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by _odey 2042 days ago
No, I do want to learn things, but the choice is simple, you either:

1. Learn Electron and implement an app, publish to all platforms.

2. Choose your target OS, learn the native toolkit, implement the app, switch to other OS, implement again, rinse and repeat for all, and in the case of linux you have to deal with multiple toolkits and you have to know the quirks around Wayland support (with electron you don't necessarily as chromium handles most of that).

One of them simply takes way more time and effort than the other.
2 comments
stefan_ 2042 days ago
You keep mentioning Wayland as if it is the magic keyword that will strike fear into the heart of native app developers. That's just not a thing, it won't matter at all for your app.

The irony is that if you write a desktop app at one point, you will soon learn about all the things that Chromium doesn't do for you. Want to run some kind of privileged operation (since disk benchmarks came up)? Tough luck, there is no special pass for you on macOS just cause it's Chromium. And with the app sandbox, there are now lots of things that are privileged. This story repeats ten times for every OS you want to support, regardless of using CSS for your UI chrome.

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_odey 2042 days ago
I mention it because that's basically what I keep reading related to it, the fact that it's incompletely implemented right now and some apps that used to work with X no longer do. Isn't it natural to consider it a potential risk for app development as well?

For the OS specific stuff that chromium doesen't handle, that's fair, hopefully I'll have to deal with as little of that as possible.

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cjaybo 2042 days ago
This is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of cross-platform toolkits that are far leaner than electron.
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_odey 2042 days ago
Can you please give me a list of examples I can evaluate myslef and decide if it's worth spending my time learning instead of going the Electron route?
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thesuperbigfrog 2042 days ago
Not the previous poster, but here is a list of cross-platform GUI libraries / toolkits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_G...

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GirkovArpa 2041 days ago
Sciter is missing from that list for some reason.
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