It's the memory bloat that stands out to me. Many modern laptops have 8GB of RAM. (Curiously this number hasn't really changed in the last 9 years.) 500MB of bl

It's the memory bloat that stands out to me. Many modern laptops have 8GB of RAM. (Curiously this number hasn't really changed in the last 9 years.) 500MB of bloat isn't a trivial fraction of that. Also, an application that runs constantly in the background, is under a greater obligation to make efficient use of system resources. > judging by all of the Electron apps failing in these departments, I guess you really do need native apps. I'd put that differently: solutions heavily based on web technologies seem to consistently fail to be anywhere near as efficient as solutions that use conventional toolkits. (Sometimes someone will suggest this isn't true if the web-based solution is well implemented, but they are never able to give an example of such an application.) On most platforms, Qt doesn't count as being truly native, but it's still far more efficient than Electron.