[ari__]

Hacker News is probably not the best place to ask this question, as it's very much "JS bad" as a service. Take any advice received here with a grain of salt. With that out of the way - the only correct choice is the one you're more productive in. If you find that QT fits your workflow better, go with that. If you're more familiar with web technology and want to work within your comfort zone, use Electron (or Tauri or Neutralino or NWJS or...you get the point).

QT has much less overhead to it, but it's not exceptionally difficult to create an optimized Electron app that people will enjoy using. Discord and (in my opinion) Visual Studio Code are good examples of well-optimized Electron apps.

All else held equal, I would personally choose Electron (or rather Tauri) if just by virtue of "you are forced to separate the display tier from the business logic."

[jokethrowaway]

Just because you don't feel the weight of electron apps, it doesn't mean it's not there.

You just have a powerful computer.

I switched from Slack / Discord to Ripcord and, even though the UI is not great, it's much cheaper to run. It's using 80mb of RAM with multiple slack organisations open and multiple discord servers.

Pritunl written in Electron is using more than 100mb or RAM, just to let me provide 2 factor auth and connect to my VPN.

I've been toying with the idea of writing a native app for Pritunl, but I don't work for Pritunl and I have 32GB of RAM. I'd love to rewrite Visual Studio in Qt, but I don't work for Microsoft.

The funniest thing is that the developer experience on Qt is years ahead frontend development in the browser and it's been like this for more than 10 years. You have a mature widget system and you even have native looking widgets.

I can see the appeal of Electron; if all you know is web development, you don't want to take the additional complexity of learning a new framework. Personally, I would definitely use Qt.

[ari__]

> Just because you don't feel the weight of electron apps, it doesn't mean it's not there. You just have a powerful computer.

I definitely don't intend to imply that Electron apps aren't inherently heavier - they are, hence the second paragraph of my initial comment.

> I switched from Slack / Discord to Ripcord and, even though the UI is not great, it's much cheaper to run. It's using 80mb of RAM with multiple slack organisations open and multiple discord servers.

I actually switched to Ripcord for Slack myself! I find it doesn't provide a comparable experience to the first party Discord app, but it beats Slack all day every day. Slack is an excellent example of a poorly made and unoptimized Electron application, in my opinion.