What's your experience with Electron alternatives

Electron is a widely hated framework on Linux, but what about the alternatives like Neutralinojs?

In their own words: In Electron and NWjs, you have to install Node.js and hundreds of dependency libraries. Embedded Chromium and Node.js make simple apps bloaty — in most scenarios, framework weights more than your app source. Neutralinojs offers a lightweight and portable SDK which is an alternative for Electron and NW.js. Neutralinojs doesn’t bundle Chromium and uses the existing web browser library in the operating system (Eg: gtk-webkit2 on Linux). Neutralinojs implements a secure WebSocket connection for native operations and embeds a static web server to serve the web content. Also, it offers a built-in JavaScript client library for developers.

Do you experience alternatives like Njs to blend more in the desktop layout, install less junk, use less memory, are more compatible with Wayland,…?

merthyr1831, (edited )

If you need multi platform support in one codebase, Flutter is a good choice. Ubuntu uses it for their new OS installer and GUI package manager.

Quite easy to get set up on Linux (though the recommended route is using Snaps).

No waiting ages for a massive node_modules folder to fill up, nor the general pain of using javascript; dart is a really nice language to write in.

You wont get the smallest binaries with it, but it’s powerful, reliable, and pretty damn performant for a “non native” framework.

satansbartender,

Second this. Been working with flutter and dart professionally for awhile now and it’s great

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Have you tried Flutter? flutter.dev

React Native is good, and isn’t just a web view. It uses native UI widgets so the apps feel truly native. Many Android and iOS apps use it, and Microsoft ported it to Windows and MacOS and use it in some of their apps (notably, the Xbox app, parts of Office, and parts of Windows like the old Mail app in Windows 10, use it). Unfortunately there’s no stable port for Linux :/

In theory, someone could port React Native to use Gtk, Qt, or WxWidgets, but I haven’t seen any such efforts recently - there’s a few old projects but they’ve all been abandoned.

winnie,
@winnie@lemmy.ml avatar

Have you tried Flutter?

I didn’t develop on it, but I’ve used recently one app written in it and it was hot pile of garbage.

It was slow as a slug, and eat lot of CPU. I’ve also checked web eversion and was astonished as it rendered everything into canvas. It’s really poor design choice to render everything by app itself.

I guess it was just buggy app, but I didn’t try other apps in flutter, so can’t compare.

But web demo of flutter UI components with list box was also not so fast. But perhaps it’s just web version. Didn’t know any example of good flutter app.

winnie,
@winnie@lemmy.ml avatar

I haven’t use any alternatives, and haven’t developed with electron, but I know that there are another alternative – Tauri. It also uses web-view. It’s built in Rust and allows apps to be developed in JS (providing JS api) and in Rust.

What I can say – JS support won’t be cross-platform, like we have with NodeJS in electron. Special debug per platform might be required.

sentient_loom,
@sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’m using pywebview, a cross-platform python web view GUI framework. I like it so far, it’s fairly straightforward. I just wanted a python API around my database, and I’m building most of the app in the front-end with vanilla JS and html.

I didn’t want the (alleged) bloat of electron, and I didn’t want to jam async/await onto everything in the backend, so I found this alternative.

The 3rd contender was Tauri, but I didn’t want to bother learning Rust for a simple API. But it was very tempting, and Tauri is an option you should consider.

I haven’t finished my current project so I can’t completely vouch for pywebview yet. But so far it’s great and I recommend it if you don’t mind using python (I do long for a statically typed backend TBH).

rollingflower,

The thing is, Linux Desktops dont have a unified WebView. I wonder how that would work on KDE and others

winnie,
@winnie@lemmy.ml avatar

I believe it uses gtk-webview. So on KDE system you would use GTK as a base. But you anyway would have GTK libs in your system.

leopold,

Tauri uses webkitgtk everywhere, including KDE.

rollingflower,

Hm, I mean that is way better than using an entire Chrome browser, but KDE uses qtwebengine

leopold, (edited )

