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?

that's a lot of words to basically say "i'm a fucking idiot".

Wow, that's some serious misinformation.

Meanwhile Microsoft makes the start menu with React

Tell me you have no idea how software development works without saying it...

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

(Apple as a platform is so closed that it couldn't be influenced by this utter crap and the developers can use the OS native API's.)

A hidden gem of stupidity and nonsense in the already pretty dumb tirade.

I hate the Windows API so much. There are like 100 million function that all start with a capital letter and take a kajillion arguments just to do the most simple thing imaginable (see CreateThread). And there are twenty different typedefs for the same type (PSTR, LPSTR, tchar* all point to char*). Also all variables and function arguments should start with their types, like hWindow if the window is a HANDLE.

I hate this joke of a programming interface so much, I hope everyone sticks to programming with POSIX and platform-agnostic libraries.

EDIT: And also, did I mention that if you want to use it, you get all of it or none of it? It's literally a single header file named Windows.h. You get just that and take it or leave it.

This is what too much windows does to your brain kids.

They must really like the taste of leather.

1. The user land API/ABI is stable to a fault in Linux. The kernel API/ABI is unstable.

2. Companies are cheap. They hired web devs then tasked them with building a desktop application rather then hiring people to write native apps. They had a hammer and used it to fix every problem they had.

3. macOS is just as affected by electron apps as a Linux is.

4. Electron is horrible, but it does bring apps to many an OS once Chromium is ported.

5. Open protocols or open APIs from the company would fix the non-native app problem.

This is not even mental gymnastics at that point.

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.

What kind of shit for brains asshole is still defending Windows in 2025?

I'm pretty sure you guys just took the bait. This is either satire or ragebait.

He's a magician, because reading this, I aged 10 years and grew a metastatic tumor.

Lame attempt at ragebait.

Aren't Qt and GTK cross platform? I have Dolphin and Kate running on my Windows work laptop.

Amongst the apps mentioned as bloated on Windows were Teams, Discord (major offender) and WhatsApp. The latter is a curious case because a Universal Windows app existed (now being deprecated I guess?) that was more memory efficient than the Web wrapper.

And in case, someone in interested there is a terminal client for WhatsApp (and Telegram) called nchat. Sure, it is not at feature parity with web client (images is a big problem, for obvious reasons) but the simple fact that a third party client taking so little resources exists is a damning indictment of Meta. It shows that resource efficient clients are possible (provided the parent company junks the metaverse).

Thank God this guy got disliked to hell.

Okay, how does this dude explain native Linux apps?

Abstraction layers? In MY messy pile of spaghetti ass code!?

I'm glad I'm not this guy

Thats... Thats like a flat earther in computer stuff.

Do those really exist??

Clearly rage bait

Sure, except that end user market share for MacOS is larger than Linux probably

Someone obviously missed their nap and is having a tantrum.

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.

The real reason is it's a pain in the ass to deploy software in Windows. It's not like you can easily set up a server and put some packages on and have it just automatically apt update to that. Sure there's some "Enterprise" servers you could set up (and pay license fees for) that might work somewhat like that, but it's easier to just make it a web app and deploy to an internet webserver.

For product distribution, you need someone download an .exe, hope a virus scanner won't block it, maybe pay microsoft to sign it or whatever, hope the user has a compatible version of windows, and maybe they can get some working software. But then you have to make some mechanism to handle updates and hopefully that doesn't get blocked by some security software. So it's easier to make your software a web application.

Also putting out windows native applications means you might not be able to enshittify it later since people could continue to use the old version forever. It's weird to assume enshittification happens accidentally, but it's actually what some companies want to do their software because $$$. They want applications they can enshitty later, they don't make applications that may work on linux and whoopsie it just somehow got enshittified because of that... somehow.

But many times it's just best solution. If an application doesn't need access to anything on my system, I'd rather it be a web app. App does the thing I need, and when I'm done, I close the tab and we're done. Why install more software on my system if I don't need to?

Since when has competition ever spurred innovation? Pff

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 feel the opposite. I expect things NOT to work on linux.

