- Yes
- Yes, and also delete Electron
- That, and also make me forget I ever even heard about Electron in the first place
Electron apps are a crime against computing.
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.
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
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Outdated theming and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?
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.
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 :)
what’s are the alternatives? I want ease of writing UIs js/CSS/HTML gives, especially with frameworks like svelte.
A webpage.
Or, get this, a PWA.
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!)
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
vscode isn’t an IDE, but an actual IDE written in electron would be horrible.I don’t want to argue about this anymore. I admit i had a bad take, and this whole thread is just arguing about semantics at this point. Does it even really matter if vscode is an IDE or not? If it works, it works.
What functionality is Vscode lacking for it to be an IDE?
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!
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
