For anyone considering Electron: take a look at Tauri. It’s another way to build cross-platform apps with web tech. It will use the OS‘s web rendering engine instead of shipping Chromium which results in much smaller binaries and faster startup times and less RAM usage. You can also write native code in Rust. It’s like Electron but good.
Bad for Linux at the moment…
That being said, it won’t improve just by saying it’s bad for Linux, if you work as a maintainer in a distro, or know a lot about Linux and rust to help their development then please reach out!!!
The sooner tauri is usable everywhere the more people will prefer it
I didn’t try out a Tauri app on linux yet, I just know that it’s generally supported. What doesn’t work (well) as of now?
First I’ve heard of this. What’s wrong on Linux?
Outdated theming and
several widgets(?)that aren’t implementedgeneral instability such as random crashes, code not behaving similarly to Mac or Windows, slowdowns, missing packages in builds, a lot of window resizing issues and uh, fuck load of appimage issues
Works fine for me on endeavourOS (Hyprland and i3).
What makes it bad for Linux?
There’s actually a pretty cool music player project I’m keeping an eye on called Audioling that’s built on Tauri. I currently use one called Feishin which is pretty good.
Yep, using Feishin as well. Audioling is a rewrite from the same dev.
That does seem like a good improvement.
What about Flutter? It was pretty nice to work with
The reason people use Electron in the first place is that they wanna share a codebase between web, desktop and possibly mobile.
While Flutter can technically do that, the web apps it outputs are atrocious with poor usability and accessibility. It’s drawing the whole UI on a canvas element which causes all kinds of issues.
they wanna share a codebase between web, desktop and possibly mobile.
That way you get an app that’s crap on every platform.
Make sense, tnx
Electron apps are a crime against computing.
A crime commited by techbros of the early 2010’s, who envisioned an end to desktop applications, and them being replaced by websites.
To be fair making native aplications was( maybe even still is , the last time i touched anything non abap related was in uni )very unnesecarily complex thing back then especialy compared to the simplicity of web frontend .
Electron and unreal have been disasters for their industries
Bruh i rant against both weekley
Everything runs like shit now. My old xp retro gaming pc feels snappier than my new one.
I think there’s a very large correlation between people that decide to use electron and people that write unusable, broken, tortoise-speed software.
Because it really doesn’t need to be slow for user-interacting software. In fact, I don’t think any platform exists that is so bloated that it can make modern computers slow for user-interaction.
Some people are still waiting on a text editor that never lags.
Is Unreal worse than Unity? I’ve only ever heard people complain about the latter
Unity is bad as a company but unreal runs poorly and yet is being used in a LOT of games for no reason. Similar to Electron.
I think a lot of the plugin tooling for Unreal promotes bad practices with asset management, GPU optimization, and memory management. I’m trying to say that it allows shitty/lazy developers and asset designers to rely on over-expensive hardware to lift their unoptimized dogshit code, blueprints, models, and textures to acceptable modern fps/playability standards. This has been prevalent for a few years but it’s especially egregious now. Young designers with polygon and vertex counts that are out of control. Extraneous surfaces and naked edges. Uncompressed audio. Unbaked lighting systems. Memory leaks.
I’ve found that in my personal experience in experimenting with Unreal, the priority matches developing DNNs and parametric CAD modelling applications for my day job: effective resource, memory, and parallelism management from the outset of a project is (or should be) axiomatic. I think Unreal 5 runs exceptionally well when that’s the case. A lot of the time, one can turn off all of the extra hardware acceleration and frame generation AI crap if your logic systems and assets are designed well.
I know this is a bit of an “old man yells at cloud” rant, but if one codes and makes models like ass, of course their game is gonna turn out like ass. And then they turn around and say “tHe EnGiNe SuCkS”.
No. Fuck you. You suck.
Unreal pushes a lot of “hip tech” that supposedly improves performance, but often it turns out that many example cases are just really poorly optimised. With more traditional optimization techniques more can be achieved.
Unreal can perform really, really well, it’s just that it won’t by default. And many devs are too lazy to properly profile their games to figure out how to improve it.
I hate both. Godot for lief
When a team uses Unreal properly it can be great. Guilty Gear Strive is built in Unreal, has a beautiful unique visual style, and runs great. But you need a team who really knows what they’re doing, both on the code and art sides.
The problem is when an indie dev tries to use it and does everything “out of the box”. If you’re a solo or indie dev, just use Unity or Godot (I’ve been using the latter and loving it)
How do you mean in terms of Unreal?
