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Convenient you pick VS Code as your bar, given it's probably the one acceptable Electron app anyone can think of. Meanwhile, I can think of a dozen native apps

Convenient you pick VS Code as your bar, given it's probably the one acceptable Electron app anyone can think of. Meanwhile, I can think of a dozen native apps that behave better than Slack or Spotify or Atom, just to name a couple of obvious examples.

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
I can't think of any acceptable Qt or Xamarin apps period, which is the real point of comparison here. The fact that VS Code is acceptable is truly surprising and represents a victory not only for Electron but the whole concept of cross-platform apps.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  Then you're not thinking very hard. I'm too bored of this discussion to look at Xamarin, but for Qt, just looking at the Wikipedia page and cross-referencing with my experience with them, we have: VLC, Stellarium, VirtualBox, Telegram, Google Earth, LyX...
  - Matthias247 9y ago
    From those two I use VLC and VirtualBox. And while they work fine, I don't think they are great showcases for good GUIs. E.g. the VLC guis scaling is quite bad on my 4k screen. The same applies also for the version QT creator which I have installed (but that's not a very recent one, maybe the current one is better). To be fair: I have seen various good QT apps, but most of them were not standard desktop apps. Instead they used fullscreen QML for highly custom user interfaces. That seemed to work well, but I think JS/HTML5 would do the same.
    - zzalpha 9y ago
      The scaling issue is more a problem of Windows than it is Qt, per se. And, good news, they're fixing it in the next major version! That seemed to work well, but I think JS/HTML5 would do the same. With the same memory footprint and CPU utilization? I highly doubt that...
      - KirinDave 9y ago
        Sure, but the trade-off is a lot more developer time. "Twice as long" seems generous, and certainly Electron makes accessibility easier.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    So, a majority of apps that set up a window then use their own internal renderer? Except Telegram and Lyx. Fair enough, but this is hardly representative of the sort of things Electron does well. What's more, Lyx and Telegram aren't exactly famous for being accessible apps. It's very difficult for me to envision why someone wants to work 4x harder on an app to cut the memory footprint from 2g-4g (much of which is actually shared with the browser you've probably got running anyways) to 1g. People demand respect for less able hardware, but I use Electron on 8 year old computers without complaint. And all I can hear in this is the emacs vs vi stuff again.
- pfranz 9y ago
  I work in visual effects. Large companies (Disney, DreamWorks, ILM, Weta) are all Linux based, while small shops are Windows or Mac. So much of the software is cross platform in order to be relevant (usually Linux first). Maya, Nuke, Houdini, rv, and a bunch more. All of the smaller tools and utilities in open source projects are either Qt or PyQt. Maya, Nuke, and Houdini all had their own in-house toolkits, but migrated to Qt. They all have fairly custom UI requirements, require high performance, and need high end things like accurate color and GPU acceleration. It's not the same type of app as Spotify or Slack, but is comparable to VSCode.
pvg 9y ago
It's not only convenient, it's entirely deliberate. I don't think comparing bad Electron apps to bad anything-else apps is going to be interesting or informative to anyone.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  Sure, but the least you can do is compare averages. IME, the average Electron app is a memory hogging piece of battery exhausting garbage. Cherrypicking outliers to make the case is, to say the least, misleading.
  - pvg 9y ago
    It's neither cherrypicking nor misleading. 'Compare averages' is your idea, I honestly don't understand why that's interesting at all. Much more interesting (and sensible) - here's an app that represents the current state of 'peak Electron'. What's a 'peak Qt' app? There are much better things to complain about in my pick of Electron apps. Here's one - VS Code is a highly specialized app from a field in which users are perfectly ok with highly non-native UI. Sublime, IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans, Emacs, Eclipse, etc are all deeply non-native yet popular. So that's a bit unfair but hey, there are Qt-based dev tools out there as well. But again, I'd be happy with any example of a non-shitty (UI/UX-wise) Qt app.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - mlvljr 9y ago
      https://www.netacad.com/ru/courses/packet-tracer-download/ https://www.netacad.com/ru/courses/packet-tracer-download/ It may be you only know a Qt app when it is a bad one :)
    - zzalpha 9y ago
      It's neither cherrypicking nor misleading. 'Compare averages' is your idea, I honestly don't understand why that's interesting at all. Much more interesting (and sensible) - here's an app that represents the current state of 'peak Electron'. What's a 'peak Qt' app? Uh... the entire KDE Desktop Environment and surrounding ecosystem? Of those, KDevelop and Krita are both fully cross-platform. I've listed many others in other comments. Frankly, I think you're either choosing not to look, or moving the goalposts in order to rule out perfectly fine examples of native cross platform apps that aren't written in glorified web browser.

