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by Cyberdog 3090 days ago
I didn't say it in my above post, no, but I'll say it in this one: Electron is bad.

Specifically, it allows lazy dev teams to deploy lazy "apps."

1 comments

You don't know how good you have it. Try using Inkscape on a Mac.

Before Electron, the quality of the average cross-platform app was generally atrocious. e.g. lack of support for retina displays, menu bars attached to the window, system fonts totally missing, non-system file pickers, ugly homegrown font rendering...

Electron is amazing and as much as people like to shit on it, it has raised the quality bar considerably.

I'm feeling strange defending Electron, because I have crapped all over it in the past, too. There are certainly too many simple little apps written in electron that come with a 65MB download to do things I don't care about, but I'll second this.

The problem you have with "Inkscape on a Mac" is all over the place. I cringe when I go to install an app and find out it's used some C++ GUI kit that was designed for X/linix. They all "sort of" work on Windows -- the file dialogs will be all wrong, they'll have forward instead of back-slashes sometimes, none of my pinned folders will be there, etc. The windows in the app will sort-of feel like native Windows apps but will function just screwy enough that you long to be running KDE or Gnome[0]. Even if they look good in all of those OSes, they rarely provide the same experience. Then there's the handful of Electron apps I use. Keybase looks and behaves exactly the same way in KDE and Windows, as does Visual Studio Code and draw.io (though I almost always just use this right from the site, itself). And I'm very happy with the UI of those apps. Then I decide I want to tweak the way a ligature looks in a font I rely on and make the mistake of launching FontForge on my Windows box and remember why cross-platform generally means "take the worst of every platform and use only those features". Non-electron cross-platform apps all-too-often look like Java-based GUI apps from the early 00's -- write once, suffer everywhere.

[0] I've had apps that launch in a single pane within KDE/Gnome, but in Windows launch as several separate windows and apps that launch as normal looking windows in KDE/Gnome but in Windows look like a "Window within a Window" with all of the native Windows chrome outlining the application's window chrome, akin to placing a camera in front of a television and watching that camera's feed to watch a show/movie.