On Mac you could have a PWA-like target that is backed by the built in Safari, so all you need to distribute is your app (HTML + JS + CSS) itself and it just uses the OS-provided browser runtime.
I see a lot of bashing against Electron because of the size and memory consumption of Electron apps, but at least on Linux Electron is a blessing. Many times it's either an Electron app or no app at all, as many companies wouldn't bother supporting Linux if Electron didn't make it so cheap and easy.
With that in mind, with many laptops coming with 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM nowadays, it it really that big a concern?
Even less for developers: my laptop has 1TB HDD + 256GB SSD, and 24GB of RAM. I can definitely spare 50MB of disk space and 200MB of RAM.
> my laptop has 1TB HDD + 256GB SSD, and 24GB of RAM. I can definitely spare 50MB of disk space and 200MB of RAM.
How much cache does your laptop have? All this RAM usage completely thrashes any caches anywhere. Page caches, disk cache, etc.
Slack alone takes a heavy toll on my laptop. Combine it with any heavy website on FF (which has gone insane on mac since Quantum) and the laptop is ready for take-off.
Not to mention that we are slowly putting a ±$1k price tag on "comfortable computing". People who spend <$300 on a computer are absolutely screwed, even though they have orders of magnitude more power than a device which took humanity to the moon (to use a hackneyed comparison).
I find using developer computers as a measuring stick a painfully elitist perspective. In an ideal world, software developers would be banned from spending more than $250 on hardware. Ever. [for their current workstation]. That would do more to change the face of software than any processor improvement ever did.
> Many times it's either an Electron app or no app at all, as many companies wouldn't bother supporting Linux if Electron didn't make it so cheap and easy.
I agree with this. However, focusing on first order consequences can be deceptive. Perhaps it is precisely the existence of Electron that suffocates any budding competition for more performant but slightly more involved alternatives?
> How much cache does your laptop have?
Enough. How much bandwidth does my ram have? Enough that it can fill cpu caches in I don't notice time. I still have 12 year old Conroe with spinning hard disk laying around and it never had any problem running VS Code so there's that data point.
Literally Xamarin.Forms, though without the Linux support still (and browsers, of course, because native apps aren’t web apps).
The difference in battery life between Chrome + Slack + Atom at work, and Safari + Sublime at home is huge. Quitting Slack often gives me an hour more battery.
Besides, without Electron, we'd have more native Windows apps, and running Win32 under Wine on Linux is still often better than Electron.
What happens when every developer decides user resources are practically infinite, so every application uses as much of everything it wants to all the time?
What does the current landscape of javascript on the web look like? Not exactly a model of efficiency and speed, for more or less that reason.
Also I don't know any no technical friend using more than 4GB on their computers.
Yeah, once. For a game, or a movie. But not 100 times for utilities I am actively using. Imagine, any given application can be run together with dozens, hundreds of others. Just like any given website is rarely the only website that's open.
Looking towards resources you can waste is the wrong approach. Look for waste you can do without, period.
The thing that makes it 50gb is all the web sockets and ie4-comparable-iframe-shims that nobody ever uses on the desktop. Lop all that stuff and see how big the install is and how much memory it uses. My guess is it would be a lot less.