linuxmemes

When all you have is ~~a hammer~~ JavaScript, everything looks like a ~~nail~~ web page.

Kids these days don't bother learning languages that actually compile to native apps.

Because you want a cross platform solution?

I get that electron can be slow, bloated, etc, but the amount of ire it draws is overboard.

Why have a consistent Wayland experience when each application can run it's own Electron version with varying degrees of enforced Wayland flags, and/or such an outdated Chromium version Wayland is just jank.

Edit:

Was trying to say that most of these CEF/Electron applications all need their own separate Wayland specific (Chromium) flags to have better Wayland support/integration. And the older Electron applications typically use an older Chromium as base, having even worse Wayland support... Was not trying to make this a "Wayland bad!" kind of post.

TL;DR: Electron applications have wildly varying level of Wayland support/integration, don't have any Wayland issues other than specific CEF/Electron apps!

That's kind of the point of the frameworks though? Electron apps suck not only because of resource footprint, they don't look and feel native, if they have any accessibility it's usually custom and different for every program. Too much customization is bad.

I remember the times before UI toolkits took over. These programs had soul and were beautiful in their own way, but you had to learn how UI elements worked in each of them separately. The same thing happens with web apps now. Tab and the other usual keyboard shortcuts rarely work, controls are all custom.

Once upon a time, we differentiated our apps based on their capabilities and gave them a consistent interface so people who knew how to use Windows|Linux|MacOS apps would already be familiar with how they operated. Now we differentiate on looks/user experience, and many of them arent capable at all.

Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.)

Holy shit, he figured it out!

So yeah, it turns out that platform human interface guidelines are a thing, and for good reason.

Which as a company, you want your app to look like your company, not some generic OS bundled app

What kind of take is this? Consistency among UI used to be treasured

Sorry but the window real estate of an application isn't meant for branding and advertisement. For that you have splash screens and the about dialogue, or even the help pages. And for more branding your webpage.

GTK is so shitty to use that they created Vala to make it usable.

it kinda seems you're not supposed to customize it

This is usually a good thing. More recent native frameworks like Qt QML do work more or less like designing web apps though, if that is what you want to. Qt Widgets itself provides a uniform look on platforms.

And vaguely related: Sciter, a little known but widely used framework that is a few megabytes and is similar to electron for design but very lightweight. Far older than it, too.

Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.)

Sometimes all of this is there for a reason. I used to really hate standard Windows (and I still do) but it had one big advantage: everything was accessible, in the sense that it all worked very well for blind and vision-impaired people. Usually when people create their own custom look and feel etc. they never accommodate accessibility at all.

Counterpoint: Every developer should have to test their app on a machine with 1 GB of RAM and a dialup modem before inflicting their bloat on the rest of the world.

Flutter