I would simply say that the OP should reverse the question: "in which cases can an electron app suffice for a desktop application" and not presume the death of

I would simply say that the OP should reverse the question: "in which cases can an electron app suffice for a desktop application" and not presume the death of desktop apps. It's a very web-dev-centric view to imagine that this model is right for everything and will eat all software. There are clear performance and efficiency tradeoffs. If you KNOW the constituent bits of the software stack of an electron style app, you will be horrified at what you are doing in the name of being 'normal cool and popular'. It would be considered extremely bad engineering if you whiteboarded the actual layers and proposed it sans the singular justification of "there are lots of JS devs and this is considered easier than QT which requires a bunch of picky expensive C++ devs' More's the pity that the eventual use case is not first priority in such a decision making process. "Background communication channel that should be kept open while the users main productivity software is afforded the computers resources for actual work" that would suggest that Slack would be better written as a native or near-native app. Hello, McFly...