And at least in my experience, spinning up a VM to run windows only software is a bigger battery/memory/cpu hit than running electron.

---

I would love it if Electron was better on those fronts (not to mention a few others) but it's good enough for most of my current use cases.

I wish there was something like Lazarus, but somehow more language agnostic.

I do not dwell on "liking/disliking" languages. I use what I use (few languages) for pure practical reasons. To me the goal is to design and deliver end product. Language to me is like a screwdriver. It just has to be good enough to do the job without bending backwards. For making native multiplatform GUI applications Lazarus/Freepascal combo totally ticks the box.

(Full disclosure - I don't really recommend this, it's not ready yet, imo)

I have not used Lazarus for any serious project, so if there's something particularly novel that you enjoy about it, I'd love to learn!

And nothing "better" and more practical came out ever since paradigm wise. Just insane bloat of trying to marry Browser to a native application

I think this is a pretty poor take on the problem. If that were really the case we'd all be using winforms 3.1 (or whatever the original version number was...).

Here's the "Better" that a browser does

- It's got standards and open documentation describing most behavior

- It's got incredibly robust networking code.

- It's got an insanely flexible markup language for describing both what form elements are present, but also how they're visually displayed. (Show me how to do animations in Lazarus... last I looked it was all manual) NOTE: Not only is it insanely flexible, it also is well documented and described by standards.

- It avoided the trap of being GUI first at development time, encouraging an eco-system of tools that generate and modify the text based definition of the GUI you're going to present to users

- It has good separation of concerns. My form elements can be styled completely differently by just swapping out a style sheet.

- It has good (although often underused) A11y support. For most disabilities that you can think of.

- It has first class debugging tools available, supporting a wide variety of environments.

----

That's what the browser brings. Is it heavy? Sure. Is it bloat? Not really.... depends a lot on your use case.

a) animations. yes you have to do it manually in Lazarus. or you can spend few days and write a component which would animate any published property of any component on a form. Will take a few days to write it in a flexible way and not to be ashamed to submit in public repo. I suspect such component maybe written by someone already but since I did not need it I did not research the area.

b) Debugger is a sore point. It is adequate but falls way of behind what you have in browser or in Delphi (commercial IDE Lazarus is trying to imitate). But they're not standing still and it is getting better.

c) A11y - Highly unfamiliar with the subject so you are most likely correct here.

Not me.

From my point of view, if the Linux version is Electron-based, then there is no Linux version.

If the linux version is Electron-based, ALL versions will be electron based. That's the whole point.

If you'd rather not use electron based software, more power to ya - that's your choice. But lets admit that's a luxury that some of us don't have - I'm a hell of a lot happier spinning up slack as an electron app rather than having to run it in a vm, I promise you that much.

It's fine to hate the tech and wish that someone would come along and make something better but the tools that everyone big and small is using to build apps is cross-platform by default and that's a huge huge huge win for users.

AFAIK, JetBrains builds all of their excellent IDEs with Java + Swing. Old school for sure, but it works great. If I were building something new today, I would definitely consider Java on both the client and server sides.

Ironically, this thread is exactly about a Logitech app that doesn't have this.

If the determining factor for whether my product was useful to you is what rendering engine it uses, you were not and will not ever be the target user anyways.

I don't make "social" apps, I'm not in the business of collecting users for the hell of it. Either I provide business value or I don't, and Electron has very little to do with the business value my customers get (although it certainly does accelerate new feature releases, and most of my customers like that).

edit: ah, too late

It's not some random 3rd party that's trying to implement a buggy client or wrapper. At risk of being shut down at any moment, and probably violating the company's terms of use. (which is a whole different conversation around the sad reality of interoperable software today)

---

It's native in the sense that I, as a developer employed by a company using it, can easily drop in a linux release without having to have a long drawn out cost/benefits analysis trying to convince PMs that we should do it, because it's not months or years of additional work - it's some manifest file tweaks to get icons in, and possibly some additional signing scripts to be run during the final packaging.

---

It's not native in the sense that it directly uses OS specific APIs, but who gives a flying fuck? Seriously.

I spend 95% of my time in a browser or a text editor already - "Browser with better system access" is just fine to me.

