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0 pointshorsawlarway1mo ago0 comments

This has surprisingly few valid use-cases.

We see this today - there are plenty of protocols to support rendering applications over the wire (vnc, rdp, x-forwarding, waypipe, broadway, etc...)

They get very, very little usage outside of highly technical spaces. The demand just isn't there.

What did get there was the browser - which solved this problem quite nicely for basically every desired use-case, and has the benefit of offloading most of the computation to the remote device.

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And as an aside - text remains a wonderful medium, with an incredible amount of composition and flexibility. The issue with GUI systems is that output != input. And it turns out that matters quite a bit, and is unavoidably limiting.

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MisterTea1mo ago· 1 in thread

The web is way too heavy for simple applications. On Plan 9 devdraw text is a first class primitive - its a GUI built around displaying text.

And who said text isn't a useful medium? We are discussing how it is displayed which today is on bitmapped displays.

> The issue with GUI systems is that output != input.

Can you elaborate?

tracker11mo ago

I'm pretty sure you could create an HTML based calculator app pretty easily with minimal overhead. Hell monaco (editor in VS Code) is massive by comparison to most apps... there's very little reason most line of business needs and simple apps can't or shouldn't be done in browser.

You get composition, scaling, accessibility features and a host of other benefits in the box that any other toolkit for GUI adds a lot of developer overhead.

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