Electron is the only cross platform gui toolkit…
If you ignore QT, GTK and everything else.
I’m so glad that Microsoft makes an awesome cross platfor— wait, no, but they contribute code to— hmmm … Hey, what does Microsoft do to make apps more portable again?
one of the funniest (and sadly accurate) things i’ve heard said about linux backwards-compatibility is that its most stable API is Win32. you can run really old windows software on wine because they support stuff even windows doesn’t anymore.
of course this is because the expectation is that you can just recompile old software to work on new systems, which is not really a thing on window.s
The real reasons often are:
- They want be able to hire much cheaper webdevs instead of software devs.
- Electron has a lot of built-in data collecting metrics, which they urgently need for creating a real-life KITT.
- Easy live embedding of content. Sure you can add your own solution, in fact I created ETML as a solution for this problem for my engine, all without any support for nasty scripting languages or convoluted stylesheets (style-inheritance in CSS turned me off from webdev even more than JS did). At best, it can be used for things like embedding videos on Discord, because no one else thought some universal approach, let alone one that disallows proprietary players. At worst, it’s being used for ads.
Also a lot of Windows-only apps are Electron apps, only because the manufacturer wants to go “fuck you”, even putting protections into the code just in case you wanted to run it on Linux.
EDIT: Forgot the “live embeds” reason.
Every operating system contributed to the bloat. Windows has Win32, OS X has Carbon / Cocoa, Linux has X11 and various widget libs that sit on top of it. So it has been a perennial nut to crack to make cross platform widgets - wxWidgets, QT, SWT/JWT/Swing on Java, XMLShell (Firefox), Electron, GTK/GTK#, winelib etc.
Throw mobile platforms into the mix and it’s an unholy mess. Lowest common denominator is HTML and so the likes of Electron “wins” even though it’s bloated and slow.
i actually don’t have a problem with HTML, i just think that instead of every app shipping their own copy of electron, the operating system should provide basic browser functionality.
the operating system should provide basic browser functionalit
Microsoft got literally sued and almost dissolved as a company for that
But that’s cause it wasn’t FOSS, but instead a privately owned closed-source app
If an open standard was set, and agreed upon by most, then nobody would sue anyone
Heck, many Linux distros come with a browser preinstalled, but use a FOSS one to not hit that legal problem
And what did we get for it? If you search “chrome install” in Edge it pulls a Janet, all like
Show me how you never programmed anything without telling me
Software should be maintained, not built and forgotten about. Windows encourages the latter, which is just straight up bad practice
Wow, that’s some serious misinformation.
What kind of shit for brains asshole is still defending Windows in 2025?
Thats… Thats like a flat earther in computer stuff.
Do those really exist??
Meanwhile Microsoft makes the start menu with React
I try not to let considerations get in the way of doing great work.
That is the most punchable response I’ve seen in a while.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
“… And that is how I used React as a database language.”
~me presenting at a conference in 2026
This is such a hilariously bad take. I like how “I can’t use Win32 on Linux” morphed into “re-write the whole app in Javascript just so I can use Electron.”
Meanwhile, Wine and QT are like: “am I a joke to you?”
I’ll add that (IMO) a lot of applications are becoming increasingly malicious, although less-so in the desktop space. I’m happy that devs like this are forced to quasi-sandbox their crap into a browser. Actually, if anyone knows how to crack into an Electron app in order to restore local plugins, user-scripts, and sandbox security controls, let me know. Or just liberate the guts into a local web app instead so I can use a real browser? This trend could be very useful for local security if those features become available.
I can code in C on all 3 (more if you include BSDs). You would not believe how amazing my skills are to avoid platform specific dependencies in a language that predates all these OS.
