> Honestly, this appears to destroy a fundamental promise that Java made when it was first released: Write once, run anywhere.
Correct. And I’m fine with that, it was a terrible idea right from the start for most use cases IMHO. If I never need to maintain a system wide Java again to run user applications I will be very happy.
The purpose of system runtimes (for Java, Python, whatever) is for running system components IMHO. User installed application dependencies beyond actual OS components are a user/vendor issue and I think the right way to handle that is on a per application basis.
I have this old KVM system I occasionally need to access. It is pretty old, so it's primary access method is a java browser plugin and those have been removed from every modern browsers.
Luckily, it still has that JNLP link, so I was able to get it to work. I am really glad that JNLP exists, and that they didn't use OS-specific bundle -- I am sure the latter would have been Windows only, and I don't run it.
>Correct. And I’m fine with that, it was a terrible idea right from the start for most use cases IMHO.
I completely disagree. Platform dependent Java is worse than useless the same way electron made Linux support worse.
Running a complicated Electron app under wine can be very difficult and yes you will have to run electron under wine one way or another because not every company provides linux builds of their electron apps.
What proportion of popular Electron apps do you think would have had first class Linux ports if Electron hadn't existed? I'm guessing not many.
I do sympathise, I fully realise Electron apps are sub-par in many ways compared to native apps, but to be brutally honest that's mainly a problem for platforms that would have had native apps otherwise. For linux that's generally not the case and it's either Electron or nothing.
Now ok, maybe nothing would be preferable in some ways because it might encourage native Linux competitors, but that's pretty unlikely to work out in practice. I think it's more likely that the availability of Electron versions of popular apps makes Linux a lot more viable as a user desktop, and that could promote better Linux support generally. For example once Outlook is an Electron app there might finally be an officially supported MS Outlook client for Linux. That's huge.
Correct. And I’m fine with that, it was a terrible idea right from the start for most use cases IMHO. If I never need to maintain a system wide Java again to run user applications I will be very happy.
The purpose of system runtimes (for Java, Python, whatever) is for running system components IMHO. User installed application dependencies beyond actual OS components are a user/vendor issue and I think the right way to handle that is on a per application basis.