I welcome other’s input but I thought this was a pretty clear cut case of Mac becoming popular. Why write a program for Windows and Mac when you can just make a website. Then Chromebooks in education sealed the deal.
Linux is only starting mainstream use now because of Europe’s push for digital sovereignty and windows 10 end of life.
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.
that sounds like Tauri!
Linux and Mac use WebkitGTK, Windows uses Edge/Chromium, Android uses Chrome - as bundled in the respective OS, and you essentially have a frontend running on that webview communicating with a backend running locally via some special IPC protocol
No matter how fanboi-y a Linux or Apple user gets, they can never out fanboi a Microsoft fanboi. They take making shit up about competitors to a entirely new level.
Abstraction layers? In MY messy pile of spaghetti ass code!?
Most applications that are Electron either only support Windows or also want to support Android, iOS and Web. I assume there is some toolkit out there that supports everything, but honestly HTML5 is more well known and tested.
Someone obviously missed their nap and is having a tantrum.
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
Fairly large chunks of Windows code are examples of the latter, in fact.
You dont even have to look at the code to see this. Just make one wrong click in a UI and youre directly getting dragged into a UI that hasn’t changed since Windows XP.
But that’s always a good sign that you’ve dug into the part that actually still works consistently! Once you pop some Windows 2000 era UI you know you’ve struck gold and need to note the path for next time (until Microsoft rearranges their settings for the 5th time this year of course)
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.
Sure, except that end user market share for MacOS is larger than Linux probably
Depends, apple & linux are toe to toe in the research world.
is that where you find a lot of electron programs?
There are indeed lots of Mac users at CERN. But CERN is mostly concerned with particles other than electrons.
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?
Flatpak
AppImage
SnapHell, let’s not forget
Python Perl
Java
POSIXYou can even do inefficient UIs in Python using tkinter, which is part of the standard library in python.
Python tkinter interfaces might be inefficient, slow and require labyrinthine code to set-up and use, but they make up for it by being breathtakingly ugly.
Ugh, and they’re just weird. I can handle ugly but ktinker popups go across virtual desktops and over other windows for some ungodly reason, and never seem to dismiss themselves properly
And now imagine yourself creating an UI in tkinter without an editor. Because that’s what I did. It was absolutely horrible.
Probably faster than me even deciding the bg color tho
GTK is not accessible anywhere other than Linux and is therefore not a serious option outside of Linux.
I wonder why so many people bundle Electron when you can make your app run in any browser. Like, you can totally write a program that just launches the browser and makes it load a site from lokal storage
Electron (and Tauri, and Neutralino) also offers some deeper OS integration stuff that browsers don’t do or actively block; direct file management, USB peripheral control, that sort of thing.
But for something like Discord, you’re totally right. You just need the browser.
