For anyone considering Electron: take a look at Tauri. It’s another way to build cross-platform apps with web tech. It will use the OS‘s web rendering engine instead of shipping Chromium which results in much smaller binaries and faster startup times and less RAM usage. You can also write native code in Rust. It’s like Electron but good.
Bad for Linux at the moment…
That being said, it won’t improve just by saying it’s bad for Linux, if you work as a maintainer in a distro, or know a lot about Linux and rust to help their development then please reach out!!!
The sooner tauri is usable everywhere the more people will prefer it
I didn’t try out a Tauri app on linux yet, I just know that it’s generally supported. What doesn’t work (well) as of now?
What about Flutter? It was pretty nice to work with
The reason people use Electron in the first place is that they wanna share a codebase between web, desktop and possibly mobile.
While Flutter can technically do that, the web apps it outputs are atrocious with poor usability and accessibility. It’s drawing the whole UI on a canvas element which causes all kinds of issues.
they wanna share a codebase between web, desktop and possibly mobile.
That way you get an app that’s crap on every platform.
what’s are the alternatives? I want ease of writing UIs js/CSS/HTML gives, especially with frameworks like svelte.
Getting good is an alternative, coding will always be a trade between ease and quality. Super high level languages are super easy and accessible but the tradeoff is you have no idea what is actually happening on the backend nor much control of it and it requires bloated web engines to manage and run.
Real coders program in assembly.
I think VSCode is the only stable electron application and even then it took them like 5 years to reach passable stability lol.
Used to crash and combust all the time when I first tried it.
Etcher seems stable! But it’s also a well over 100 MB download for a disk image writer. Rufus does more in less than 1% of the download size and also has a GUI.
Zed is native and it has way better performance! You can tell it’s not Electron!
