Okay, how does this dude explain native Linux apps?
Probably “Native Linux apps are made in Linux-only bullshit by useless neckbeards, and probably only run in the terminal. Real actual apps like Discord made by a for-profit corporation have to be made cross-platform.”
Thank God this guy got disliked to hell.
5 downvotes are absolutely nothing compared to that level of idiocy.
Most applications that are Electron either only support Windows or also want to support Android, iOS and Web. I assume there is some toolkit out there that supports everything, but honestly HTML5 is more well known and tested.
What kind of shit for brains asshole is still defending Windows in 2025?
And what kind of slavering mouth-breathing teoglodyte doesn’t understand that Hannah Montana Linux negates all of these issues, will suck your dixk without hesitation, and lets you read news from four days from now.
Abstraction layers? In MY messy pile of spaghetti ass code!?
Someone obviously missed their nap and is having a tantrum.
Aren’t Qt and GTK cross platform? I have Dolphin and Kate running on my Windows work laptop.
Yeah, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There is a shitload of frontend developers that specialize in web standards and technologies. Electron was developed to take advantage of that deep pool of frontend developers. The side affect, is that other OSes can just support electron and they get the developers and the applications for free. Which has been a major boon for Linux users and those looking to escape Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy. Today might be different, but in the past, nobody was intending to support Linux by creating electron apps. If they cared so much or it was so important, they would have been using Qt and GTK prior to Electron.
I welcome other’s input but I thought this was a pretty clear cut case of Mac becoming popular. Why write a program for Windows and Mac when you can just make a website. Then Chromebooks in education sealed the deal.
Linux is only starting mainstream use now because of Europe’s push for digital sovereignty and windows 10 end of life.
No matter how fanboi-y a Linux or Apple user gets, they can never out fanboi a Microsoft fanboi. They take making shit up about competitors to a entirely new level.
Electron is the only cross platform gui toolkit…
If you ignore QT, GTK and everything else.
I’m so glad that Microsoft makes an awesome cross platfor— wait, no, but they contribute code to— hmmm … Hey, what does Microsoft do to make apps more portable again?
one of the funniest (and sadly accurate) things i’ve heard said about linux backwards-compatibility is that its most stable API is Win32. you can run really old windows software on wine because they support stuff even windows doesn’t anymore.
of course this is because the expectation is that you can just recompile old software to work on new systems, which is not really a thing on window.s
Flatpak
AppImage
SnapHell, let’s not forget
Python Perl
Java
POSIXThe real reasons often are:
- They want be able to hire much cheaper webdevs instead of software devs.
- Electron has a lot of built-in data collecting metrics, which they urgently need for creating a real-life KITT.
- Easy live embedding of content. Sure you can add your own solution, in fact I created ETML as a solution for this problem for my engine, all without any support for nasty scripting languages or convoluted stylesheets (style-inheritance in CSS turned me off from webdev even more than JS did). At best, it can be used for things like embedding videos on Discord, because no one else thought some universal approach, let alone one that disallows proprietary players. At worst, it’s being used for ads.
Also a lot of Windows-only apps are Electron apps, only because the manufacturer wants to go “fuck you”, even putting protections into the code just in case you wanted to run it on Linux.
EDIT: Forgot the “live embeds” reason.
Another reason is when developing the Web version first. Draw.io is a good example, where we get a bonus desktop(electron) version “for free” though the product was developed as a web app.
You can even do inefficient UIs in Python using tkinter, which is part of the standard library in python.
Python tkinter interfaces might be inefficient, slow and require labyrinthine code to set-up and use, but they make up for it by being breathtakingly ugly.
Ugh, and they’re just weird. I can handle ugly but ktinker popups go across virtual desktops and over other windows for some ungodly reason, and never seem to dismiss themselves properly
And now imagine yourself creating an UI in tkinter without an editor. Because that’s what I did. It was absolutely horrible.
Probably faster than me even deciding the bg color tho
GTK is not accessible anywhere other than Linux and is therefore not a serious option outside of Linux.
This is not even mental gymnastics at that point.
Mental… contortionist?
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The user land API/ABI is stable to a fault in Linux. The kernel API/ABI is unstable.
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Companies are cheap. They hired web devs then tasked them with building a desktop application rather then hiring people to write native apps. They had a hammer and used it to fix every problem they had.
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macOS is just as affected by electron apps as a Linux is.
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Electron is horrible, but it does bring apps to many an OS once Chromium is ported.
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Open protocols or open APIs from the company would fix the non-native app problem.
The user land API/ABI is stable to a fault in Linux. The kernel API/ABI is unstable
It’s the other way around. The kernel API stable to a fault, the kernel ABI isn’t. If your application only relies on the kernel API you won’t have many compatibility issues. If you rely on userland stuff such as C++ stdlib, GTK, QT, Python, … Good luck.
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I’m pretty sure you guys just took the bait. This is either satire or ragebait.
I don’t man, Hanlon’s razor feels appropriate here.
The whole reasoning and especially MacOS exclusion are so contrived that it just has to be.
Every operating system contributed to the bloat. Windows has Win32, OS X has Carbon / Cocoa, Linux has X11 and various widget libs that sit on top of it. So it has been a perennial nut to crack to make cross platform widgets - wxWidgets, QT, SWT/JWT/Swing on Java, XMLShell (Firefox), Electron, GTK/GTK#, winelib etc.
Throw mobile platforms into the mix and it’s an unholy mess. Lowest common denominator is HTML and so the likes of Electron “wins” even though it’s bloated and slow.
i actually don’t have a problem with HTML, i just think that instead of every app shipping their own copy of electron, the operating system should provide basic browser functionality.
that sounds like Tauri!
Linux and Mac use WebkitGTK, Windows uses Edge/Chromium, Android uses Chrome - as bundled in the respective OS, and you essentially have a frontend running on that webview communicating with a backend running locally via some special IPC protocol
Show me how you never programmed anything without telling me
Software should be maintained, not built and forgotten about. Windows encourages the latter, which is just straight up bad practice
Fairly large chunks of Windows code are examples of the latter, in fact.
You dont even have to look at the code to see this. Just make one wrong click in a UI and youre directly getting dragged into a UI that hasn’t changed since Windows XP.
But that’s always a good sign that you’ve dug into the part that actually still works consistently! Once you pop some Windows 2000 era UI you know you’ve struck gold and need to note the path for next time (until Microsoft rearranges their settings for the 5th time this year of course)
