prof

There's a joke in there about grannys with boob jobs, but I'm not yet depraved enough to try and find it.

Ha! I'm partially looking at this issue in my bachelor's thesis.

It's not at all necessary to embed a browser, but it's really easy to transfer your web app to a "near native" experience with stuff like electron, ionic, cordova, react native or whatever other web stuff is out there. The issue is mostly that native APIs are complicated and relying on web views or just providing your own "browser" is a relatively easy approach.

Stuff like Flutter, Xamarin or .NET MAUI compile depending on the platform to native or are interpreted by a runtime. There's a study I use that compares Flutter to React Native, native Java and Ionic on Android and finds that unsurprisingly the native implementation is best, but is closely followed by Flutter (with a few hiccups), with the remainder being significantly slower.

The thing is. I don't think these compiled frameworks lag behind in any way. But when you have a dev team, that's competent in web development, you won't make them learn C#, Xaml, Dart or C++, just to get native API access - you'll just let a framework handle that for you because it's cheaper and easier.

Edit: To add some further reading. This paper and this one explore the different approaches out there and suggest which one might be "the best". I don't feel like they're good papers, but there's almost no other write up of cross-platform dev approaches out there.

Edit2: I also believe that the approach "we are web devs that want access to native APIs" may be turned around in the future, since Flutter and now also .NET offer ways to deploy cross-platforn apps as web apps. I'll get back to writing the thesis now and stop editing.

I don't think I understand your point about them impersonating users? It seems to me like an account gets created for everyone using the portal. It then provides you a password and you can start using that account. I tried it just now and it seems like your account gets flagged as bot on creation automatically. So most people posting from that domain, might just not have unchecked that "I'm a bot"-tick and are actual former Reddit users.

Creating an account doesn't make a user active though, but for the question if a bot posting stuff counts as an active user or not, I honestly can't say.

It's active users, not total users. I'm not sure on the exact metric, but users need to post, comment, vote or whatever to be counted for this statistic.

That made me laugh more than it should have.

In case you're interested I've tried out a few things and kinda settled on fish, but will still use bash for scripting.

Fair point. For me using a distro dedicated to making Arch accessible just is more attractive than having an installer and being on my own afterwards.

But yeah, EndeavourOS is pretty much just an installer with purple space theming.

Definitely. For now every fix that worked for Arch, also worked for me.

I think EndeavourOS profits greatly from being so close to Arch, because right now every fix that worked for an Arch user also worked for me.

Idk much about other distros, but maybe try Pop OS first and see if you like it.

As I mentioned I've ran into really weird issues with steam because of some missing dependencies that are mentioned on page 49 of google search results.

This will send me down another 4h rabbit hole today, thanks 😬

Yes, I was also very surprised. The userbase is surprisingly small, even though it runs quite well.

But if I wasn't into IT, I'd probably have run into issues that I wouldn't be able to fix. Just little things like proper directory permissions, ownership and such.