For the graphics question, it really depends on how you define a desktop programmer. Most video game developers need to work with graphics at some point, and a

For the graphics question, it really depends on how you define a desktop programmer. Most video game developers need to work with graphics at some point, and a great deal of professional creative software uses GPU acceleration. Whether you deal with the drivers directly or not, you're going through them, and end up bitten by weird bugs and platform inconsistencies in testing. (Why are my drop shadows pink? Oh, this is a known issue with Intel HD 4000 on OSX... that sort of thing.) To be fair, Electron doesn't solve this problem, and neither does any toolkit really, it just shifts the responsibility to the framework, rather than the application developer. As for electron being better than existing toolkits as far as UI development? I don't think that's a fair assessment in either direction. It's a right tool for the job thing. Electron's real strength is that it's web-based, so it's familiar to existing web developers. In that respect, it's a bit easier to use if you already know web technologies. But, it's not terribly good at native integration (Electron apps tend to feel like web apps because they are), and resource consumption is abysmal because it's going through the browser layer, and we all know Chromium isn't light on RAM usage. Other toolkits are far better at handling native platform integration and can be much more lightweight. Again here, "better" is a really tough thing to define, as every team and project is going to have different priorities.