil because the FOSS options - if they exist at all - are really bad.
And yeah, I might be in the extreme minority when it comes to users. I'm neurodivergent so that definitely contributes to my aversion to change. It doesn't mean my opinion isn't valid or that I don't have the right to complain though. What I want is software that won't change on me without my opt-in, and that will let me keep my data locally. Maybe most users don't want that, but there are those of us out there and that speaks to untapped niche. Maybe you won't get rich making software for us, but there are far more small mom & pop shops in the world than there are massive rich mega-corps. I'm happy giving them my money.
Considering how far behind the European Union is in the digital services industry, and considering the need to decouple from the American circus, a strategic move towards preying on digital services through tariffs or taxes is a logical option.
Western europe- eastern europe is not afflicted by this particular malaise.
How about we talk openly about it- there is a limited number of perfectly good heads- and fabrication industries and service industries are in systemic competition on that limited pool. And they create their own support environment ("bloated universities") where the service wins and destroy the competition.
I have personal anecdote how bonkers eastern european digital system is.
My child was born in NZ and in order to gain dual citizenship you need to submit form in Lithuanian.
To access e-gov you used to have so many cool methods - most popular is your bank (makes sense since they’d have highest stakes and worked out security), then your local SIM card finally your ID card. Well first ones are off the table since I was away for so long. I managed to source a usb smart card reader. Even somehow more luckily find working software. By shred of luck my card is not expired (card is valid for 10years, but digital certificates on chip for 18 months lol).
I’m in. The digital form is ok, albeit designed before mobile era so definitely won’t work in mobile screen. Fine. Submit it. Two weeks later I get a response (clearly my form was just dumped as an email) that in fact I need to meet face to face to ID me and my child…
Fortunately thru personal connections I was able to do so via video call.
Contrast that to NZ. In 10 years here I didn’t get to meet beurocrat even once. I’ve mailed a form and received passport by post. Low tech but sublime experience.
As if western europe wouldn't have the skills. Eastern Europe has not relevant international software industry outside of JetBrains. Same as western europe which at least has SAP and Spotify.
I very much agree from contractors I’ve worked with from Poland and the like, but the same areas don’t produce a lot of international software companies. Lack of capital for venture businesses in those regions? Hard to pin down.
Why aren't they meaningfully competing with Ireland as centres for software, if that's the case?
Obviously Czechoslovakia has a great excuse, not having existed for 32 years, but neither Czechia nor Slovakia come close to Ireland, either is terms of Euro-value or number of software jobs.
Ireland's software exports dwarf Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and the Baltics combined. That's ignoring the inflated GDP figures from international IP revenue tax-dodging.
Ireland is a tax haven that parasitically deprives the rest of the EU of tax revenue. It's not a viable model to emulate and would cause a race to the bottom, at the expense of the public and to the benefit of the modern day robber barons.
> Ireland is a tax haven that parasitically deprives the rest of the EU of tax revenue.
The days of the Double Irish are long gone and comparing effective tax rates paints a very different story, so this is 5 years out of date in as true as it ever was.
Even excluding the EU IP revenue of multinationals with EMEA HQs in Ireland, real software development revenue is over double Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and the Baltics combined.
Not by tax cuts, by tax policy. One which the bloc was happy to enable when it wanted to pass the Lisbon treaty.
But that's irrelevant, as ghost HQs can avail of Ireland's tax regime with minimal employees.
Ireland's extremely educated workforce and exceptionally stable and peaceful governance along with business friendly economic climate are the reason Ireland is a software powerhouse, independent of tax regime (which is not particularly conducive to large employers).
Wasn't Ireland used for tax evasion for a long time ? Wondering if that might be somehow related & how irish some of those companies are in practice.
Also there are quite a few successful gaming companies in central and eastern Europe - like CD project (Witcher/Cyberpunk) in Poland and Factorio, Mafia, Kingdom Come from Czech Republic.
Also on the IT driven services are there are quite big companies like like Alza/Allegro (eq. local Amazon), Seznam (eq. local Google), Windy (weather), etc.