The issue isn’t the engine itself, but the management practices that lead companies to desire unreal.
I think VSCode is the only stable electron application and even then it took them like 5 years to reach passable stability lol.
Used to crash and combust all the time when I first tried it.
Zed is native and it has way better performance! You can tell it’s not Electron!
Etcher seems stable! But it’s also a well over 100 MB download for a disk image writer. Rufus does more in less than 1% of the download size and also has a GUI.
Never realized that Etcher was an Electron app and it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah that crashed for me across several versions too lol.
Latest works, but I have like 5 different ones saved because I think 1.16-1.18 wouldn’t complete writing to disk.
Rufus could fit on an 1.44 MB floppy disk
GitHub Desktop works neatly
Tabby terminal :)
- Yes
- Yes, and also delete Electron
- That, and also make me forget I ever even heard about Electron in the first place
HTML5 applications goddamn well ought to be first-class programs, as a totally platform-agnostic realization of Turing completeness.
Instead you get every application bundled with its own whole-ass operating system and virtual machine. For a fucking webpage. Yep! No other way to run that on a modern computer!
what’s are the alternatives? I want ease of writing UIs js/CSS/HTML gives, especially with frameworks like svelte.
I’d highly recommend Tauri. It’s much much much faster and you can use svelte for the front end and enjoy all of those benefits.
The “downside” is that all of the backend is written in rust which can be trouble to learn… (Downside is in quotes because rust is my favorite language and I would legally marry it if the law cared about the true meaning of love) However! If you don’t care much about the backend stuff or most of that is gonna be simple anyway… Just use it. It’s better in every way
Edit for context: I’m the lead developer of a “popular” (it’s as popular as you can be as a niche tool for a niche community) open source project that uses Tauri with a svelte front end and rust in the back end.
There’s also a Golang alternative that does not have 6 GiB build folders like Tauri / Tauri 2.
(Tauri generates like 3 MiB binaries. It’s the build folders that are huge. Also stay ready to compile huge Rust packages!)
A webpage.
Or, get this, a PWA.
Getting good is an alternative, coding will always be a trade between ease and quality. Super high level languages are super easy and accessible but the tradeoff is you have no idea what is actually happening on the backend nor much control of it and it requires bloated web engines to manage and run.
Real coders program in assembly.
deleted by creator
The checkbox should be grayed out.
But I want to always delete Electron Applications…
That’s why the checkbox should be grayed out, so that you can’t uncheck it.
OOOOOHH! I get it now!
I thought you meant grayed out so it couldn’t be checked.
My bad. You’re right.
When gecko electron?
(Yes, I know that there has been effort to that, but at one point having gecko and FF seperate was too much work, so it was merged further, so that it’s now even harder to create a gecko-based electron. So basically just create a clean FF profile, add all addons you want (uBlock and noscript are useful for some apps), and make a desktop shortcut to open the web page in that specific profile. Funnily enough, it’s more lightweight!)
XULRuner use to exist. I ran Chatzilla under it at one point in time.
Can I get a browser built entirely on Electron?
Any tech college kid can write an app in common frameworks. I’ll admit llm code generators are great when they can translate electron apps to say tauri or even better to QT at reasonable cost :)
KATE >>>>>>>>>>>>> VSCode
Yes, except container devel (need to use ssh).
Don’t get me wrong, I love Kate for general developement but I think VSCode is better for web developement because it has many useful extensions like LivePreview etc…
Well, one advantage of running your text editor in a browser is you have access to the browser.
- Qt “cute” (the UI framework)
- QT “cutie” (QuickTime the Apple media framework)
QT “cutie” (you 😊😳)
Well that would be even more impressive.
I’m experimenting with a game and rather than deal with platform specific graphics I’m just targeting wasm and webgl and plan to embed my game in a browser runtime.
It feels less terrible than the mess that is linking platform specific logic and code.
Or use a real cross-platform UI toolkit.
Like what?
One of them.
Do you have suggestions?
Last time I looked at QT I didn’t like it
For what it’s worth, I’m not looking at electron but something like an embedded browser mode. I think qt has that
Qt is overkill if all you’re using it for is to create a window you render into, something like SDL would be better.
That’s how I feel, and I was between SDL and just writing GL code myself.
The problem is I run Mac and OpenGL is at best neglected and is deprecated. If I use webgl and wasm I done have to worry about any of that, and they have sdl for wasm.
