Trying to discover new/unheard Linux desktop programs (Sorry for the confusion).
Edit: I apologise for confusing a lot of people. I meant Linux desktop “programs” coming from Windows/Mac. I’m used to calling them “apps”.
Edit: 🙌 I’m overwhelmed with the great “programs” people have recommended in the comment section. Thank you guys.
“Apps” has been common terminology among macOS users for ages. On Windows, apps used to be called programs, until Microsoft changed with the time in Windows 10 and just started using apps like everyone else.
There’s no distinction between an app, an application, or a program. Same thing, different name.
That makes sense. Maybe I’m just old but they are called as programs since punched cards, as well as on Unix, Linux, Windows (until recently apparently).
Not exactly sure but I think the term “application >> apps” started with mobile phones. So, to me they are different. At least that evokes this meaning in my mind. It seems not with younger people though.
Go search Usenet posts from the 80s. We’ve used the short term “app” for “application” for goddamn forever.
It seems I’m not that old and apparently it first appeared around between 50’s and 60’s as a term. I assume it’s only used among programmers back then (until Apple, approximately late 80’s). Though it was not so common as today I guess.
I would assume that “application” (or its short form “app”) implies some kind of GUI.
I would say apps are software run with a runtime (PortableApps, Android apps, Windows Apps) while software runs by itself.
Another interpretation could be “little (software) tools”. I assumed with “apps” you wanted some shell tools.
Very little software runs by itself. You’ll need at least some form of libc to get the code running. Then there’s the graphics stack, where you need a runtime consisting of drivers, compositors, and all kinds of supporting software before you get even a pixel on the screen. It’s all APIs upon APIs upon drivers upon kernels. Even a command line tools needs a terminal emulator device to do any meaningful work these days.
Windows “apps” can be hidden browser frames or native C++ code and from look, feel, and behaviour, you wouldn’t notice the difference. iOS apps are basically just GUI programs, reusing many of the desktop toolkit in mobile form. Many “apps” built in frameworks like Flutter will take a Vulkan/GL context from the OS and do all GUI rendering directly, making them lower level programs than most OpenTK/Win32/Cacao applications.
I once made the distinction between apps and programs, but I realised every dividing line I could think of is rather arbitrary. The best I can think of is separating native code (C++. Rust) from JIT code (Python, Java) but even that distinction is starting to become blurry with JIT tookits being AOT compiled and C++ code being compiled into bytecode through things like webassembly.
I mean, i’m a software developer too. I just sometines forget all he context.
Hmm, thinking about it like that, the whole software stack has a similiar situation to the modern web: historical layers upon layers. Maybe we should sometime start from scratch, if the situation with vulnerabilities, reliability and brittleness becomes bad enough/gets more weigth.
Software is the antonym of hardware.
Generally speaking, all runtimes have been traditionally called programs. (On Unix systems runtimes are often synonymous to executables. I guess the term runtime is used more often by devs on the Windows and Java platform, and I think it is specifically an antonym of library, but not sure because I don’t develop on those often) Applications traditionally referred to programs that were exposed to the user through a mouse interaction by intention. On macOS an app has the .app extension and is thus a special type of a program.
Although, depending on the context, an “application” might just mean programs because even official tech manuals aren’t perfectly rigorous.
On Linux and Windows it is similar. They don’t have a specific extension (some .exe binaries on Windows are meant to be run through the commandline.)
Software is the antonym of hardware, as I wrote in another comment.
Honestly I’m surprised that people here don’t share this. The terminology was rather cleanly separated before iPhone. Unfortunately, due to smartphones the word “app” entered the mass population and it lost meaning as usual.