For modern digital service usage, I wouldn't necessarily look at the US as a leader. It's bureaucracy rivals that of big countries in the EU. And a lot of that is still based on form filling. Germany is definitely a basket case on that front (I live there). But I wouldn't rank the US much higher. I've lived in Finland and Sweden as well, which are much better and more efficient. And I'm from the Netherlands, which has modernized quite a bit unlike Germany. Places like California aren't necessarily a lot better and possibly worse in some areas. I've never lived there but I've talked to plenty of people that spent some time there.
Also, if you look at manufacturing, Europe still provides some essential things. SAP, a German company, is a global market leader in ERP and related software. Companies like Tesla buy high their high tech machines from Germany. And the machines that make the chips that are power the AI revolution are made by ASML, headquartered in the EU. US manufacturing is a lot weaker than EU manufacturing at this point.
So, I don't think it is that black and white and there are a lot of things in the US that aren't necessarily very modern or nice.
And for taxation, there's the argument to be made that there are an awful lot of US companies with extreme valuation rivaling the GDP of most EU countries that seem to be very good at dodging taxes in the EU despite getting a lot of their revenue there. There's a lot of talk about trade imbalances lately, and this has been an obvious candidate for balancing. So, I don't think this is such a strange thing to do for the EU to be publicly musing doing something about that in light of all the tariffs that Trump is threatening with currently.
So, tarrifs are understandable when countries in Europe want to bolster local industries and decrease reliance on foreign countries, but not when the US does the same?
What tarrifs would you like to see implemented to achieve this effect, and how would they differ from the current administration's approach that apparently "looked like trump high on meth"?
No one would have been surprised if the US had increased tariffs on airplanes to cushion Boeing’s failings, understanding that this specific sector may be seen as vital interests. Europe could have replied with tariffs on space launches to avoid reliance on space-x in an equally strategic sector.
On the other hand, blanket tariffs levied on countries rather than specific industries don’t look like they serve a specific industrial policy.
> It sounds like you want the ability to instantiate a scratch block that contains a text box, which in turn contains the function body for the block ?
That is the escape hatch from all visual development environments. Having seen Talend and W4 in action, I know the end state of the process: a single block with everything in it - I'm barely caricaturing here.
Maybe the specific needs of early learners will keep the system from degenerating too fast but, the moment code goes in that is not visually represented in the environment's visual paradigm, coherence goes downhill fast and one starts longing for properly managed scripts.
As I see it, that the whole point in this case. Alexander wants to teach children how to program in text mode, but can't see the bridge from Scratch to text mode. With textboxes, the child can write small functions to start with. As they learn, they may well start making the blocks of code more complex. Eventually they might end up with a single block with everything in it, as you describe. At that point they ditch the Scratch "wrapper" and start using a typical text mode tool chain. Mission accomplished.
One of my children did something like this. In the days when Scratch was written in Squeak, he discovered that shift-clicking the 'r' in the Scratch logo dropped him into the underlying Squeak environment. He then started modifying and writing Scratch blocks and was eventually comfortable with text mode programming.
I’m familiar with the Grasshopper visual scripting environment for the Rhino CAD system, and what you’re describing happens there as well…but I don’t really perceive it as a negative. Users who aren’t comfortable with text programming continue to use the visual method, and users who are tend to migrate their more complicated functions to single blocks. There’s a limit of complexity beyond which the visual programming becomes an impediment to understanding. It’s OK if moving things to a text-based block will make the internal logic of that block inaccessible to some number of users, given that those users would struggle to understand the visual version of the function as well.
I did that a few years ago, with the 1990 computer that I lusted over as a teenager: the IBM 8595 AKD (European reference - it is 85950KD in North America)... 486 DX, XGA display, 320 MB SCSI, 64 MB RAM... At that time my computer was a 1988 Olivetti PC-1 (512 KB 8 MHz Nec V40 with CGA and a floppy drive)...
I was awed by the beast... Everything about it screamed over-engineering - even the case was incomprehensibly robust and the power switch had a satisfyingly loud motion... I could even touch its legendary tangential fan... Touching the 20 years-old dream was an emotional moment - I'm glad I did it... The ultimate Windows 3.0 host !
But it had to go after a little while: my two-room apartment was too small for so much awesomeness, so it went to another fan.
Funnily, I had the opposite journey: I got plainly frustrated with everything OpenHab and was delighted with the versatile integrations and ease of setup with Home Assistant...
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