electron is comprehensive. maybe claude is not there yet. ecosystem still important
Why is Claude an Electron app?
201–210 of 483 posts
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#202Because it's the most popular & flexible cross platform user space compositor: - unlike QT it's free for commercial use. - I don't know any other user land GUI toolkit/compositor that isn't a game engine(unity/unreal/etc).
Why does it need to be cross platform? If code was free there would be a native app for each platform using its respective toolkit, not QT.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#203[dead]
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Judging by the state of most software I use, customers genuinely could not care less about bugs. Software quality is basically never a product differentiator at this point.
Tell that to people abandoning Windows. (I'm writing this on a Linux machine right now) Most users are forced to use the software that they use. That doesn't mean they don't care, just that they're stuck. BTW, this going to matter MORE now that RAM prices are skyrocketing..
I'm not saying zero actual people care, I'm saying that not enough people care to actually differentiate. Is Windows getting better now that you switched? Then it doesn't matter you left.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#205Heh, I felt the same. I'm a web dev but I do not want a electron app. We can do better, I used to write electron apps because I wasn't able to build a proper native app. Now I can!
I've been building a native macOS/iOS app that lets me manage my agents. Both the ability to actually control/chat fully from the app and to just monitor your existing CLI sessions (and/or take 'em over in the app).
Terrible little demo as I work on it right now w/claude: https://i.imgur.com/ght1g3t.mp4
iOS app w/codex: https://i.imgur.com/YNhlu4q.mp4
Also has a rust server that backs it so I can throw it anywhere (container, pi, etc) and the connect to it. If anyone wants to see it, but I have seen like 4 other people at least doing something similar: https://github.com/Robdel12/OrbitDock
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#206Boris from the Claude Code team here. Some of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back in the day, so preferred building non-natively. It’s also a nice way to share code so we’re guaranteed that features across web and desktop have the same look and feel. Finally, Claude is great at it. That said, engineering is all about tradeoffs and this may change in the future!
> Finally, Claude is great at it.
So the model is not a generalised AI then? It is just a JS stack autocomplete?
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a user I would trade fewer features for a UI that doesn't jank and max out the CPU while output is streaming in. I would guess a moderate amount of performance engineering effort could solve the problem without switching stacks or a major rewrite. (edit: this applies to the mobile app as well)
> a UI that doesn't jank and max out the CPU While there are legitimate/measurable performance and resource issues to discuss regarding Electron, this kind of hyperbole just doesn't help. I mean, look: the most complicated, stateful and involved UIs most of the people commenting in this thread are going to use (are going to ever use, likey) are web stack apps. I'll name some obvious ones, though there are other candi…
> While there are legitimate/measurable performance and resource issues to discuss regarding Electron, this kind of hyperbole just doesn't help.
From the person you're responding to:
> I would guess a moderate amount of performance engineering effort could solve the problem without switching stacks or a major rewrite.
Pretty clearly they're not saying that this is a necessary property of Electron.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guy if you can’t see the problem with a $300B SF company that of course claims to #HireTheBest having a dumpy UX due to their technical choices I don’t really know what to tell you. Same goes for these companies having npm as an out-of-the-box dependency for their default CLI tools. I’m going to assume anyone who thinks that every user’s machine is powerful enough to run electron apps, or even support bloated deps…
Presumably these competent people could look at electron, think about building their own cross-platform application on top of chromium and conclude that this free as in code and beer tool fit their needs. Should they have re-written Chromium too?
You are unfamiliar with native toolkits?
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#209Boris from the Claude Code team here. Some of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back in the day, so preferred building non-natively. It’s also a nice way to share code so we’re guaranteed that features across web and desktop have the same look and feel. Finally, Claude is great at it. That said, engineering is all about tradeoffs and this may change in the future!
this is you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We7BZVKbCVw if that's the case, why don't you just ask it to "make it not shit"?
hahaha
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#210Yawn the 90/10 excuse again and 'Shipping it everywhere' is a blatant lie there is still no Linux release. Looks like you are talking about Claude Code as Claude. Claude would be the Desktop app...
Because it’s an Electron app, I use on Omarchy Linux with no problem
There is no official release and some features don't work if you patch it to work on Linux.