True. If their goal is truly to use the “native” solution everywhere, they should use QtWebEngine on Qt desktops. For the most part, the advantage with Tauri isn’t so much that it’s using the “native” web engine, it’s that not every Tauri application has to bundle a full (probably outdated) web engine. On Linux, this is achieved regardless of whether WebKitGTK or QtWebEngine is used. The first Tauri application you install pulls in WebKitGTK if you didn’t already have it installed, then every subsequent application just uses the same one. I’m personally glad it’s using WebKitGTK despite being a Plasma user. The less we rely on Blink and Blink-based web engines, the better. Having to spend 100MB of my 1TB hard drive on WebKitGTK to achieve this isn’t making me lose a whole lot of sleep.

rollingflower,

I suppose that is okay, and targeting a specific engine is likely needed, to have non-trivial features.

bizdelnick,

Alternative for what? I never used electron apps and I don’t see any reason for that. If you are a developer, try Qt.

moreeni,

Qt and Electron are different technologies that achieve somewhat different goals

intelisense,

Yet the telegram client is written in Qt and has great cross-platform support.

jbk,

They have like 3 different, official codebases and clients (and so many 3rd party ones) for so many platforms. No other app I know of is like that, not really a great example imo

bizdelnick,

Qt and Electron are different technologies

Yes.

that achieve somewhat different goals

No.

moreeni,

You can’t get a website working as a “native” application with Qt, which is exactly what is Electron’s goal.

nyan,

Which is why Electron reminds me of a little kid who’s just done some extremely difficult but utterlly pointless thing.

Websites belong in a browser. If it doesn’t work in any random standards-compliant browser, then you should be delivering it as a true native application, not some horrific fiji-mermaid-esque hybrid.

porous_grey_matter,

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/cb855787-09e6-4ec1-81b8-7a2ef22115ed.jpeg

moreeni, (edited )

You are talking as if all people can make a native app with the same knowledge and amount of effort as it would take to develop a website.

Sometimes, web developers would want to go further with their app and deliever “native” functionality. Sometimes, a person wants to build an app but only happens to know how to build a website.

It’s a much more complicated matter than just some idiots deciding “let’s build an utterly pointless thing and then let other idiots build horrific fiji-mermaid-esque hybrids!!”.

…madhouse-project.org/…/Walking-in-my-shoes/

winnie,
@winnie@lemmy.ml avatar

Then they shouldn’t! Just give users website and be done with it.

Now you can even allow websites work offline and install them “like” an app with proper manifest.

nyan,

Sometimes raising the barrier to entry is a good thing.

Many Electron applications I’ve run across don’t make even a try at loading system settings. For me, that causes accessibility issues related to photosensitivity. For some reason, feeling like I’ve been stabbed in the eyeball when I try to open a program does not endear me to it or its framework.

No application at all is actually better than something built on Electron, as far as I’m concerned, because then there’s a chance that someone, somewhere, might fill in the gap with software I can actually use.

Electron needs to either actually provide the basics of native functionality, or go away.

wewbull,

Generally, my view is if it’s an electron app it’s going to be a crap user experience.

You are talking as if all people can make a native app with the same knowledge and amount of effort as it would take to develop a website.

No, not all people can’t do that, but I think they should learn. It will lead to better results. Or are you saying that web developers are inherently incapable of developing native applications?

mamotromico,

Honestly it varies a lot. I’m the kind of user that would rather have self contained apps (even if electron) whenever possible instead of new browser tabs/windows. So unless a electron app is notoriously bad, I’d rather have it avilable than not

bizdelnick,

There is a browser working natively in any system. I don’t see any point in bundling a web app together with a browser and calling it a “native” app. The only difference is that you have no address bar in that case.

winnie,
@winnie@lemmy.ml avatar

I’ve just tried Qt based matrix client. Compared to Electron based Element.

It’s nice, snappy, beautiful, and eats WAY less RAM. But it lacks lot of feature. That’s sad.

bjoern_tantau,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

No matter how much I like an alternative to Electron. It cannot save me from bad Electron apps.

Secret300,

Are there any good electron apps? Like genuinely

cygnus,
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

VSCode and Obsidian work great.

joyjoy,

Until you want to integrate with the system and use gtk window controls.

