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I've come to see the rise of Electron not as a shortcoming of other UI tech, not a problem with Electron. OSX, Windows and Linux failed to have any viable cross

by _pmf_ 9y ago

I've come to see the rise of Electron not as a shortcoming of other UI tech, not a problem with Electron. OSX, Windows and Linux failed to have any viable cross-platform UI solution[0]; Electron is what we deserve for this failure. [0] I would be very happy with Qt/QML and would grudgingly accept GTK, but others apparently are not that complacent

interfixus 9y ago
We've had perfectly viably cross platform GUI-applications for decades. Lots of them. Done one way or another, or a third. I'm sorry, I fail to see the problem that abominations like Electron are trying to solve.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Effectively it is VB for the web age...
  - interfixus 9y ago
    Exactly. And nothing new in my being contrarian. Back in my Windows days, back in the nineties, I had an iron rule that no vbrun.dll ever entered my machines. Mainly because they invariably turned out to be badly designed, poorly implemented, and just not worth the trouble. These days, I do* have a couple of Electron-things installed, because I occasionally need them, but they are ugly hacks which bring me no joy. No JRE either, by the way, if I can help it. Same reasoning.
- tracker1 9y ago
  Could you demonstrate an alternative that allows for UI as complex, with fewer cross platform issues that can easily target usage on MacOS, Windows and Linux? Let alone leveraging the language and UI interface/api that are the most widely developed against.
  - interfixus 9y ago
    We used to get along just fine on things like Qt, Gtk (perhaps via Wx), or indeed Tk - in some ways still my favorite after all these years. But then 'easily' wasn't necessarily the gold standard of everything. The electronisms I occasionally have to use are glorified chat-apps like Signal. Hardly complex UI cases.
    - tracker1 9y ago
      By comparison, I wouldn't consider VS Code a "simple" UI. And replicating it with Qt, GTX or anything else would be a significant endeavor for even one platform, let alone three very different platforms. They all have serious flaws. As a user, I'd rather have something useful now, than wait a couple years hoping to maybe see a linux or mac release of a program.
      - interfixus 9y ago
        To each his own, of course, and if VS Code does it for you, well then - excellent. I personally find it a bloated mess, and like to stick with my Komodo and my Geany - two neat examples of portable UIs done right. Anyway, I'm sure there are ways of embedding runtime web macinery in somewhat less than 100Mb. Twenty years ago I did so in a megabyte or two, admittedly without the js.

by _pmf_ 9y ago

interfixus 9y ago

We've had perfectly viably cross platform GUI-applications for decades. Lots of them. Done one way or another, or a third. I'm sorry, I fail to see the problem that abominations like Electron are trying to solve.

digi_owl 9y ago
Effectively it is VB for the web age...
- interfixus 9y ago
  Exactly. And nothing new in my being contrarian. Back in my Windows days, back in the nineties, I had an iron rule that no vbrun.dll ever entered my machines. Mainly because they invariably turned out to be badly designed, poorly implemented, and just not worth the trouble. These days, I do* have a couple of Electron-things installed, because I occasionally need them, but they are ugly hacks which bring me no joy. No JRE either, by the way, if I can help it. Same reasoning.
tracker1 9y ago
Could you demonstrate an alternative that allows for UI as complex, with fewer cross platform issues that can easily target usage on MacOS, Windows and Linux? Let alone leveraging the language and UI interface/api that are the most widely developed against.
- interfixus 9y ago
  We used to get along just fine on things like Qt, Gtk (perhaps via Wx), or indeed Tk - in some ways still my favorite after all these years. But then 'easily' wasn't necessarily the gold standard of everything. The electronisms I occasionally have to use are glorified chat-apps like Signal. Hardly complex UI cases.
  - tracker1 9y ago
    By comparison, I wouldn't consider VS Code a "simple" UI. And replicating it with Qt, GTX or anything else would be a significant endeavor for even one platform, let alone three very different platforms. They all have serious flaws. As a user, I'd rather have something useful now, than wait a couple years hoping to maybe see a linux or mac release of a program.
    - interfixus 9y ago
      To each his own, of course, and if VS Code does it for you, well then - excellent. I personally find it a bloated mess, and like to stick with my Komodo and my Geany - two neat examples of portable UIs done right. Anyway, I'm sure there are ways of embedding runtime web macinery in somewhat less than 100Mb. Twenty years ago I did so in a megabyte or two, admittedly without the js.