Fairphone managed to do it, I'm sure companies with more budget than them can figure it out.

Not water proof and definitely big for its capacity.

Yes, hence why I'm sure companies with 100x the budget can do better.

It's reminds me what happened with Frontpage, ultimately people are going to learn the same lesson, there's no replacement for the source code.

I'd say the opposite, the frontend code is so complex these days that you can't escape the source code.

If you stick to tailwind + server side rendered pages you can probably go pretty far with just AI and no code knowledge but once you introduce modern TS tooling, I don't think it's enough anymore.

> A big warning is that a lot desktop motherboards (at least consumer oriented ones) wipe the TPM when you update the BIOS.

Well no thanks, that risk is much higher than what this is worth.

There's a lot of good use-cases of Web usb, you can't just cut everything which might have privacy aspects otherwise the browsers wouldn't have canvas or even gpu rendering.

What are those use cases? It seems like a giant hole punched all the way from a tab's sandbox through the process boundary and out to the kernel... Yes, gpu rendering is a great example of the same problem. Canvas at least has some intervening layers depending on implementation.

GrapheneOS for example can install with web usb, I think it makes it much easier for people who aren't too tech savvy to switch.

Somebody also recently shared an awesome project which let's you use an usb printer regardless of your OS driver.

Almost all of the gui software for programming keyboards with QMK uses webusb or webhid, so you either have to use a chromium based browser or an electron app that is basically just a wrapper for chromium.

Yeah, it's a shame Qt/C++ doesn't have any way of interacting with USB devices and there's no libraries for that, otherwise there could be a native GUI app for QMK. Or failing that, because Qt is simply too difficult for programmers to figure out, maybe some day there will be a way to deal with USB devices from Java, then at least we could have an AWT app (or I guess Swing is the new hotness now?).

Yeah the fundamental problem is there isn't a good way to write cross platform applications that interface directly with a usb device

pianu.com used to be a website where you could learn piano by connecting your piano through usb with the browser. It seems defunct now but I found a video demonstrating it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTBmRV02NgI

I used something similar in the past. It was a legitimate use case for web usb which changed my mind on it quite a bit.

https://www.charachorder.com/ sells ergo keyboards and allows you to update their firmware directly in the website, through web usb. No local apps at all. Also an improvement in overall security from having to download some .exe / .dmg and running it locally.

Siri is one step below that for me, it still doesn't understand my accent, I feel like its voice recognition didn't improve from 2010...

> Turns out, an operating system is more than just a kernel with some userspace crap tacked on top, unlike what Linux distros tend to be.

This is also my opinion of OSX, let's not pretend that the userland mess is the most beautiful part of OSX.

Apple has great kernel and driver engineering for sure but once you go the stack above, it's ducktape upon ducktape and you better not upgrade your OS too quickly before they fix the next pile they've just added.

That's also what Microsoft 365 is, a webapp, even the latest Outlook is a webapp.

Nobody in their right mind prefer the web apps over the native apps if they sit all day doing e.g spreadsheets. I tried the M365 web app for Word the other day and it's sluggish.

I would bet the opposite, Twitter was already a small competitor compared to Facebook and never reached its popularity, switching the audience to the far right likely cut down even more of what was left.

> this simplicity also comes specifically because there's less contributions.

Not entirely. A rather large amount of Linux's mess stems from the fact that it was a hobbyist project in its foundational years. It was never clean or well designed, at any point in its life. Go look at Linux 1.2.0 vs FreeBSD 2.0

Even when Linux began to get traction, it had already developed an ingrained culture that didn't particularly care about "nice" code or architectural solutions. The BSDs inherited their culture where such things were prioritized. You're right that things get messier as they get larger, but the gap between the two is much, much larger than can possibly be accounted for. Things like Linux not respecting NICE values have very little to do with surface-level problems like stylistic inconsistencies in the source code.