5 ms·

> They could have done better. They chose the path of least resistance, putting in the least amount of effort, spending the least amount of resources into accom

> They could have done better. They chose the path of least resistance, putting in the least amount of effort, spending the least amount of resources into accomplishing a task You might as well tell reality to do better: The reality of physics (water flows downhill, electricity moves through the best conductor, systems settle where the least energy is required) and the reality of business (companies naturally move toward solutions that cost less time, less money, and less effort) I personally think that some battles require playing within the rules of the game. Not to wish for new rules. Make something that requires less effort and resources than Electron but is good enough, and people will be more likely to use it.

observationist 7mo ago
Shaming the use of electron? I'll do that every day and twice on sunday. Same with nonsense websites that waste gigabytes on bloat, spam users with ads, and feed the adtech beast. And I'll lay credit for this monument to enshittification we call the internet at the feet of Google and Facebook and Microsoft. Using electron and doing things shittily is a choice. If you're ever presented with a choice between doing something well and not, do the best you can. Electron is never the best choice. It's not even the easiest, most efficient choice. It's the lazy, zero effort, default, ad-hoc choice picked by someone who really should know better but couldn't be bothered to even try.
- llbbdd 7mo ago
  What alternative did you have in mind when you said there are even easier ways of getting high-performance cross-platform software built?
  - dmix 7mo ago
    I might hate Qt apps more than I hate Electron so I'm curious about the answer too.
    - prizzom 7mo ago
      As a recent toe-dipper into linux (now running Arch on a powerful minipc and KDE plasma) I'm shocked at how little progress has been made on the native UI side.
      - KETHERCORTEX 7mo ago
        Well, it's not that surprising, considering that as soon as something radically new appears, there is always some mistreatment from all sides: platform owners, app developers and users. Windows' Metro/Modern UI was pretty good from different perspectives, but didn't have enough effort put into it to make it a universal thing fit for multiple purposes (half of the Windows settings was still in Control Panel for quite some time), wasn't familiar for users (so they hated it) and wasn't familiar for developers (so they created hideous apps). In the opposing Linux camp, GNOME made Gtk 4 with Libadwaita UI library with "everything is a phone app" mindset that not every app can adopt. For example, there's no application menu (a line with File, View, Edit, etc.) component shipped by default, you should make it yourself or get it somewhere. So now GIMP is developed using Gtk 3 (not modern 4) because it has all the components GIMP needs. Trying to get GNOME developers to implement some stuff outside of their vision is a futile effort.
    - wolvesechoes 7mo ago
      Whats is wrong with Qt apps? Take too little RAM?
      - llbbdd 7mo ago
        As far as I can tell after a quick Google, you can't share your Qt UI with the browser version of your app. Considering that "lite" browser-based versions of apps are a very common funnel to a more featureful desktop version, it makes sense to just use the UI tools that already work and provide a common experience everywhere. The same search incidentally turned up that Qt requires a paid license for commercial projects, which is surprising to me and obviously makes it an even less attractive choice than Electron. Being less useful and costing more isn't a great combo.
  - ivan_gammel 7mo ago
    It might be a strange thing to say, but Java is still viable alternative route. You can build a nice and fast cross-platform desktop application on it today. The language was designed for this kind of things. The entry barrier is quite high though.
  - observationist 7mo ago
    The power move would have been Cosmopolitan, or a package similar to it. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan Cosmopolitan can be used to bundle up any gui package, and your code, and a team of professional software devs should be able to cope with it just fine. You end up with a native executable with a slightly bigger package to ship, since it's carrying executables for various platforms, but you'd effectively have the same code and behavior everywhere. A few extra megabytes, instead of whatever the hell electron is doing. They could also use Java, or even one of the electron type clones that attempt to be better, like Tauri. The point isn't that electron is so awful. It's that the company with the purportedly best coding AI and one of the best overall AI models in the world chose to do the absolute tawdriest, cheapest, even laziest thing without any consideration of what the right thing to do might be, or what thing they could do that demonstrated their excellence and mastery of craft, or at a bare minimum, the advanced capabilities of the AI. Cursor used claude to build a browser from scratch; it's not like their AI couldn't do it.
    - salad-tycoon 7mo ago
      I don’t code, so I’m well out of my league but this point of “premier coding AI company should showcase its capabilities by using their own model to build superior software” rings true to me, right? Especially as we start to discuss AI as more dangerous than nuclear weapons yet it can’t even do that? Who’s got the rebuttal to this?
- blackqueeriroh 7mo ago
  Please do continue to waste energy on doing something that will do nothing but allow you to feel superior about yourself. In fact, you will probably waste more energy than Electron ever has.

