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by mdip 3095 days ago
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.