Meanwhile, in our universe, it's somehow considered reasonable to expend nearly six gigawatts (= 51 TWh per year) on a number-guessing game that will totally revolutionize global finance some day.
In the meantime, the invisible hand is doing it's thing. Time will tell what it's thing will look like.
This is even more true for resource-limited open source projects, as cross-platform gui-based ones are difficult to get right, but Electron makes that easier.
And now Mac users get the same terrible Electron app. The problem is that companies are not just making Electron apps for Linux users. They are replacing native well-integrated Mac and Windows applications by Electron apps (Skype) or do not consider writing native apps (Slack).
So, we had nicely integrated applications with Automator workflows, consistent shortcuts, consistent look and consistent feel. And we are replacing them by things that do not fit into the platform at all. No thanks.
That’s a straw man argument. The parent said that Linux development might not be worth the cost. They didn’t say anything about the ability to pay.
«Team, M$ killed Skype for linux, I cannot use it anymore, let switch to something else, like Slack.»
But to be honest, I'd rather have no GUI app on Mac/Linux at all than have it basically be a requirement to waste resources on Slack or whatever other crap and to have developer energy tied up in an editor as shitty as Atom.
It's only 90 KB (!)
Unlucky for me, my admins refuse to enable the bridges and also won't grant me an API key for use with the weechat slack plugin.
I hate Slack so much. Slow and miserable and unconfigurable and just crashes at least once a month.
Basically I'm fine with Electron apps but I have yet to find one that I need and can't be replaced by a browser tab.
To be honest though, since my VS Code instance is sitting at ~500 MB (all processes together) and 0%, I'd wager it's not actually Electron itself that's at fault. It probably is incredibly inefficient compared to pure native code, and probably makes it easy to write inefficient code, but still, that's quite heavy usage you're referring to.
Another commentor in this thread wrote that VS Code is incredible efficient for a Electron app.
VS Code certainly is efficient for an Electron app, and I'm sure it's really hard to achieve that level of efficiency. To be honest though, I use it side by side with Visual Studio itself, and on many metrics, it eats its big brother for breakfast (e.g. [1])... and that is a native app. One can argue that it's apples and oranges, and that the two are not equivalent, but we have an interesting counterpoint. While I'm sure performance is heavily weighted in favour of native, it seems like it's certainly surmountable.
[1] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/695013979807047680?...
Compare VSCode or Atom with Emacs or Gvim for something more native.
To pick some apps off my desktop right now:
- Emacs with a pile of extensions, 22 MB
- SpeedCrunch, 13 MB
- SumatraPDF, 19 MB
- MS Word, 101 MB
The native libraries had decades to fix this mess, yet they're still by and large the same as decades ago. Will not miss them.
You do not understand what a productivity boost is if you think learning a totally new language and framework is a better choice than using the tools already available.
But also if your logic were correct, we'd all still be writing C.
It's a productivity boost for web developers, who don't have to learn a new language, and for companies that can hire cheap web developers instead of more expensive desktop developers. It's not a productivity boost for someone who knows (or is willing to learn) .NET or Qt.