5 ms·

As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather have no app at all (and use an alternative) than have an Electron app suck users away from the potential native alternative.

• thiht 9y ago
  So don't use it and use the web version. A potential native app is of no interest to me compared to an actual full featured Electron app.
  • beojan 9y ago
    If the Electron app exists, there's a lot less incentive to write the native one.
    • mateuszf 9y ago
      If the Electron app exists, often the alternative is no app at all.
    • OberstKrueger 9y ago
      See Slack. If Slack were still some plucky startup, I can understand it using Electron. But it's been around for a while now, and a more performant native application doesn't seem to be coming anytime soon.
      • Aelius 9y ago
        Luckily Slack has the IRC and XMPP bridges. can't imagine any other protocols with a wealth of highly performant clients to choose from. Unlucky for me, my admins refuse to enable the bridges and also won't grant me an API key for use with the weechat slack plugin. I hate Slack so much. Slow and miserable and unconfigurable and just crashes at least once a month.
        • detaro 9y ago
          Sadly, Slack also happily breaks the protocols in their bridges, e.g. producing invalid IRC usernames. So even though our Slack has the bridge enabled, I can't login to it since it wants me to put a dot in my nick.
      • laurent123456 9y ago
        Skype for a long time only had an outdated application on Linux. Now that MS converted it to Electron, it's available and regularly updated. The truth is, even for huge companies like Microsoft, the cost of doing a Linux-specific app is not worth it given the small user base, but with Electron they get this for free so they do it. This is even more true for resource-limited open source projects, as cross-platform gui-based ones are difficult to get right, but Electron makes that easier.
        • karpodiem 9y ago
          Now I've heard it all - a company with a seven hundred billion dollar market cap can't afford it. Come on. They can absolutely afford to do native Windows / MacOS / Linux cross platform. They're lazy/don't want to.
          • alsetmusic 9y ago
            > Now I've heard it all - a company with a seven hundred billion dollar market cap can't afford it. Come on. They can absolutely afford to do native Windows / MacOS / Linux cross platform. They're lazy/don't want to. That’s a straw man argument. The parent said that Linux development might not be worth the cost. They didn’t say anything about the ability to pay.
            • v_lisivka 9y ago
              So we, linux users, actively promoting alternatives for Skype, to increase cost of ignoring us. «Team, M$ killed Skype for linux, I cannot use it anymore, let switch to something else, like Slack.»
          • gbersac 9y ago
            They can do it but if it's not profitable, they won't. It's not being lazy, it's being smart in the capitalist sense.
            • karpodiem 9y ago
      • amedvednikov 9y ago
        I'm working on a native client for Slack, Skype, Twitter etc. It's only 90 KB (!) https://eul.im https://eul.im
        • blackoil 9y ago
          Is it 90kb installer or complete app? Also what are using to build the interface?
          • amedvednikov 9y ago
            It's the complete app. Cocoa on macos, WinAPI on Windows, GTK on Linux.
        • stephenr 9y ago
          Is this the one that uses OpenGL or something to render everything (ie nonnative text controls etc)?
          • amedvednikov 9y ago
            Not any more. Now it uses native controls.
            • stephenr 9y ago
              Oh nice, I need to check this out then!
        • mamcx 9y ago
          How you do this? Probably some of us could guess, but maybe will help people that only know electron :)
          • amedvednikov 9y ago
            Cocoa on macOS, WinAPI on Windows, GTK on Linux.
        • 9y ago
  • majewsky 9y ago
    In some alternate reality, reasonable resource usage is considered a feature. Meanwhile, in our universe, it's somehow considered reasonable to expend nearly six gigawatts (= 51 TWh per year) on a number-guessing game that will totally revolutionize global finance some day.
    • placebo 9y ago
      Resource usage in this reality will only become reasonable when there will be a noticeable penalty involved in unreasonable usage, but I guess it boils down to what you define as reasonable: If a noticeable penalty is measured by the end user then - sorry, enough users just don't care, which enables this technology to continue to gain popularity. If there was a law that companies need to pay a percentage of the energy their applications use then you'd quickly see everybody moving not only to native apps, but to the most efficient native apps. In the meantime, the invisible hand is doing it's thing. Time will tell what it's thing will look like.
      • pasabagi 9y ago
        I think a brief look at the wiki page for 'Anthropocene' tells us exactly what the invisible hand is up to.