Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I chose Electron.js for my side business

getloaf.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 127 posts

Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business

#11

Post by _odey »

zaro wrote: post #9
_odey wrote: post #6

No matter how much I hate the bloat, and no matter how much I don't like JavaScript as and language due to it's behaviour around type coercion, I can't help it but to agree with everything in this article. Reusing the frontend skills I learned throughout the years to build desktop apps when needed, instead of having to learn an OS toolkit (and in the case of linux, multiple desktop environments, neve mind Wayland vs…

You should check Gnome Disks, it alrady has bencmarking builtin and is installed by default on Gnome environments.

Thanks for pointing this out to me, I did not know about it, is it new? I remember a few years ago when I would start "Disks" in Ubuntu it would open the "baobab" tool. Might be just an unfortunate naming colision...

Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business

#12

Post by stefan_ »

_odey wrote: post #6

No matter how much I hate the bloat, and no matter how much I don't like JavaScript as and language due to it's behaviour around type coercion, I can't help it but to agree with everything in this article. Reusing the frontend skills I learned throughout the years to build desktop apps when needed, instead of having to learn an OS toolkit (and in the case of linux, multiple desktop environments, neve mind Wayland vs…

    Learning takes time and effort, and the more general the tool I use the better.
I mean, you could have just written this. It's fine you don't want to learn anything new, but it makes your judgement suspect - hence the "Wayland vs X" confusion.

Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business

#13

Post by jfengel »

For me the big win is that it feels familiar to users. It's not a native app, but it looks like their native browser.

Users are acutely sensitive to apps that feel right. It's something Java learned the hard way, or not at all: there's an uncanny valley if you get it wrong, and users hate that. Native apps will always be better than a web app, but a web app will be better than an app that doesn't really have a home on any platform.

It would have been great if users were willing to say, "Oh, I know this, it's a Swing app, just like the one I used on my Mac/PC/Linux/etc." But Swing never really succeeded, and web browsers did.

Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business

#15

Post by intrepidhero »

cocoa19 wrote: post #5

Perfectly valid decision. For my own desktop apps, I'd choose Qt, since cross platform support is top notch. With that said, I understand that nowadays, C++ developers are harder to come by, and memory corruption issues are not fun to work with.

Qt is very doable from Python these days. I've found it quite nice to work with. I would guess you still have a bigger pool of engineers to draw from with web tech though.

Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business

#16

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

_odey wrote: post #6

No matter how much I hate the bloat, and no matter how much I don't like JavaScript as and language due to it's behaviour around type coercion, I can't help it but to agree with everything in this article. Reusing the frontend skills I learned throughout the years to build desktop apps when needed, instead of having to learn an OS toolkit (and in the case of linux, multiple desktop environments, neve mind Wayland vs…

Werid. You hate the language and the bloat, but you still would choose Electron over something like Lazarus?

Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business

#17

Post by blackoil »

I understand performance concerns, but not "native" app. Most popular thing on desktop used by people are Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Gmail and Google Calendar, Reddit, Netflix, Wikipedia.

I have never seen people avoiding them, because they don't have a native interface. As long as interface is intutive, people are happy to use them.

Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business

#18

Post by _odey »

stefan_ wrote: post #12
_odey wrote: post #6

No matter how much I hate the bloat, and no matter how much I don't like JavaScript as and language due to it's behaviour around type coercion, I can't help it but to agree with everything in this article. Reusing the frontend skills I learned throughout the years to build desktop apps when needed, instead of having to learn an OS toolkit (and in the case of linux, multiple desktop environments, neve mind Wayland vs…

Learning takes time and effort, and the more general the tool I use the better. I mean, you could have just written this. It's fine you don't want to learn anything new, but it makes your judgement suspect - hence the "Wayland vs X" confusion.

No, I do want to learn things, but the choice is simple, you either:

1. Learn Electron and implement an app, publish to all platforms.

2. Choose your target OS, learn the native toolkit, implement the app, switch to other OS, implement again, rinse and repeat for all, and in the case of linux you have to deal with multiple toolkits and you have to know the quirks around Wayland support (with electron you don't necessarily as chromium handles most of that).

One of them simply takes way more time and effort than the other.

Re: Why I chose Electron.js for my side business

#19

Post by jamifsud »

We just recently launched our desktop app on Electron for very similar reasons.

I've also heard that PWAs have made significant progress toward being a viable option for building a desktop app. Curious what folks think about this as an Electron / native alternative.

Post reply on HN