[mattgreenrocks]

> HN has strong opinions against Electron

Beware the bias of the loud minority. For every 1 noisy user, there may be 50 quiet users who are fine with the decision to use Electron.

Shipping beats not shipping every time, and if Electron is what you need, then do it. I say this as someone who does not like Electron, but also as someone who knows that writing comments on HN is 100x easier than actually shipping production software.

[Gentil]

I usually agree with this sentiment of shipping vs not shipping. But Electron is just really bloated. You cannot install 10 apps and regularly use it. Most systems will just hang or crawl. Systems with 8GB should not be hanging because you are using 10 apps.

I have 16GB RAM and even then I feel the hog with Discord, Slack, VS Code, A note app taking up too much memory. Then there is unnecessary security risk of bringing all the browser issues along with it.

People shouldn't have to buy an expensive Mac books to use normal apps. That should be for MLOPS or other processing heavy tasks.

Also, an Electron app uses anywhere around 150+MB to 400ishMB ram on normal cases. For one app.An app like QOwnNotes uses only a small portion of it. 50MB-100MB max. So when you you add just 10 electron apps, the number just blows up.

I feel like whatever progress with performance we are making with processor is just cancelled out with things like Electron. That is just sad.

So no. I don't think this is a good example of loud minority scenario.

[mattgreenrocks]

It is sad.

But I'd rather people ship something and refine the Electron version than never ship anything at all. Mostly because I believe more in indie devs than I do in the purity of software.

[Gentil]

I would at least recommend trying tauri.studio out instead of Electron. :)

[mwcampbell]

As an indie dev who has been working on an Electron application, thanks. Reading comments on message boards like this one, it's easy to pick up the attitude that it would be better to have less software than more crap. And I think that internalizing that attitude hurt my productivity on this current Electron-based project. But once I was able to push through that and get the app out to actual users, I see growing enthusiasm among the target user base, and as far as I know, zero complaints from actual or even potential users about the fact that the app uses Electron. Sure, maybe those complaints will come once the product gets past the early adopter phase, but the reception so far has been encouraging.

[truffdog]

The secret is to have your employer buy you a brand new top spec MacBook Pro every two years, then it's fast enough and doesn't bother you. That's also what all the Electron devs are doing.

[dspillett]

> HN has strong opinions against Electron

Beware the bias of the loud minority.

Hear hear.

Though depending on the application(s) in question, if JS and things that traspile to it are attractive to the developer then they could also consider an offline-first/-only web app. Not practical for everything and adds its own family of potential complications, but worth considering.

> but also as someone who knows that writing comments on HN is 100x easier than actually shipping

As someone who has a huge pile of projects just waiting to be started (and one or two languishing in a PoC state) I think your 100x factor is more than a little too small!

[thrwawy74]

Part of me wonders why someone hasn't tackled creating an Electron runtime service, so that each installed app doesn't load what could be a shared library into memory. There's a host of complicated problems there, but if the major issue is fat runtimes it can be pared down like Chrome workers.

[aldonius]

So... the system WebView library?

[OvermindDL1]

Which is what Tauri uses.

[garblegarble]

I hate to say it, but I agree - I dislike the number of Electron apps I have to use, however...

I spent a few hours last night on a personal project trying to get something relatively simple working as a SwiftUI macOS app. I needed to customise a bunch of components to get it close to what I wanted.

I decided to give Electron a go, and had what I wanted up and running quite literally in 5 minutes, and it starts and is responsive within 500ms. It's taken longer to figure out how to ship it as a .app package than to write the code. That's nothing short of amazing.

[lvass]

Does the "native GUI" requirement not exclude Electron, though?

[bool3max]

The "minority" may be loud but their comments are usually heavily upvoted.