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As far as package format goes, I think it depends on the complexity of your app. Electron is making development of rather simple apps pretty straight-forward -

As far as package format goes, I think it depends on the complexity of your app. Electron is making development of rather simple apps pretty straight-forward - I'm using at least 2 apps daily that are developed using Electron, and I can access them on both Linux and Windows. I'm not a really heavy application user, but I am curious about the limitations of centralizing packaging using something like Flatpak or Electron. If you try to build a program like Photoshop or Solidworks, do you run into some of the bottlenecks of those services?

tornadoboy55 10y ago
Electron is a webbrowser-as-a-backend on which JS+HTML5 apps run. Photoshop is written in C++, or at least large parts of it. Plus its millions of lines of code. Adobe (or any company really) will never go to the effort (think ten-thousands of man hours) of completely rewriting Photoshop (let alone their entire Creative Suite) just so its on Electron and Linux geeks can run it. Plus, its JS- it will run like hog-shit compared to C++. And even if you hypothetically did get it somewhat performant - we need to get rid of feeling the need to run everything on Electron. Atom runs on Electron. GitKraken runs on Electron. So does WhatsApp. I don't want to spawn 5 Electron instances just to run some apps. Its just horribly inefficient. WhatsApp on OS X, a chat client, uses 500Mb memory(!). Safari with 5 tabs open uses 550Mb. Telegram, which basically does the same as WhatsApp uses 125Mb, because its written natively. What would be best is a unified repo that solely contains Flatpaks. Flatpaks contain all the libraries the application needs to work, so no more issues supporting 20 different distros. However, that will never happen: 2/3+ of Linux users are on Ubuntu and Canonical will always want control (and they want to force their own standard- Snappy packages), and the other 1/3 does not want to bend to Canonical and their weird contributor license. I've already voiced it elsewhere but (mainline) Linux could be as solid as OS X, if only there was more consistency. If almost all distros were purely Wayland+Gnome+Flatpak (and mostly on the same versions) then most companies would feel comfortable targeting that instead of the constant moving multi-target that Linux is now.

tornadoboy55 10y ago

Electron is a webbrowser-as-a-backend on which JS+HTML5 apps run. Photoshop is written in C++, or at least large parts of it. Plus its millions of lines of code. Adobe (or any company really) will never go to the effort (think ten-thousands of man hours) of completely rewriting Photoshop (let alone their entire Creative Suite) just so its on Electron and Linux geeks can run it. Plus, its JS- it will run like hog-shit compared to C++. And even if you hypothetically did get it somewhat performant - we need to get rid of feeling the need to run everything on Electron. Atom runs on Electron. GitKraken runs on Electron. So does WhatsApp. I don't want to spawn 5 Electron instances just to run some apps. Its just horribly inefficient. WhatsApp on OS X, a chat client, uses 500Mb memory(!). Safari with 5 tabs open uses 550Mb. Telegram, which basically does the same as WhatsApp uses 125Mb, because its written natively. What would be best is a unified repo that solely contains Flatpaks. Flatpaks contain all the libraries the application needs to work, so no more issues supporting 20 different distros. However, that will never happen: 2/3+ of Linux users are on Ubuntu and Canonical will always want control (and they want to force their own standard- Snappy packages), and the other 1/3 does not want to bend to Canonical and their weird contributor license. I've already voiced it elsewhere but (mainline) Linux could be as solid as OS X, if only there was more consistency. If almost all distros were purely Wayland+Gnome+Flatpak (and mostly on the same versions) then most companies would feel comfortable targeting that instead of the constant moving multi-target that Linux is now.