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points by revolvingthrow 10 hours ago | 0 comments
Hot take, but: love electron. Write once, runs anywhere. The majority of bugs aren't platform specific. Easy to get nice visuals that stay consistent across different OS. Yes, it's not native. I don't care. It's not a painting to be admired. The focus on looks and visuals versus usability and ux is a plague.

Yeah, it takes some extra ram. Fork my stuff and rewrite it in rust if you care. I don't. The few hot spots can be fixed by using a lower level language. Is vs code not zippy enough? I certainly haven't noticed the slowness. People keep complaining about unnecessary load as if hardware hasn't progressed since 2004. It's hugely important for things like your OS. A few apps you run twice a month? Who cares.

But what about software used by billions, asks a person angry about my electron project used by thousands? How many ages were taken up by the five second startup time when you multiply that by however many users (all this time would be spent curing cancer of course)? Sure, improve performance when needed. For the vast majority of projects it's not needed. The average computer isn't pi zero.

[–] bigstrat2003 10 hours ago
> Yeah, it takes some extra ram. Fork my stuff and rewrite it in rust if you care. I don't.

And that, right there, is why people hate apps which use Electron. You are spending my system resources so that you can be lazy and not have to program as much. That's not really acceptable development practice.

[–] scheme271 1 hour ago
It's the other way around though. A lot of times, it's spending system resources so that they can use something that will run on your OS. Most apps using electron wouldn't have linux versions if electron wasn't a thing.
[–] CamperBob2 8 hours ago
If it's FOSS, what's your beef? You want a native version, point a clanker at the repo and tell it to party on.