It's a shame that personal computers aren't a growing market anymore. Apple and Microsoft could still use some competition. It's a shame that offering software for an additional OS is still a non-trivial task. Having to pick platforms based on what apps are available for them is a non-issue with current smartphones and web browsers. The same should be the case for OSes. Not every app can be a web app, after all.
@codesections Ugh, I hate Electron apps. I realise they are simpler to make and that traditional UI toolkits are a pain to work with compared to JS, HTML and CSS, but I don't like it as an end user. I thought we'd have native capabilities leaking over to the browser, not the web leaking into the native world...
@codesections Flexbox reminds me an awful lot of the BoxLayout manager in Java Swing, a UI toolkit that has existed for two decades. It's funny how we keep reinventing the wheel.
@thor Yeah, I agree. Hence "pretend" in my prior toot.
But more and more devs do seem to be moving in that direction for the reasons you outlined. And I don't think that trend is likely to slow (unless Rust/Golang/something else gets a silver-bullet cross platform GUI-builder working)