observationist 7mo ago

Shaming the use of electron? I'll do that every day and twice on sunday. Same with nonsense websites that waste gigabytes on bloat, spam users with ads, and feed the adtech beast. And I'll lay credit for this monument to enshittification we call the internet at the feet of Google and Facebook and Microsoft. Using electron and doing things shittily is a choice. If you're ever presented with a choice between doing something well and not, do the best you can. Electron is never the best choice. It's not even the easiest, most efficient choice. It's the lazy, zero effort, default, ad-hoc choice picked by someone who really should know better but couldn't be bothered to even try.

llbbdd 7mo ago
What alternative did you have in mind when you said there are even easier ways of getting high-performance cross-platform software built?
- dmix 7mo ago
  I might hate Qt apps more than I hate Electron so I'm curious about the answer too.
  - prizzom 7mo ago
    As a recent toe-dipper into linux (now running Arch on a powerful minipc and KDE plasma) I'm shocked at how little progress has been made on the native UI side.
    - KETHERCORTEX 7mo ago
      Well, it's not that surprising, considering that as soon as something radically new appears, there is always some mistreatment from all sides: platform owners, app developers and users. Windows' Metro/Modern UI was pretty good from different perspectives, but didn't have enough effort put into it to make it a universal thing fit for multiple purposes (half of the Windows settings was still in Control Panel for quite some time), wasn't familiar for users (so they hated it) and wasn't familiar for developers (so they created hideous apps). In the opposing Linux camp, GNOME made Gtk 4 with Libadwaita UI library with "everything is a phone app" mindset that not every app can adopt. For example, there's no application menu (a line with File, View, Edit, etc.) component shipped by default, you should make it yourself or get it somewhere. So now GIMP is developed using Gtk 3 (not modern 4) because it has all the components GIMP needs. Trying to get GNOME developers to implement some stuff outside of their vision is a futile effort.
  - wolvesechoes 7mo ago
    Whats is wrong with Qt apps? Take too little RAM?
    - llbbdd 7mo ago
      As far as I can tell after a quick Google, you can't share your Qt UI with the browser version of your app. Considering that "lite" browser-based versions of apps are a very common funnel to a more featureful desktop version, it makes sense to just use the UI tools that already work and provide a common experience everywhere. The same search incidentally turned up that Qt requires a paid license for commercial projects, which is surprising to me and obviously makes it an even less attractive choice than Electron. Being less useful and costing more isn't a great combo.
- ivan_gammel 7mo ago
  It might be a strange thing to say, but Java is still viable alternative route. You can build a nice and fast cross-platform desktop application on it today. The language was designed for this kind of things. The entry barrier is quite high though.
- observationist 7mo ago
  The power move would have been Cosmopolitan, or a package similar to it. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan Cosmopolitan can be used to bundle up any gui package, and your code, and a team of professional software devs should be able to cope with it just fine. You end up with a native executable with a slightly bigger package to ship, since it's carrying executables for various platforms, but you'd effectively have the same code and behavior everywhere. A few extra megabytes, instead of whatever the hell electron is doing. They could also use Java, or even one of the electron type clones that attempt to be better, like Tauri. The point isn't that electron is so awful. It's that the company with the purportedly best coding AI and one of the best overall AI models in the world chose to do the absolute tawdriest, cheapest, even laziest thing without any consideration of what the right thing to do might be, or what thing they could do that demonstrated their excellence and mastery of craft, or at a bare minimum, the advanced capabilities of the AI. Cursor used claude to build a browser from scratch; it's not like their AI couldn't do it.
  - salad-tycoon 7mo ago
    I don’t code, so I’m well out of my league but this point of “premier coding AI company should showcase its capabilities by using their own model to build superior software” rings true to me, right? Especially as we start to discuss AI as more dangerous than nuclear weapons yet it can’t even do that? Who’s got the rebuttal to this?
blackqueeriroh 7mo ago
Please do continue to waste energy on doing something that will do nothing but allow you to feel superior about yourself. In fact, you will probably waste more energy than Electron ever has.