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?
The 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.
It’s so portable! With maximal efforts we support both windows 7, windows 8.1 (but not 8.0), windiws 10 and soon Windows 11 !!!
/s
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 first 3 are Linux only. It’s irrelevant.
Also each is pretty bad in terms of usability and practicality, either losing integration because “containerized” or taking GBs of space or both
AppImages can get quite large because each app is self-contained, but the “losing integration” part is nonsense these days for any of these formars. That’s why we have portals, and if those aren’t enough you can still give the app full permissions.
GTK is not accessible anywhere other than Linux and is therefore not a serious option outside of Linux.
GTK is available for windows. https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/windows
Wow, that’s some serious misinformation.
Thank Tod this guy got disliked to hell.
Sure, except that end user market share for MacOS is larger than Linux probably
Depends, apple & linux are toe to toe in the research world.
I’m glad I’m not this guy
Why did you cut out the author’s name? :)
It is a generic one at a forum. The screenshot is from the comment section of Windows Latest site.
Back in the day on Reddit, some subs had a rule where names had to be blurred or removed. Since then, it is reflex for me to just cut out the author’s name (not that it mattered in this specific case).
More wishful thinking of this person than fact. The more to SPA and all the focus on javascript frameworks is more likely to be related to this shift than linux. But I get it, the writer knows that the ground is shifting and is trying to connect things that they and other people dislike into one big bad.
Welp, that’s an opinion one can have. whatyoujustsaid.gif
I still have a Google pixel book that basically is just online only.
Fascinating. Please carry on.
The problem is that mobile versions of the app is expected, and maybe also a web version. And then it should work on Mac as well. Linux is just a tiny fraction of the market share.
Each platform would require their own team if developed natively. That’s a huge headache to coordinate all features between the teams. Let’s build just one cross platform application which one team can be in charge over.