Secret300,

I hear great things about obsidian but I haven’t used it since it’s not open source

why,

Im willing to give them a pass on that since they don’t vender lock the notes I’m taking.

cygnus,
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

Sure, but all it does it give you a nice UI for local markdown files. There’s no lock-in.

acockworkorange,

I will catch flak for this, but discord works fine. You could be fooled into thinking it’s native. Audio, video, attachments… pretty seamless. Zoom sucks ass though.

missingno,
missingno avatar

Desktop audio streaming has never worked. Bug report has been outstanding since the beginning and Discord has just... never addressed it.

morrowind,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

Count yourself lucky because discord desktop is one of the worst pieces of crap I’ve ever used

slazer2au,

Na, Teams is worse than discord any day.

kugmo,
@kugmo@sh.itjust.works avatar

I would say it’s seemless on Windows, not Linux.

acockworkorange,

I wouldn’t know, I don’t use Windows. But I have no complaints on Mint.

SteveTech,

It starts to break down on Wayland though, screen sharing doesn’t work, drag and drop looks to work but errors when sending, and probably other things.

Edit: Yes I’m already running it with –ozone-platform-hint=auto

acockworkorange,

Well, Wayland support is something new for most distros. Can’t really fault the app for not being ahead of the curve.

SteveTech,

Yeah, but also I really didn’t expect Zoom to have working screen sharing on wayland before discord.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

You could be fooled into thinking it’s native.

It doesn’t look like a native app at all though. It’s not really following any operating system’s design guidelines.

acockworkorange,

It’s not like all native apps do either. It’s obviously a foreign toolkit. My point was there were no obvious issues accessing hardware, files, drag and drop, etc.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

The best native apps do look native to the platform though.

4am,

Hey hey; discord is rumored to be doing ads now. No talking good about them!

winnie,
@winnie@lemmy.ml avatar

Is zoom Electon?

It looks like shit and feels like shit. I thought it was native tbh… given how chunky UI is. Looks like GDI programming to me. Or they took design from Android 2 and ported it to Desktop.

acockworkorange,

I’m at least 60% sure the Linux client is. Either way, it’s sandboxed as hell. I have to copy backgrounds to its own special snowflake folder or it can’t use them.

Secret300,

Really? Even on windows I feel like it’s slow and you can tell it’s an electron app.

InternetCitizen2,

I don’t like Discord much, but don’t understand the dislike for the app. Perhaps because I use it rarely.

acockworkorange,

The company sucks, but the app works fine to me. I don’t get the hate either. I use the flatpak version in Linux and don’t feel any friction for it being an Electron app. There are native flatpak apps that cause me grief.

aniki,

I vehemently oppose using webviews for desktop applications in general so regardless of if there’s a better one, they all suck.

Neutralinojs implements a secure WebSocket connection for native operations and embeds a static web server to serve the web content.

WHY do we do this? How is this any better than a native app? I’d almost, ALMOST, take Java over this madness.

ominouslemon,

Companies are not willing to develop native applications anymore. Most apps are server-based anyway and developing native apps is expensive

aniki,

I mean – I totally get it but this is /c/linux not /c/programming. I understand the difficulty of developing both but I lament the fact that open source isn’t utilized to make the process easier running a damn webserver to render a mostly static view.

___,

I’m with you for the most part. Web technology has the ability to run well locally, and at speed. The current integration is lacking however.

intelisense,

I just wish there was a native alternative to Visual Studio Code with a decent ecosystem of plugins.

aniki,

Mate, VSCodium is pretty right the fuck on. I’m a devops engineer but mostly a python dude so I use PyCharm for most development but when I need to do ANYTHING else that’s not Python my VSCodium is pretty dialed.

secana,

tauri.app is very popular and does not need electron. It uses the OS native we view.

kib48, (edited )

what apps use Tauri? I only know about Dorion which doesn’t really work well from my experience

edit: ok so Dorion works well in an Ubuntu VM but it doesn’t have a build for any other distro :/ also i found this github.com/tauri-apps/awesome-tauri

lengau,

Tau’ri, you say?

https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/ea9e637b-7c75-4142-82b4-b90cf94a1f87.gif

Fisherswamp,

I have been using Tauri for a personal project of mine and I absolutely love it

starman,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

And 2.0 will support Android and iOS

thebardingreen,
@thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz avatar

It will?? When??

starman,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

I don’t know, but probably soon. They release beta versions already.

xlash123,
@xlash123@sh.itjust.works avatar

I wanna use Rust to build mobile apps so bad. I don’t really know what I want to build, but I want to use Rust to do it

lazylion_ca,

Reinvent Winamp for Android and iPhones.

thebardingreen,
@thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz avatar

Came here to say Tauri.

