The upfront costs are pretty big but over time it’s not too bad to do 3-2-1. I doubt you’ll come out on top of Google every time - there’s a reason their prices are so low, and that’s more of an incentive to leave than to save a few dollars.
For me, I run Immich off a Beelink S12 Pro mini PC, with the photos themselves stored on my Synology NAS. Every night, I backup the VM with docker that runs Immich to the NAS, then the entire NAS gets backed up to Synology’s Cloud. My upfront costs were the NAS, the drives, and the mini PC, and my ongoing costs are electricity and the cloud storage fee for Synology’s cloud (about $70/year for a terabyte). That’s not cheaper than Google, but it does prevent them from having access to photos of my kids and family.
Many government orgs have spent the last decade and a half slowly transitioning old legacy applications and platforms to browser-based alternatives. That old ERP software that used to require a thick client? Now it runs in Chrome. Microsoft recognized this and smartly moved to keep these customers locked in via an ever growing Microsoft Office bundle - subscription based, with Teams for their chat and then building up additional capabilities to extend the dependency, like InTune.
Where we are at now is that the pain of moving away from Windows is acceptable for many larger organizations and governments, especially those with flat or decreasing budgets. You can just swap out the OS layer and keep other processes the same - keep using Office with just the browser versions if you want, or move to an alternative (like EU-based). Teams works on Linux. There is no moat on Windows anymore
And many of those tool providers could see for 10-20 years now that if they didn't provide a web based version sometime soon, they would go out of business sooner or later.
There are almost no applications that a government employee should be running natively on their machine anyway.
A bigger blocker I see in Belgium is all the corporate and government software written in Java or .NET-with-Angular and that has to be deployed via Azure because… compliance.
Yes, slower start, more memory/cpu use, likely worse UI as the transition broke desktop conventions and/or just lost some power features in the process
Eh. I suppose to each their own, but my experience as a user and developer is… that it depends on a lot of factors.
Many web apps open faster than many apps I have installed. Some of these apps have a faster mobile web app version.
And then, of course, there’s Apple’s increasingly bad choices in interaction and interface design. Some web apps are superior because they stick to simpler or more appealing design.
Linear comes to mind, their iOS app post-Liquid Glass is unappealing. Their macOS version is effectively a web app, and a very good one at that. Things is native and wonderful. Apple’s own apps can be both slow and ugly (hi App Store!).
Curiously, JMAP is on the roadmap for the iOS client, but I don't see it in the desktop client roadmap https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap. But seeing as how it will power their Thundermail service, I would assume all clients would need the support
I would probably switch off Cloudflare if I didn't also make use of their Cloudflare Tunnels service for sharing some stuff in a way that doesn't require me to punch a hole in my home network. I realize Pangolin and such also exist, but it's nice to get it for free
A Mac Pro without external GPU support was always a dumb idea. They just made this to shut up the hard core fans who were complaining about the outdated Mac Pro in 2018.
Ente offers E2EE photo hosting, the storage they sell through subscriptions to that is their business model. Their main selling point is that all machine learning to cluster faces is done on your devices. I would assume that they want more users to train their models on to improve their core offering
It’s easier than you think when you stop trying to treat it as an all or nothing move and more of a gradual migration. Fastmail makes it really easy to keep the two in sync
Author raises several good points. Why isn't the latest .NET runtime pulled down into Windows 11 devices via Windows Update? Why isn't there a better path forward for deployment?
It's another example of how they have completely abandoned any attempt at providing a good user experience across their products
I'm assuming but the versions are not fully backwards compatible so you can't just ship the latest version, they would need to ship all. There almost ten .NET versions released after the one which ships in Windows. And a new version is released every year.
The author does mention that .NET does have distribution options which don't require the user to install the runtime. You can have it package the full runtime with your build, either as a bunch of files, a self-extracting executable, or a standalone AOT-compiled native executable.
The author mentioned that the AOT-compiled executable is 9 MiB which is unacceptable to them. The other options will need even larger. Personally I don't see 9 MiB as a big deal especially when the author would rather go with Electron which is larger at worst (bundled Chromium) and only inefficient at best (system WebView).
Windows update is how it used to work and it's terrible. An update breaks old apps, or downloads a every single version (not feasible). Who would want to run windows update to install a new app?
It's just a bad idea. Today we just pack in the DLLs and it just works.
No one suggesting using Windows Update to install new apps, they are suggesting the current .Net framework should be elevated to a first class Windows citizen and included with Windows installs and updated with Windows Update, and that seems like and obvious idea that should have been implemented when .Net Core became .Net.
We would like it to be good. Whichever way to achieve goodness - either be backwards compat, or ship all the stable versions, I don't care but the current situation is silly. Apple gets flack for this and that, but their UI toolkit situation is lightyears ahead; you just pick the OS version you want to target in your app build settings and it will work that way for everyone.
100 MB per runtime, for everyone, and the majority of them are out of support. Is that really the good option? Why not the option the author dismissed: a 9 MB AOT-compiled executable which doesn't need a separate runtime?
That's what .NET Framework (the one that ships with Windows) tried to do. It usually worked out but you'll still run into compatibility issues sometimes after bug fixes, behavioral changes, etc. because people accidentally build software which depends on quirks.
That's something which is MS' problem; they're supposed to be the company who is best at backwards compatibility, but clearly have strayed from that path.
There are a few reasons that I can see why they don't integrate the latest .net.
First is that the security model changed with .net 5. Next is that they subsume Mono/.net core into the foundation of the language and this cost them them the ability to support Windows native development, specifically anything to do with Win32 API.
If you look at .net 10 and compare that to .net 5 you can see that they are trying to reintegrate the Win32 API but now it is in the all new Microsoft namespace.
The amount of change is too significant to act as a drop in replacement for the original .net framework. Maybe they could have gone a side-by-side installation, but the rapid development of The NET Framework I think made it too hard to tie to an operating system update. They wanted to free it from that update cycle of once a year or every two years and allow the development to progress rapidly at the cost of having to download it and install it each time.
There’s two versions of .NET. One is “legacy”, which is stable as anything and bundled with the OS. The other is “Core”, that only has support for three years and isn’t 100% compatible. The reason the latest .NET runtime isn’t bundled is the above: the stable version is bundled.
For me, I run Immich off a Beelink S12 Pro mini PC, with the photos themselves stored on my Synology NAS. Every night, I backup the VM with docker that runs Immich to the NAS, then the entire NAS gets backed up to Synology’s Cloud. My upfront costs were the NAS, the drives, and the mini PC, and my ongoing costs are electricity and the cloud storage fee for Synology’s cloud (about $70/year for a terabyte). That’s not cheaper than Google, but it does prevent them from having access to photos of my kids and family.
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