I often see people talking about the fact that they like a certain open-source application, but ‘it’s a shame it’s on Electron’; what does this mean? Is it a privacy thing or a resource thing?

  • jokeyrhyme@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    People complain about Electron, but without it there would probably be even fewer cross-platform apps today

    Some aspects of it might be less than perfect, but let’s not allow perfect to be the enemy of good

    Electron doesn’t automatically mean that an app is bad, just like Unity doesn’t automatically mean that a game is good

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      Completely agree, thanks to Electron we now have many mainstream apps working on Linux and that just wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Whatever technological problems Electron has can be addressed down the road, and are outweighed by the value of lowering the barrier of creating cross-platform applications.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
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          3 years ago

          Pluggable engines would be nice, but I feel like it’s less of a concern for stuff like Electron where you’re making apps with it. I’d be more interested in addressing memory usage and cutting out stuff that’s not really needed for apps that’s part of the browser engine. Ideally, it should be modular so that you can include just the stuff your app uses to keep it lean. Perhaps using an approach similar to GraalVM could be taken as well to reduce resource usage.

    • Helix 🧬@feddit.deB
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      3 years ago

      Or you could just use the offline functionality built into browsers nowadays instead of Electron.