You can run any app on any platform. It's just going to be a shit experience.

Apple want you to get 80% of the way there, then do the last 20% of tailoring it to the device.

There isn't some magic unicorn toolkit which can do that last 20%.

That's exactly the problem! There's this idea that, if we automate the 80%, developers will do the last 20%, and we'll end up in a land of milk and honey, where mobile apps scale up their information density and rearrange their UIs to suit the high precision pointing devices and large screens that come with desktops and laptops.

In practice that never happens. Developers make their mobile app, use the automated tool to make it into 80% of a desktop app, hit the publish button and proudly advertise, "Hey, look, we have a desktop app now!"

Maybe it's fine for Apple and Google to ruin their desktop UIs like that. Maybe they don't care, or, more likely, they think that catering to the vast majority of users who are on mobile is an acceptable tradeoff for alienating the few of us who still prefer desktops as their primary computing device.

But why does Linux have to tread that same path?

> But why does Linux have to tread that same path?

It doesn't, which is the beauty of open source. If enough people value this as much as you clearly do, there will always be options out there.

And, if there aren't enough people then you always have the (less practical, but still doable) option of rolling your own.

Linux doesn't have to tread the same path but there's no one behind it all waving a big stick when they go off track. Which is why we end up in a fragmented half baked mess every damn time and why I'm sitting here on a mac after 20 years of being promised linux on the desktop