TAForObvReasons 9y ago

I can't think of any acceptable Qt or Xamarin apps period, which is the real point of comparison here. The fact that VS Code is acceptable is truly surprising and represents a victory not only for Electron but the whole concept of cross-platform apps.

zzalpha 9y ago
Then you're not thinking very hard. I'm too bored of this discussion to look at Xamarin, but for Qt, just looking at the Wikipedia page and cross-referencing with my experience with them, we have: VLC, Stellarium, VirtualBox, Telegram, Google Earth, LyX...
- Matthias247 9y ago
  From those two I use VLC and VirtualBox. And while they work fine, I don't think they are great showcases for good GUIs. E.g. the VLC guis scaling is quite bad on my 4k screen. The same applies also for the version QT creator which I have installed (but that's not a very recent one, maybe the current one is better). To be fair: I have seen various good QT apps, but most of them were not standard desktop apps. Instead they used fullscreen QML for highly custom user interfaces. That seemed to work well, but I think JS/HTML5 would do the same.
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    The scaling issue is more a problem of Windows than it is Qt, per se. And, good news, they're fixing it in the next major version! That seemed to work well, but I think JS/HTML5 would do the same. With the same memory footprint and CPU utilization? I highly doubt that...
    - KirinDave 9y ago
      Sure, but the trade-off is a lot more developer time. "Twice as long" seems generous, and certainly Electron makes accessibility easier.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  So, a majority of apps that set up a window then use their own internal renderer? Except Telegram and Lyx. Fair enough, but this is hardly representative of the sort of things Electron does well. What's more, Lyx and Telegram aren't exactly famous for being accessible apps. It's very difficult for me to envision why someone wants to work 4x harder on an app to cut the memory footprint from 2g-4g (much of which is actually shared with the browser you've probably got running anyways) to 1g. People demand respect for less able hardware, but I use Electron on 8 year old computers without complaint. And all I can hear in this is the emacs vs vi stuff again.
pfranz 9y ago
I work in visual effects. Large companies (Disney, DreamWorks, ILM, Weta) are all Linux based, while small shops are Windows or Mac. So much of the software is cross platform in order to be relevant (usually Linux first). Maya, Nuke, Houdini, rv, and a bunch more. All of the smaller tools and utilities in open source projects are either Qt or PyQt. Maya, Nuke, and Houdini all had their own in-house toolkits, but migrated to Qt. They all have fairly custom UI requirements, require high performance, and need high end things like accurate color and GPU acceleration. It's not the same type of app as Spotify or Slack, but is comparable to VSCode.

pvg 9y ago

It's not only convenient, it's entirely deliberate. I don't think comparing bad Electron apps to bad anything-else apps is going to be interesting or informative to anyone.

zzalpha 9y ago
Sure, but the least you can do is compare averages. IME, the average Electron app is a memory hogging piece of battery exhausting garbage. Cherrypicking outliers to make the case is, to say the least, misleading.
- pvg 9y ago
  It's neither cherrypicking nor misleading. 'Compare averages' is your idea, I honestly don't understand why that's interesting at all. Much more interesting (and sensible) - here's an app that represents the current state of 'peak Electron'. What's a 'peak Qt' app? There are much better things to complain about in my pick of Electron apps. Here's one - VS Code is a highly specialized app from a field in which users are perfectly ok with highly non-native UI. Sublime, IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans, Emacs, Eclipse, etc are all deeply non-native yet popular. So that's a bit unfair but hey, there are Qt-based dev tools out there as well. But again, I'd be happy with any example of a non-shitty (UI/UX-wise) Qt app.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mlvljr 9y ago
    https://www.netacad.com/ru/courses/packet-tracer-download/ https://www.netacad.com/ru/courses/packet-tracer-download/ It may be you only know a Qt app when it is a bad one :)
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    It's neither cherrypicking nor misleading. 'Compare averages' is your idea, I honestly don't understand why that's interesting at all. Much more interesting (and sensible) - here's an app that represents the current state of 'peak Electron'. What's a 'peak Qt' app? Uh... the entire KDE Desktop Environment and surrounding ecosystem? Of those, KDevelop and Krita are both fully cross-platform. I've listed many others in other comments. Frankly, I think you're either choosing not to look, or moving the goalposts in order to rule out perfectly fine examples of native cross platform apps that aren't written in glorified web browser.