Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a mac laptop and windows desktop and I never use the app stores.
I have used each of them exactly once. In both cases, it was to purchase an OS upgrade.
You’re the HN audience.
Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
251–260 of 281 posts
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> RAM is cheap and plentiful. If you don't use it, its value is almost zero (the "almost" comes from OS-level caching of files and CPU-level cache misses of code). I have fond memories of my DOS days and the simplicity inherent in a single tasking environment, however nowadays operating systems allow for more than a single application to run at the same time and each application should play nice with the system resou…
In case this discussion is still about a 20 MB RAM NodeGUI application, I don't think this is a comparable situation because DOS was really not about developing cross-platform applications with a Turing complete styling language. It was about building text mode tools that ran on x86 and nothing else. I swear even the "bloated" Windows 10 will have absolutely no trouble running a Win32 Console application at < 1 MB RA…
My reference of DOS was tongue-in-cheek and i made it because it only allowed a single program to run (ignoring TSRs) at any time so programs using all the memory wasn't much of a problem.
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Id say its fair game if building hello world links those gstreamer and openssl.
> Id say its fair game if building hello world links those gstreamer and openssl. why ? it entirely depends on how your linux distro chose to build Qt, not on Qt itself.
OK, so in this context the app is X MB. If all distros link those libs with libre cote and ui, for all intents and purposes, it takes X MB. If some dont, then lets discuss it (but if you can link to gstreamer and openssl to build a hello world, the issue is not entirely on the distro shoulders)
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What some people actually build with Electron doesn't really say much about what people _can_ build with Electron. no, it does. anyone can build incredible apps on any tech, given infinite budget and time. What matters is how the average app behaves, and for electron it is much worse than the average Qt app for instance.
That argument makes no sense to me, do you think you'd change your mind on Electron if access to it were restricted only to very intelligent and motivated people who made very good apps then? The average Qt app would probably be close to the average Electron app if Qt attracted the same kinds of people, i.e. Electron is basically just easier to use and/or the developers picking it think they are getting more value ou…
I’ll flip this around. Can you think of any Electron apps that aren’t hugely bloated as examples of Electron-done-right?
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at a few things on my machine right now: - Emacs (with 251 open files and IRC running): 100MB - Activity Monitor: 98MB - Word: 227MB - Spotify: 465MB - Slack: 526MB - Thunderbird (not Electron, but a similar weird browser hybrid thing): 663MB - Teams (which appears to be Electron): 747MB I'm not seeing too much of a blur here. The worst chat app (Teams) is using ~7x the RAM of my primary code editor that also…
What some people actually build with Electron doesn't really say much about what people _can_ build with Electron. You can't just compare Emacs with Spotify here, I can't even scroll a list in Spotify without seeing it disappearing on me momentarily, that says more about Spotify's engineers or project managers than it says about Electron. Teams and Slack kind of address the same problem and I'm seeing wildly varying…
Heh the embarrassing thing for Teams in this case is that I’m signed into one team that doesn’t really use it for anything but conference calls, while I’m also signed into 8 or 9 heavily used Slack groups.
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
End-users are still more familiar with a download link on a website for a exe/dmg installer on desktop. You also need to need to redo your subscription/payments to support the stores and give a percentage of your revenue to Apple/Microsoft. On mobile you have no option but on desktop it's hard to justify giving up so much of your profit margin when there's a popular alternative. BTW, Linux has the Snap Store.
Hmm I really don’t think so. You might be thinking of tech people, not the general public.
All of the non-technical people I know are capable of installing software on desktop computers without using app stores.
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#257Looks really good! At first glance, this seems like probably the best Electron alternative I've seen posted on HN. Apart from the consistent GUI layer, I think an underrated reason that many teams stick with Electron is the mature tooling for cross-platform builds and upgrades. It's pretty painful to DIY. It looks like NodeGUI doesn't currently support cross-compilation--is that something that's on the roadmap? How a…
Flutter isn't a good Electron alternative? Flutter 2.0 just came out with desktop support for osx, windows and linux and will be the main GUI framework for Linux.
> and will be the main GUI framework for Linux.
That's already GTK+ and Qt, and the big GTK+ and Qt projects aren't switching over to Flutter any time soon.
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
From Qt's page https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations : "In case of dynamic linking, it is possible, but not mandatory, to keep application source code proprietary as long as it is “work that uses the library” – typically achieved via dynamic linking of the library."
Also, Chromium's Blink renderer has a lot of LGPLv2 source files that date back to the KDE KHTML days[1] and as you can see by the numerous proprietary applications that use Electron and Chromium Embedded Framework, that this doesn't hinder companies from using LGPL libraries as long as they abide by the license. However, one thing to note: the OSS version of Qt uses the LGPLv3 license, which has additional restricti…
> which make it incompatible with the iOS AppStore thus forcing you to use the commercial version of Qt in those situations.
Not necessarily. If you're able to distribute versions of your app to iOS users so that they can link it against their own Qt libraries, you'd be in compliance with the LGPL.
I've seen companies that distribute via the App Store, but also provide object files with instructions to link them against user supplied Qt libraries and to get them on iPhones/iPads.
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
As mentioned in the other comment, emacs does those things, and so does Vim (with plugins of course). I moved from sublime to atom to VS code, but eventually settled on Vim because I was able to get the same features (that I used) while getting almost instant response. A feeling that has completely changed how much I enjoy writing any sort of text.
I tried to move from VS Code to NeoVim with NerdTree and some other plugins to make it more IDE-like. But eventually wasn't able to get the same code completion, and searching was also a bit more painful. How do you go about that? Would you mind sharing your setup? :)
Hi, I use Neovim with basically the same features as VSCode. I made a video series on how to configure it: https://youtu.be/CcgO_CV3iDo?list=PLu-ydI-PCl0OEG0ZEqLRRuCrM...
Re: Show HN: Svelte NodeGUI, a lightweight Electron alternative with native UI
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
That argument makes no sense to me, do you think you'd change your mind on Electron if access to it were restricted only to very intelligent and motivated people who made very good apps then? The average Qt app would probably be close to the average Electron app if Qt attracted the same kinds of people, i.e. Electron is basically just easier to use and/or the developers picking it think they are getting more value ou…
I’ll flip this around. Can you think of any Electron apps that aren’t hugely bloated as examples of Electron-done-right?
I think vscode is pretty good.