Well, screw you too, do you know how much easier developing web apps is compared to native ones? I’ve only tried to use gtk and qt and took more years off my life than the entire time I’ve spent learning web stuff… I genuinely don’t know how people have the patience and expertise to use native frameworks…
ITT: some people are mad the web became the application platform of choice, in part due to handy dandy cross platform app tools like Electron and accessible languages like JavaScript.
There is no perfect answer. Qt isn’t using the platform’s native capabilities to the fullest extent either. Qt requires a “wrapper” too–all those libraries your app depends on, to name a few (unless you got a commercial license and are compiling statically, you rich devil).
Let’s celebrate the onslaught of apps that work with Linux instead of trying to scare off developers any more than Linux already did. Make love not war. <3
In my experience, Electron and other “web wrapper” apps run just fine and I have enough CPU and RAM to run a dozen of them alongside my 50 browser tabs. Slack, Discord, VSCode, Teams, IRCCloud, it all works fine. Hardware is cheap compared to my time.
It always seemed over-complicated to me to use web technologies to create a desktop application and run it in what is essentially a browser. The tool-chain of modern web and electron apps also seems overly complicated to me (writing in a slightly different language then transpiling to an interpreted language).
I don’t find JS any more accessible than any other language with automatic memory management. JS is actually a bit of mess due to bolting on new features while keeping backward compatibility.
I don’t mind using electron apps. VS Code is pretty great.
I think Java Swing was the apex of desktop development :)
It’s a poor architectural choice, but making cross-platform apps is even more problematic with the current UI tooling out there. Too much fragmentation in the base OS’s. If Mac moved to support Wayland or something like that, maybe we’d start getting somewhere.
Development-wise? It actually makes dev process much simpler by making it grossly cross platform instead of having to care about little gotchas on each use case (which may or may not actually be popular. Not saying it’s optimal, but as a developer myself, I say it makes a lot of sense.
JS land is the America of development. You may not like it, but it’s the encumbent power and it’ll be that way for a long time so might as well enjoy the plus sides
The problem is that even Microsoft choose to use Electron when they built Teams. MS got loads of developers and Teams is really a big product in terms of users.
It’s quick and doesn’t lag at all, even with the couple dozen plugins I have installed. Compare that to Atom (or whatever it’s called now) with zero plugins.
i cant relate sadly. ive got a decent computer but vscode still takes a while to load (with plugins). neovim on the other hand takes a split second to open, and has never crashed on me, even with the equivilent of my vscode plugins
Lets write an OS in Electron and go to March. Maybe start using the right tool for the right job. If i only know how to build with lego, I dont build a real house with lego, instead i learn how to do it right.
Jank is one reason I’m not a fan of electron. It’s very common to gain extra scrollbars, for the contents to shift around weirdly. Things break in ways that native apps never do, due to the sheer complexity of web rendering these days. Customizability is nearly always lacking, especially when it comes to cooperating with the host OS’s preferences…
I only use things like Discord in Safari and Firefox to not have to use the Electron app.
I really don’t get how everything has to use web UI. SwiftUI is really easy to learn and you can run this on any Apple platform. Flutter is a mess but you can run it on Android. GTK looks just gorgeous and Qt can run on everything but ChromeOS (like 99% of things). Is it really too much to ask for 3 more developers in a company that build native?
Small addition: I unsubscribed like many others from 1Password because with version 8 even they switched from native to Electron. This is just crazy.
I mean guys, frickin think about people who can’t afford recent hardware! Do we really want Electron and thus Chromium/Google to force us to buy 1000€+ hardware to be able to do things?
This might be a hot take but I’ve noticed some complicated electron apps are faster than some simple native apps. The striking example to me is how Vs code runs better and has a lower startup time than the stock Windows 11 File manager.
A well written electron app is better than a poorly written native app sometimes.
I don’t use Windows but I’ve realized all Microsoft apps are just React wrappers on macOS. Then the last time I used Windows I noticed they do the same — so they’ve essentially given up on their own system APIs for UI. 🤣
It’s legitimately hilarious to me when the creator of the OS ships web-based UI on their own operating system… Like teams on windows. Not only is it a terrible experience, slow, buggy and sluggish - it’s obviously not native - on Microsoft’s own OS! Where they’ve made all the UI APIs!
Now that I think about it I think Apple Music does the same. I kept having a bug pop up that made it rather obvious it was a JavaScript error. I’m not sure though.
Text chat client was a solved problem 2 decades ago. Teams felt like one step forward, two steps back and the second one was more of a stumble than a step.
You can use C++ for web technology instead of JavaScript? I’m taking a class in C++ right now so I’d be happy to swap janky JavaScript for pedantic but speedy C++ in new projects.
I mean sure once you start getting big enough, you’d probably be bundling all the features of chromium anyways, and any extra bloat is meaningless. Chromium and thus electron are extremely well optimized so if you are using the full feature set it will be fast.
But please stop using vscode as the benchmark electron app. It is not comparable. No other application in history has as large of a talent pool as vscode and It’s possible none ever will either.
That’s the exact opposite of my experience but I’m comparing macOS native apps, not Windows apps.
On top of that, the macOS Electron apps don’t allow me to do half the stuff you can do in macOS such as command + click the title of a document to open its parent folder, renaming/moving documents while they’re open (are we emulating FAT32 lol), sloppy “native”-looking components that are mismatched, etc.
The Windows File Manager is really just awful in that regard. You can get alternative file managers that start up in a fraction of that time, with more features.
Startup time isn’t really the worst of it. RAM usage is worse. And if a program uses lots of RAM, it will still appear quite performant. But it makes everything else on your system slower.
genuinely curious, I have a shitton of networked drives and at least 7 volumes on this locally, file manager has always popped open ready to go at a click or hotkey.
I don’t know, man. I haven’t done a scientific study on it either.
It was one of the reasons why I switched from Windows to Linux. On the same HDD, with same data, Windows file manager took half a minute to open, when the various Linux file managers were all instant.
I did ‘refresh’ Windows beforehand, too, which Microsoft claims is like reinstalling. Couldn’t easily do a proper reinstall, because of OEM license horseshit.
These days, I only really see Windows when colleagues are using it. That’s all within my company’s network drive infrastructure. Maybe it is being slowed down by that.
That’s still proof enough for me, though, that Windows file manager is shittily coded. A proper architecture would have the UI in a separate thread from all the file operations and it should never be the case that a slow hard drive or network drive is causing the UI to appear later.
Well, the file manager I use on Linux, Dolphin, has an experimental Windows version.
When I learned of that a few years ago, I gave it a shot on Windows and I prefered it to File Explorer, but it’s not like I compared it to other offerings or anything like that.
I do think that’s the best file manager on Linux and most features were working on Windows back then, so it’s not unlikely either, that it is by far the best offering for Windows. But it could also be a buggy mess. I wouldn’t know…
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