I recently gave my grandfather a Linux machine to use–it's done much better than his Windows computer at least. All he needs to do is click the browser in the dock at the bottom.
Thats fine so long as we're happy to relegate all end user software to be run inside the web browser. But I can't help but mourn what we're losing in the process.
I've spent most of my career on the web. But web apps are always (and will probably always be) second class citizens to desktop apps because they're slower, can't integrate as well into the desktop environment, have a one-size-fits-all user interface, they can't really save and load local files and so on.
And sure - web software has been strengthening linux because most native software never targets linux anyway. But surely there are other answers?
