For anyone considering Electron: take a look at Tauri. It’s another way to build cross-platform apps with web tech. It will use the OS‘s web rendering engine instead of shipping Chromium which results in much smaller binaries and faster startup times and less RAM usage. You can also write native code in Rust. It’s like Electron but good.
Bad for Linux at the moment...
That being said, it won't improve just by saying it's bad for Linux, if you work as a maintainer in a distro, or know a lot about Linux and rust to help their development then please reach out!!!
The sooner tauri is usable everywhere the more people will prefer it
There's actually a pretty cool music player project I'm keeping an eye on called Audioling that's built on Tauri. I currently use one called Feishin which is pretty good.
Yep, using Feishin as well. Audioling is a rewrite from the same dev.
That does seem like a good improvement.
What about Flutter? It was pretty nice to work with
The reason people use Electron in the first place is that they wanna share a codebase between web, desktop and possibly mobile.
While Flutter can technically do that, the web apps it outputs are atrocious with poor usability and accessibility. It’s drawing the whole UI on a canvas element which causes all kinds of issues.
Electron apps are a crime against computing.
A crime commited by techbros of the early 2010's, who envisioned an end to desktop applications, and them being replaced by websites.
To be fair making native aplications was( maybe even still is , the last time i touched anything non abap related was in uni )very unnesecarily complex thing back then especialy compared to the simplicity of web frontend .
I think VSCode is the only stable electron application and even then it took them like 5 years to reach passable stability lol.
Used to crash and combust all the time when I first tried it.
Zed is native and it has way better performance! You can tell it's not Electron!
Etcher seems stable! But it's also a well over 100 MB download for a disk image writer. Rufus does more in less than 1% of the download size and also has a GUI.
Never realized that Etcher was an Electron app and it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah that crashed for me across several versions too lol.
Latest works, but I have like 5 different ones saved because I think 1.16-1.18 wouldn't complete writing to disk.
Rufus could fit on an 1.44 MB floppy disk
GitHub Desktop works neatly
Tabby terminal :)
Electron and unreal have been disasters for their industries
Is Unreal worse than Unity? I’ve only ever heard people complain about the latter
I hate both. Godot for lief
When a team uses Unreal properly it can be great. Guilty Gear Strive is built in Unreal, has a beautiful unique visual style, and runs great. But you need a team who really knows what they're doing, both on the code and art sides.
The problem is when an indie dev tries to use it and does everything "out of the box". If you're a solo or indie dev, just use Unity or Godot (I've been using the latter and loving it)
- Yes
- Yes, and also delete Electron
- That, and also make me forget I ever even heard about Electron in the first place
Instructions unclear: Computer turned into neutron star
what's are the alternatives? I want ease of writing UIs js/CSS/HTML gives, especially with frameworks like svelte.
I'd highly recommend Tauri. It's much much much faster and you can use svelte for the front end and enjoy all of those benefits.
The "downside" is that all of the backend is written in rust which can be trouble to learn... (Downside is in quotes because rust is my favorite language and I would legally marry it if the law cared about the true meaning of love) However! If you don't care much about the backend stuff or most of that is gonna be simple anyway... Just use it. It's better in every way
Edit for context: I'm the lead developer of a "popular" (it's as popular as you can be as a niche tool for a niche community) open source project that uses Tauri with a svelte front end and rust in the back end.
There's also a Golang alternative that does not have 6 GiB build folders like Tauri / Tauri 2.
(Tauri generates like 3 MiB binaries. It's the build folders that are huge. Also stay ready to compile huge Rust packages!)
A webpage.
Or, get this, a PWA.
Getting good is an alternative, coding will always be a trade between ease and quality. Super high level languages are super easy and accessible but the tradeoff is you have no idea what is actually happening on the backend nor much control of it and it requires bloated web engines to manage and run.
Real coders program in assembly.
When gecko electron?
(Yes, I know that there has been effort to that, but at one point having gecko and FF seperate was too much work, so it was merged further, so that it's now even harder to create a gecko-based electron. So basically just create a clean FF profile, add all addons you want (uBlock and noscript are useful for some apps), and make a desktop shortcut to open the web page in that specific profile. Funnily enough, it's more lightweight!)
XULRuner use to exist. I ran Chatzilla under it at one point in time.
Can I get a browser built entirely on Electron?
Any tech college kid can write an app in common frameworks. I'll admit llm code generators are great when they can translate electron apps to say tauri or even better to QT at reasonable cost :)
- Qt “cute” (the UI framework)
- QT “cutie” (QuickTime the Apple media framework)
QT "cutie" (you 😊😳)
Well that would be even more impressive.
I’m experimenting with a game and rather than deal with platform specific graphics I’m just targeting wasm and webgl and plan to embed my game in a browser runtime.
It feels less terrible than the mess that is linking platform specific logic and code.
The vast majority of game engines already have seamless cross platform support. Nothing need be done beyond selecting your target when compiling. Use Vulkan instead of dx11/12 and good to go
But I'll build an electron app, and have support for Linux /s
will it also have blackjack and hookers?
It'll only have blackjack and hookers.
Use Qt or some similar framework to develop your desktop apps, or use SDL or similar middleware if you want your own and want portability very quickly. I even managed to write my own SDL replacement.
Interesting, but I was raising a joke at how many apps are electron based and could easily have a working app on Linux. Yet they never publish Linux versions of electron apps, and it drives me nuts as it's so easy to enable
And yet, the most popular, and desired (and one of the most admired) IDEs that developers use all day, everyday, is built using Electron:
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/#2-integrated-development-environment
vscode isn't an IDE, but an actual IDE written in electron would be horrible.I don't want to argue about this anymore. I admit i had a bad take, and this whole thread is just arguing about semantics at this point. Does it even really matter if vscode is an IDE or not? If it works, it works.
It's literally listed in stack overflow's section on IDEs, functions as a replacement for an IDE, was architected so that plugins can turn it into an IDE, and is distributed with plugins made by the same company that turn it into an IDE. Insisting that it's not an IDE in this context isnt helping anyone communicate, it's just being pedantic.
This distinction is not useful since the creation of language servers.
I'm keeping an eye on Zed: https://zed.dev/
Yeah, AI, whatever. It's written in Rust and looks pretty great.
Yeah you can turn off the AI it's not mandatory, besides, it's really fast, has built in support for LSP's , custom themes which are easy to make, vim mode out of the box, extensions, and some GitHub functionalities.
I was using Kate because electron is too much of a hog on my system and zed works insanely well (it's slightly slower than Kate though but not very important)
I wish you could turn off the automatic downloads on zed though (or have a prompt to confirm the download) but it's really shaping up to be a great text editor.
Why is Spacemacs listed separately to Emacs when it's just a fancy Emacs' config?
Eh, not that bad
