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Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

tauri.studio

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Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entire generation where? Let's say I saw exatly 1 guy with a chromebook through my life, and likely chromebooks weren't even officially sold in my country. And still Chrome is the most popular browser here.

Chromebooks outsold Macs in 2020 and schools all over the US are pushing Chromebooks on students because they're affordable and accessible to most people. https://www.geekwire.com/2021/chromebooks-outsold-macs-world...

So it looks like we are talking about the States. Meanwhile Chrome dominates pretty much globally, and it doesn't correlate with Chromebooks adoption.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#432
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It adds a lot of value to Linux and to a lesser extent Mac users: before a electron a lot of apps didn't have a version for these platform at all What value does _this_ add over a web app? I've been an exclusive Linux user since college so I'm aware of the disadvantages of app/service unavailability (I remember the dark days of running Netflix in a windows VM that I barely had enough RAM to run...). But what's the…

I'm on Ubuntu and use the Slack app, which never causes any freezes or anything of the like. The advantages is that i know where it is ( in my taskbar and launcher) compared to it being one of my 500 open tabs, and the taskbar icon shows if i have unread notifications or messages. Furthermore, i can use it with multiple workspaces at the same time.

I feel like the push towards PWA where you "appify" those websites rather than running another instance of a full blown browser would be good indeed.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#433
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It adds a lot of value to Linux and to a lesser extent Mac users: before a electron a lot of apps didn't have a version for these platform at all What value does _this_ add over a web app? I've been an exclusive Linux user since college so I'm aware of the disadvantages of app/service unavailability (I remember the dark days of running Netflix in a windows VM that I barely had enough RAM to run...). But what's the…

I'm on Ubuntu and use the Slack app, which never causes any freezes or anything of the like. The advantages is that i know where it is ( in my taskbar and launcher) compared to it being one of my 500 open tabs, and the taskbar icon shows if i have unread notifications or messages. Furthermore, i can use it with multiple workspaces at the same time.

Ah yes, the panel icon. This makes a lot of sense, thank you! My os is _heavily_ customized (i3 + wmctrl + heavy scripting), so I forget sometimes what the standard floating-window workflow looks like and how difficult it can make it to manage and quickly access important windows/tabs.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#434
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we got there also by desperation of lacking good cross-platform GUI toolkits. The current state is, you either use something that looks like Windows 95 in all platforms, or web app. What the web made possible is to anyone to create a decent custom UI with little effort. I still remember how messed up was to create a custom component for Java Swing, which I believe is still one of the easiest to do. How would…

Take a look at Telegram client, looks great on Linux, not sure how it looks on macos or Windows.

Interesting Telegram has both a native (Swift/Obj-C not sure which) and an cross-platform-codebase app for macOS. The former is called Telegram for macOS and the latter Telegram Desktop. Both are on the app store even. So it would actually be a very good case to compare performance, etc. The native one presumably shares a lot of code with iOS which is probably why it exists at all, and it supports secret chats. Otherwise they have similar but slightly different design and features.

However, I think the Telegram Desktop client is not Electron either, it is just regular C++ compiled on different systems.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#435
post #404
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or at all, how many Electron apps would bother with native Linux clients for example. Some maybe but certainly not all and probably not most either.

Electron app is not a native Linux client, it is just a browser app. If you ran that app in a tab it gives you much better performance and less memory used.

That all depends on how the app is written. The idea of Electron is to bring the web app frontend experience to apps which are fundamentally not able to run in a browser, such as VS Code, Etcher, etc. Writing to raw device files, listening to ports, using the full CPU resources and timers not available in the browser, using more memory, etc.

If you just package an existing website into an Electron app that is a waste of time and user resources. Electron is intended to combine a web-based presentation/UI layer with a Node.js layer that supports access to native resources, unlimited storage, persistence outside the browser, etc. If you are not making meaningful use of these capabilities a PWA would be sufficient.

Overall, I do prefer native apps, although there are examples out there such as VS Code that have achieved UI excellence without it. Although, I really only like that on macOS... on Windows I prefer the older Windows Forms style rather than the new Modern UI, and on Linux there is a bit of style mismash between Qt and GTK apps already.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#436

I think the desktop seriously needs a production, RAM and developer friendly breakthrough that isn't Electron. Tauri may be it, but the desktop SO needs this moment, I don't want to see 50 years on and Electron is still being used.

There's React Native for Windows/macOS, though if you don't like Electron I doubt that's very appealing either. I've had some nice experiences using PyInstaller to create desktop apps.

Depends on why OP doesn't like Electron.

To be clear to everyone: Electron and React Native are not alike. Electron is a big web browser. React Native work completely differently: It neither renders, computes, or runs the same. React Native uses the Hermes engine, puppeteering native components.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#437
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at Telegram client, looks great on Linux, not sure how it looks on macos or Windows.

Interesting Telegram has both a native (Swift/Obj-C not sure which) and an cross-platform-codebase app for macOS. The former is called Telegram for macOS and the latter Telegram Desktop. Both are on the app store even. So it would actually be a very good case to compare performance, etc. The native one presumably shares a lot of code with iOS which is probably why it exists at all, and it supports secret chats. Other…

Yes, Telegram Desktop is a normal C++ app: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop

So a cross-platform is quite easy, Electron one would need to be tested for different webviews on each system.

Re: Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My god... a 200+ MB install footprint, 200+ MB of RAM usage, requires a beefy GPU just to render its window. How did we get here?

I might be crazy, but for me it's faster and more convenient to download and run Etcher than to read up on dd command arguments and device paths. Storage space is plentiful for me. RAM isn't an issue as it's only run once in a blue moon. Is it crazy bloated and resource hungry for what it does? Undeniably! Does it matter? Not for me. Electron resource use can be painful for apps that are running constantly, like Disc…

I realize I'm replying six days later - but I can't help mentioning that the "dd situation" is even crazier than it first appears: you can just use `cp foo.iso /dev/sdb` or `cat > /dev/sdb`.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/189091/220387 https://eklitzke.org/the-cult-of-dd

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