Just wait until they figure out Mac has been an OS just as long as MSDOS

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.

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.

Boy, imagine when that idiot finds out about iphones and android!

More wishful thinking of this person than fact. The more to SPA and all the focus on javascript frameworks is more likely to be related to this shift than linux. But I get it, the writer knows that the ground is shifting and is trying to connect things that they and other people dislike into one big bad.

Welp, that's an opinion one can have. whatyoujustsaid.gif

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

Eithet ignorant or troling

VSCode is super light on resources on linux, I have two running right now and they don't break the top ten on btop (often). It can be done right, rarely is, but it can be. Generally electron is badly used, probably a skill issue, seeing as the skill is locked behind useless documentation, proprietary BS and whatever, but the ppl who made it actually make it work, might be black magic or chicken sacrifice...

Someone's actually gonna take this seriously, and they're right.

You need to put this in clear [JOKE] tags, otherwise they'll never get it.

Yeah, not because they saw a way to develop for Win/Mac/Linux/Android/IOS all at the same time and went yeah, we'd take some of that.

Naw, They REALLY wanted to dip their toes in that 2013 extra 1% of traffic pool.

Fascinating. Please carry on.

Why did you cut out the author's name? :)

Regardless of the stuff that needs to be done for crossplatform development, building a native Windows version without looking at Linux isn't hindered by Linux at all. That's like saying you can't drive your car because another car exists.

@kirk781 no, it is not because of linux support. It's only because managers hiring web developers instead of desktop apps developers. Because.. managers do not see real difference, but see some stylish web design.
Microsoft ruined cross-platform desktop apps many years ago in early WPF/Sliverlight/XAML era by ceasing Moonlight project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight/_(runtime)
https://web.archive.org/...
So there is no reason to blame Linux that we do not have modern cross-platfrom toolkit for GUI apps.
Microsoft decided to make new XAMP/UWP incompatible with classic widgets GUI and kill classic GUI in WinRT/Win8 era, Microsoft decided to make XAML GUI Windows-only and cease mono developement entirely, not providing any GUI supportt

That's such bullshit! Those supposedly cross platform shit are the least compatible softwares you can make! What can of idiot can pretend it's used because of Linux?

I have this sudden urge to do an FLTK project.

Imagine the stupidest person on earth. Now realize this guy to the right of that.

I still have a Google pixel book that basically is just online only.

Has someone schooled 'em yet?

The problem is that mobile versions of the app is expected, and maybe also a web version. And then it should work on Mac as well. Linux is just a tiny fraction of the market share.

Each platform would require their own team if developed natively. That’s a huge headache to coordinate all features between the teams. Let’s build just one cross platform application which one team can be in charge over.

sometimes if you have nothing nice to say to that person, just post rocky horror .gifs. i really wish this site would have a .gif finder though. seriously!

Lol scrub

Guh

Sir or madam or Xir, did you forget to put a /s in that title?

That's cute

@kirk781
this is incorrect. #win32 applications run natively on #linux with #wine.

To be fair. Linux starts of super light, but if used as a general OS it becomes the epitome of bloat.

Linux is like buying a car and just getting only the parking space.
If you want to use your car, first you have to install the door and interior package. Then you get inside and have to install the seat package. But the seat has adjustment levers and uses the gear shifter library because it has levers already defined.
Great now you also have a gear shifter too. But it turns out your transmission doesn't work on the new version of the library so you have to also install an older package in parallel, so now you have 2 gear shifters, no biggie.
Next up is the steering wheel, it uses the wheels package as a dependency (because both are round and can turn) so now you also have all the wheels. But those are summer tires, you need winter tires. You get the winter tire package but it needs an older version of the rim package. Unlucky for you, the download for the older rim package is unavailable, but you're in luck. Some guy included that version of rims in his completed but unrelated car project. So you clone his car and rebuild the rim package yourself. You now have a whole extra car, but it's not yours.

By the time you got your one car ready to go, you have installed the parts for 7427 different cars, 27 complete vehicles and read 593 pages of documentation.