Why I chose Electron.js for my side business

For all the hate it gets, this is exactly why I'm glad Electron exists: tooling that empowers people to create things that would otherwise be entirely out of reach for them.

Congrats on the app, it looks great :)

How is Flutter for Windows and MacOS in contrast to electron?

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 X) is the difference between shipping something and not shipping at all.

Learning takes time and effort, and the more general the tool I use the better.

If I had to implement a desktop app tomorrow, I would default Electron, no contest.

A bit of an aside, but I was thinking lately, it would be great for linux to have an SSD benchmarking app, just like CrystalDiskMark, I would never attempt to implement something like this in Qt or GTK, there's just too much to learn beforehand compared to simply going with CSS, wrapping the fio command in a JavaScript shell call then publishing everything as an appimage. This way I know it will work everywhere and it will have a consistent look and feel everywhere. I might actually set this up as a weekend project sometime next month. Without Electron it would take me months of intense dedicated time, which I would rather spend on something else.

I wish more companies would choose Electron instead of native apps so they could iterate faster on all platforms.

I bet most people who have a problem with Electron are laptop users. I use a refurbished HP desktop i7 that I bought two years ago for $300 on Amazon and upgraded the SSD and 32gb RAM for another $250 or so. I can run numerous instances of VS Code, Chrome, Slack, Postman, etc all day without even a hint of a slowdown. I also never hear my fans go on, not ever.

I work in a nice quiet room and I don’t have to travel to work. I never understood why people want to optimize for working on trains, planes and in meetings. Even when I was going into the office, I didn’t need to bring my computer home because I had the exact same machine at home since it was so cheap.

It is alpha and it is from Google. Electron has neither of those flaws (which btw combine in my opinion to some kind of super-flaw, like those Transformers toys).