I'm quite skeptical that this is a problem with Electron. I use nw.js which is similar to Electron for a UI that also allows dragging shapes and text around. I

I'm quite skeptical that this is a problem with Electron. I use nw.js which is similar to Electron for a UI that also allows dragging shapes and text around. It's SVG-based and it's stupid inefficient-- for every mousemove event I'm sending coords over the socket to a backend and receiving back a message that triggers a callback to do the actual property/attribute updates to the respective DOM elements. In other words, I'm using the browser's slowest graphics API in such a way that any layout changes are guaranteed to trigger the least performant graphics updates. Still it performs just fine on a Lenovo from 2006. What you are probably seeing is that the Electron GUI toolkit allows devs to throw together a GUI so quickly that they can ship a product in the time it takes to read the documentation of other GUI toolkits. You may thus be comparing a class of cross-platform applications in Electron which simply don't/can't exist in other GUI toolkits given the same amount of effort.