Aux,

Use Flutter.

just_another_person,

Flutter has been on the uptake quite a bit the last 2 years for Linux. Canonical and RedHat have built some end-user tools on it that work great, and it’s pretty easy to develop for.

Only thing that keeps me away is Big Googz running the development show. Not only can we not trust them to do what’s best for the dev base of a specific tool, it’s obvious how out of step they’ll go with said ecosystem to exploit consumers of tools built in that ecosystem. Look at Chrome.

Aux,

All the best dev tools are created or owned by either Google or Microsoft, you can’t avoid them.

just_another_person,

Nah, that’s not even close to true. I’d say MS has the worst track record with community engagement overall, with the last 3 years being an exception.

Somebody slap me - because I hate them with a passion - but of the Big 5, Meta has probably kicked out the most important FOSS contributions to the Data and UI arenas in the past 10 years with the React ecosystem. Almost every modern app has a touch of React in there somewhere, and it was adopted, forked, and deployed quite widely, so they can’t even take it back if they tried at this point by switching up licenses 😁

Aux,

You must have been living under the rock, but Microsoft is supporting devs since 1990-s. VS was pretty much a pinnacle of IDE world until recent times. MSDN was pretty much the best source of documentation for all kinds of tech, not just WinAPI. And then they donated web related MSDN content to MDN and made redirects to MDN more than 3 years ago. VS Code, TypeScript, ReactiveX, GitHub, man, the list of MS contributions to developers is pretty much endless.

just_another_person,

Been heading FOSS-based projects and teams for quite some time. I think you confuse “enterprise” type engineers with the vast majority of the rest of the world working as engineers.

Past few years is the first time I’ve seen FOSS devs picking up VScode to use it at all, and that’s basically because it’s a continuation of Atom that MS extended after they bought GitHub.

Never known anyone to use MSDN as a definitive resource anything, they’d rather use Stack Overflow, Man Pages, or docs directly. Never seen a Python/Ruby/JS/Whatever dev go to MS anything looking for answers, for example. Maybe in the Windows world 🤷

GitHub was bought by MS, and up until then, they had no similar repo tool out there for people to easily consume anything they put out in the world. They just used GitHub like everyone else lol

I won’t even go into the mess that MS’s activities had on the open web in general. You shouldn’t be saying that to people publicly if you do this for a living. If you want to make such an argument about anyone on that front, Mozilla would be that benefactor to kind comments in that regard.

I mean…if this is your experience, go for you, but I’ve doing this a looooong time, and your experience matches very few outside of the enterprise world, who are generally speaking NOT the arbiters of good will in the FOSS community, so…

Aux,

Past few years is the first time I’ve seen FOSS devs picking up VScode to use it at all

VSC was released in 2015, it became most used code editor in 2016 and #1 in 2017. That’s a bit more than a few years IMHO.

Never known anyone to use MSDN as a definitive resource anything

MSDN was the main source of info for web development as it had the most comprehensive knowledge library for HTML, CSS and JS. It still has great C/C++ docs.

I won’t even go into the mess that MS’s activities had on the open web in general.

SVG is based on MS proposals. Microsoft was instrumental in development of CSS and IE3 was the very first browser to feature CSS support. The second ECMAScript implementation called JScript also came from Microsoft (the first one called JavaScript came from Netscape, which pushed ECMAScript standard). Microsoft has invented loads of tech like XMLHttpRequest, etc. One must be totally ignorant to think that Microsoft did not invest heavily into web standards.

And then you conveniently forgetting about tools like TS, RX, etc which are used worldwide for decades. Microsoft was also instrumental in bringing the very first open computer architecture (together with IBM) - PC. Your whole IT experience is enabled by Microsoft.

just_another_person,

No, nobody is forgetting the historical contributions of MS as an entity, but the majority was that was decades ago, and not the context of what was being discussed 🤣

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