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Shame. I do my best to avoid the resource bloat of electron apps whenever possible.
I mean, when my own iron - dual 12-core 24-thread Xeon E5, 128Gb RAM - sees non-trivial impacts from just two or three Electron apps, I do my best to nip that in the bud by avoiding all that crap.
What’s so hard about building a traditional app? With DotNet you could build a single program for all three platforms, and you could bundle DotNet up into that app such that it doesn’t even need a separately-installed sandbox like Java does.
As a .net dev I agree this would be ideal, but I don’t do UI much these days so I don’t know what’s out there for frameworks right now.
I do know one thing that’s out there in spades tho, and that’s “full stack” JS devs. :P That’s probably what’s “so hard” about building a traditional app.
There aren’t any great cross platform UI frameworks for .net. There are a few out there, but they are not as robust as what you can do with stuffing a react app into electron.
From what I have seen, AvaloniaUI is getting really close to being the ideal framework for cross-platform desktop use. It has become very polished over the last two years.
MAUI on the other hand, has been falling flat on its face on desktop because it is geared much more towards mobile.
I’d agree that Avalonia has come a long way in a short time. It has a lot of potential, but there aren’t a lot of UI control libraries available yet.
I’m using it for a personal project and it’s very good for cross platform consistency. The trouble is that building a good looking UI is still difficult. Some of that is my lack of knowledge, but some is lack of available docs, examples, and community.
Here’s hoping they keep growing those things and become a viable alternative.
Plenty of companies started using electron for writing cross platform apps, these apps(electron) use JavaScript engine, which makes it easy to develop these apps but as a tradeoff it uses more system resources than your regular native apps. And when they all do it(discord, vscode, steam etc.) you ask, why the hell do I need these dedicated apps if all they do is just start up a browser? I can just open another tab in firefox or whatever and be done with it.
As others said, it’s basically chrome bundled with the website code so it looks like an app. And while Electron does offer devs the ability to do things a webapp can’t, it still brings the chrome browser engine along with all the inefficient ram usage and potential for security flaws that implies.
Electron is basically the “lazy” way of doing things, and not terribly different from progressive web apps. It’s basically a browser that looks like an app. And it’s more resource and battery intensive.
It is truly uneducated. While it’s true that the “UI” part is web you can interface with the OS level api so it’s not that different than a real software
Tauri uses the system’s native web rendering engine instead of shipping Chromium with the whole app. As a result you get much smaller app bundles (like 10 MB for a complex app), better startup times and less RAM usage. The downside is that you need to do slightly more testing but the end result is worth it.
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Ah, looks like an Electron app. Disappointing, but unsurprising.
And also ironic. Because they’re called Proton and they’re using Electron to make their app (it’s chemistry, ♀️🐶)
Opposites attract
Oh yeah
Shame. I do my best to avoid the resource bloat of electron apps whenever possible.
I mean, when my own iron - dual 12-core 24-thread Xeon E5, 128Gb RAM - sees non-trivial impacts from just two or three Electron apps, I do my best to nip that in the bud by avoiding all that crap.
What’s so hard about building a traditional app? With DotNet you could build a single program for all three platforms, and you could bundle DotNet up into that app such that it doesn’t even need a separately-installed sandbox like Java does.
As a .net dev I agree this would be ideal, but I don’t do UI much these days so I don’t know what’s out there for frameworks right now.
I do know one thing that’s out there in spades tho, and that’s “full stack” JS devs. :P That’s probably what’s “so hard” about building a traditional app.
There aren’t any great cross platform UI frameworks for .net. There are a few out there, but they are not as robust as what you can do with stuffing a react app into electron.
From what I have seen, AvaloniaUI is getting really close to being the ideal framework for cross-platform desktop use. It has become very polished over the last two years.
MAUI on the other hand, has been falling flat on its face on desktop because it is geared much more towards mobile.
I’d agree that Avalonia has come a long way in a short time. It has a lot of potential, but there aren’t a lot of UI control libraries available yet.
I’m using it for a personal project and it’s very good for cross platform consistency. The trouble is that building a good looking UI is still difficult. Some of that is my lack of knowledge, but some is lack of available docs, examples, and community.
Here’s hoping they keep growing those things and become a viable alternative.
For linux? Oh shit :(
Could you explain for a layman why this is disappointing?
Plenty of companies started using electron for writing cross platform apps, these apps(electron) use JavaScript engine, which makes it easy to develop these apps but as a tradeoff it uses more system resources than your regular native apps. And when they all do it(discord, vscode, steam etc.) you ask, why the hell do I need these dedicated apps if all they do is just start up a browser? I can just open another tab in firefox or whatever and be done with it.
As others said, it’s basically chrome bundled with the website code so it looks like an app. And while Electron does offer devs the ability to do things a webapp can’t, it still brings the chrome browser engine along with all the inefficient ram usage and potential for security flaws that implies.
It’s just the web version wrapped inside an app, not an actual, true, software application.
Electron is basically the “lazy” way of doing things, and not terribly different from progressive web apps. It’s basically a browser that looks like an app. And it’s more resource and battery intensive.
This is my uneducated understanding so…
It is truly uneducated. While it’s true that the “UI” part is web you can interface with the OS level api so it’s not that different than a real software
They could have at least used Tauri.
Not familiar with Tauri. Guess I’ll go google that, but what’s your reason for suggesting it as a preferable alternative?
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Tauri uses the system’s native web rendering engine instead of shipping Chromium with the whole app. As a result you get much smaller app bundles (like 10 MB for a complex app), better startup times and less RAM usage. The downside is that you need to do slightly more testing but the end result is worth it.
I agree, Electron is a nightmare to work with
@Heavybell It is fully Electron.
Good to know, thanks.