It turns out RAM and disk space are really, REALLY, REALLY fucking cheap. as in - I can get 32gbs of ram for less than the cost of a windows license. So I'll take my linux support, thank you very much. (shocker - I also like mobile web apps, and strongly favor mobile moving that direction as well - For exactly the same reasons).

Except for the times when that isn't true. Elsewhere in this thread people are complaining about how the Logitech software is Electron based but doesn't work on Linux.

> It turns out RAM and disk space are really, REALLY, REALLY fucking cheap.

RAM and disk may be cheap and plentiful, but battery power and bandwidth are not. It's why web apps don't make much sense for mobile today.

I have less than 5 installed apps that I use on my phone directly, and those are almost all exclusively apps that need direct hardware access - Camera - Phone - Maps

I also happen to use a few apps to work around sites that are genuinely awful to their mobile users (reddit, for example, is a black whole of dark ux patterns if you open it in a browser without faking your user agent - So I run bacon reader which [ironically] is just another webview running on the device anyways)

I'm just the opposite of you. Just using web to reach HN, and Google, nothing else. Everything I use is native, and I'm happy with all the native apps I have.

Hardware is cheap, network is reliable notion is just an illusion. No resource is cheap and nothing is reliable. I'm in a remote location with 4G network access and, while it's not slow, it's unreliable and choppy as hell (with full bar / excellent reception). Even well-baked and battle tested algorithms and applications (e.g. Zoom, Skype and other similar covid-19 critical, realtime software) choke, shudder and fail with smallest network congestion.

Also, while RAM is relatively cheap, processing power is not. Just because you have fast flash and plentiful RAM on the device, it doesn't mean all is yours. You can't just assume to use all of that.

If that software is running on a resource contained system, It'd be probably confined in a cgroup, and it'd be killed or crashed with OOM exceptions constantly because of this assumption.

At the end of the day, Electron is useful for some stuff, however it's not native in any means. If it was literally native, Evernote for Linux would've been released by now. Tiddly Desktop wouldn't have some silly fullscreen bugs. Spotify Linux wouldn't be a volunteer project inside Spotify. A simple application wouldn't consume as much memory as a full blown IDE with gazillion plugins enabled and written in Java. Visual Studio Code wouldn't need plugin subsets or "Hey, group the plugins you use by language, otherwise memory usage becomes unwieldy" warning. I can go on and on and on.

We have alternatives. We have Qt, GTK, Python compiled with Cython (if you need binary code), heck even Lazarus and WX widgets, and Java. It's unbelievable that JVM is lighter than Electron with all bells, whistles and Hotspot and whatnot. Some of these technologies can adapt themselves to the hardware resource limits of the system they're running on, transparently, with negligible performance impact most of the time.

So, you can tell that Electron is a better RAD tool than Java, but it's nowhere the only feasible tool to enable native cross-platform applications. Electron is lazy. It's the perfect manifestation of MVP meets mock-ups with enough features baked in to allow rapid-fire releases.

I agree that 640K is not enough for everybody, but no resource is as abundant as hydrogen in the universe.

But it means (in theory) the same experience on all plattforms.

And in my opinion, a working linux electron app beats a buggy wine ported version by far.

Because this is usually the choice. The linux market is way too small and unwilling to spend much money, than to justify a common software developer to spend the effort of porting.

Citation needed.

I think for years humble indie bundle kept statistics and linux supporters were always chipping in well above average.

That's quite the opposite of native since each platform has a host of unique features and capabilities. Guaranteeing the same experience on all platforms is guaranteeing that you're not using the platforms natively.

Interesting. I don't seem to be lacking software to do everything I want to do in Linux without having to use Wine.

Also, I've spent more money buying Linux software than any other platform.

It's also with chrome super easy to open a page without the normal browser UI that looks like an app add a .desktop file and presto it's an app it would actually be superior in many respects.

Yeah that's what Electron is.

> add a .desktop file and presto it's an app

So Chrome has turned the .url into a .desktop and ruined what .desktop means. Neat.

> it would actually be superior in many respects

Few, not many. And those respects are garbage because it's a still a web app masquerading as something it's not.

This means that it shares little with the installed browser and will consume 300MB-1GB of ram itself.

I do not suggest a web app is an adequate replacement for a native application but rather that a website may be a superior alternative to electron as it uses fewer resources while providing a similar UI for some applications.