I didn't say that there are no other frameworks. The ones you provided all break the "transferable skill" requirement (React native a bit less so but still).

If you prefer to install ripchord instead of discord and slack nothing prevents you for doing so. Let me write a few comments about it:

- it made sense building it for the author because those two services already existed and already had enough users. Also the author has the skills needed to build it.

- it won't be free

- it is not feature complete compared to the reproduced services

So it might attract users depending of the perceived gain from a faster software vs its price and the missing features. It also has to win over all the people that have already installed the slack & discord clients. If it gains significant market share there are 2 risks: intentional api breaking changes by slack & discord, and them redoing/optimizing their client to win back the lost users. Most probably: they don't care about the client part. They are selling a service and this new client might make some of their users happier.

So we see that even though ripchord exists, it does not mean that electron hasn't helped in making two new services available. The ripchord author might be able to reproduce a client with a better tech, but that doesn't mean he has the skills to create a whole new offer (market research, sales, backend administration, etc).

edit: format

At this point what you have can't even be called skill, on?

If you skim a tutorial and release an unmaintanable mess because you lacked experience with your tools users are not going to forgive you because thank god you did not use electron.

You might have some time to learn all this. Or not. Maybe you are busy finding funds. Maybe you are pitching companies to get your first prospects.

It might not be the future you or I want, but it is the future that the majority of end users want. Market forces don't always work for getting users what they want (see privacy) but in this case the money is talking. Slack's desktop app is a classic example of being a memory hog, but Slack has been enormously successful.

Don't Apple already do something similar for battery hogs? May be misremembering, but I'd have thought a similar principle applied.

Half the challenge of course would be dissuading the vendor from excluding their own apps from these notifications.

But yes, on OS X, the battery drop-down will list any apps that are consuming significant amounts of energy. For me these are constantly Chrome and Intellij IDEA.

Well, JetBrains is one of few choices that's even more of a hog than Atom.

  > There seems to be an opportunity here for platform vendors like Microsoft
  > or Apple to be a bit more aggressive about "this application is what's
  > slowing you down" notifications.

Every time you hear someone complain about how their new PC is so slow to do $trivial_task, think again. Most users unfortunately don't know any better, nor have the inclination to teach themselves to.

Modern OS's don't really have an equivalent to that. Probably because usage has become more fragmented.

uTorrent is perhaps another bad choice.

uTorrents first public beta release was in late 05 Qbittorrent was released in early 06.

By the time about anyone was aware of uTorrent Qbittorrent was already a thing and as good. uTorrent went on to become first proprietary and ultimately ended up installing malware on users system and mining coin whereas Qbittorrent is still awesome.

Slack with its famously crappy performance and battery destruction is probably another bad choice to make the case although I hear its improved lately. Maybe wait another year to use it as an example so people have time to forget how much it sucked.

I would totally stay with comparing say visual studio code to visual studio and hope your audience doesn't remember Emacs and Jetbrains products are also cross platform without electron.

I think instead you should hope they do remember those.

I wouldn't say that emacs is a shining exemple of desktop UI. Everything is based on text buffers and keyboard commands. I don't see this type of application getting the same scale of adoption as vscode or slack (and this comes someone who has used emacs as an editor for python and org mode files for 3 years).

I don't hate Electron. I just won't trade _my_ limited CPU, memory, and bandwidth for _your_ inabilility to learn Qt. Your Qt using competitor will get my business.

Not to mention a lot of QT apps bundle the entire thing as well, so I have in my PC several versions of qt5win.dll and friends, many exactly the same.

Furthermore QT apps are not a guarantee of fast programs, and often the interfaces look horrible.

I fail to see a huge difference in programming methods, even if the QT runtime clocks at about 50mb instead of 500mb.

Here is an example: https://imgur.com/a/RZZK7nA

The hardware industry has trained them to think, "This machine is slow. It must be getting old. Time to get a new one!"

In reality, they've probably just accumulated applications that run in the background and/or put less developer time into constraining resources.

I was able to find it by:

1. Go to discord

2. Control + Shift + I

3. Application Tab

4. Storge/Local Storage/discordapp.com

5. Refresh with Control + R

6. Token will appear, quickly copy it.

I don't understand what personal information is contained in a discord token, or who it is being given to in this example

Cross-platform desktop apps with Reason

Recreating all widgets is a huge task and such a framework needs a lot of dev momentum behind it to be usable in production. I really like everything Revery promises but right now it's just not an option for anything beyond simple apps for personal use.

End users do want it as seen by the commercial success of Electron based products, including completely free products like VSCode even when Sublime and Visual Studio exist.

Features and functionality almost always overrule performance. I'd rather wait a little longer to do something than not be able to do it at all.

My main laptop has 4GB ram. I cannot afford to use 500mb for a chat app. Beside, did you even go outside? A lot of people cant afford (or dont need) a computer with more than that. For example lets see in a community where having a lot of ram matters. In the Steam Community, around 12% of people have 4GB or less. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey#cat0_stats_row

If you need more power, that's fine. But does an administrative assistant, or a lawyer, for that matter? Give me old-fashioned desktop applications, and I can compete with you at hundreds to thousands less per head. How many people doing that does it take to make a software engineer's time worth the trouble?