Edit: my game is going to be 2d and the UI isn’t going to be more complex than raylib. I’m just playing around but also building an idea I’ve had for years.
I even forgot how that one i liked years ago was named. But Wikipedia has a (likely slightly outdated) list. Just google “cross platform ui toolkit”.
The vast majority of game engines already have seamless cross platform support. Nothing need be done beyond selecting your target when compiling. Use Vulkan instead of dx11/12 and good to go
But I’ll build an electron app, and have support for Linux /s
will it also have blackjack and hookers?
It’ll only have blackjack and hookers.
Use Qt or some similar framework to develop your desktop apps, or use SDL or similar middleware if you want your own and want portability very quickly. I even managed to write my own SDL replacement.
Interesting, but I was raising a joke at how many apps are electron based and could easily have a working app on Linux. Yet they never publish Linux versions of electron apps, and it drives me nuts as it’s so easy to enable
And yet, the most popular, and desired (and one of the most admired) IDEs that developers use all day, everyday, is built using Electron:
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/#2-integrated-development-environment
deleted by creator
What functionality is Vscode lacking for it to be an IDE?
deleted by creator
Seems unnecessarily pedantic 🤷
deleted by creator
But aren’t the plugins also basically part of the electron app after installing? But I have no idea how electron, vscode and their plugins acrually work.
deleted by creator
What’s different between Vscode and other editors like Vim is how easy it is to make it a fully fledged IDE. Usually a notification pops up about analyzers being available, and if you click accept it’s done. Just one click of a button.
With Vim it’s not that easy. You need to install many separate plugins just to make it a fraction of an IDE.
deleted by creator
You could call vscode a “DIY IDE Building Kit” because everybody is using it that way.
After you put all the extensions together you basically got a fully featured “IDE” for most languages out there.
Nobody I know uses vscode like a simple “code editor”.
deleted by creator
I think that whether it needs plugins or not to do the job isn’t really relevant.
You can develop software in a large number of languages including writing the code (with intelligent code completion), building it, committing it to source control and running and debugging it.
If it didn’t use plugins to do that then it’d huge and take ages to start up.
deleted by creator
Being good
Fuck M$
It’s literally listed in stack overflow’s section on IDEs, functions as a replacement for an IDE, was architected so that plugins can turn it into an IDE, and is distributed with plugins made by the same company that turn it into an IDE. Insisting that it’s not an IDE in this context isnt helping anyone communicate, it’s just being pedantic.
deleted by creator
With enough plugins vim can have almost all of the features of an ide. Not that I recommend using it like that tho.
This distinction is not useful since the creation of language servers.
I’m keeping an eye on Zed: https://zed.dev/
Yeah, AI, whatever. It’s written in Rust and looks pretty great.
Yeah you can turn off the AI it’s not mandatory, besides, it’s really fast, has built in support for LSP’s , custom themes which are easy to make, vim mode out of the box, extensions, and some GitHub functionalities.
I was using Kate because electron is too much of a hog on my system and zed works insanely well (it’s slightly slower than Kate though but not very important)
I wish you could turn off the automatic downloads on zed though (or have a prompt to confirm the download) but it’s really shaping up to be a great text editor.
I’m currently mid-migration from Windows to Linux, so I have to wait until the Windows release or until I finish migrating (I’m not really up for building a beta at this point), but I’m very excited.
It’s not done, but I’ve replaced VSCode and haven’t felt the need to come back, moreover If I were to go back I’d miss Zed because it’s just that good.
Like it feels so light and fast 🤤
Did Zed devs fix vim mode? In the early stages I tried it and lots of movements weren’t the same as in vim, I still remember trying to jump a few screen down and it just deleted a few lines instead. Also didn’t really like that you couldn’t controll the menu on the left using vim movements like you can with vimtree, really makes it unusable if you have to jump around between your mouse and keyboard. Gotta check it myself I guess, hopefully they made it better
So you tried to move a few screens down and accidentally deleted a few lines?
I don’t know what you’re talking about, to me it sounds like they’ve perfectly nailed the vim experience!
I pressed Ctrl+d a few times and it deleted a few lines instead. Ctrl d and Ctrl u are used for travelling half-screen down and up. That’s right, you don’t know what I’m talking about and still spewing bullshit. *.world checks out.
Oh my god buddy, it was a joke. Breathe.
Why is Spacemacs listed separately to Emacs when it’s just a fancy Emacs’ config?
Eh, not that bad
