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Re:Electron 7.0 by bluesroo on Thursday October 24, 2019 @03:15PM (#21348164)
As a solo founder, I doubt there are any other platforms that make economic sense to support, especially if it pulls effort away from the real money makers. Depending on the market, Linux wouldn't even make sense to support for most companies and it's only supported because Electron supports it out of the box.
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Re:Electron 7.0 by bitwize on Thursday October 24, 2019 @03:27PM (#21348296)
If you have hungry mouths to feed, and whether or not they get fed depends on whether your app makes enough to justify the time and expense it takes to develop it, tell me you would have made a different decision.

When development is your livelihood, you target the platforms that make money and only the platforms that make money. That pretty much means Windows and maybe Mac. Anything else is throwing money away.

Re:Electron 7.0 by inferiorhuman on Thursday October 24, 2019 @03:31PM (#21348347)
tell me you would have made a different decision

Sure. As a developer I would've used Qt (or Gtk) because even on the platforms that Electron provides, both provide a much higher quality user experience. You may not care about Linux on non-x86 or QNX or BSDs now, but you've ruled out ever caring enough to consider them.

As a user I loathe Electron apps. They're slow, don't respect native mannerisms (e.g. VS Code for ages didn't put titles on windows you minimized), and horrifically bloated. I try not to use free Electron apps (Discord and Slack get used in a browser), and I would never pay for one. So there's that.

Re:Electron 7.0 by filoleg on Thursday October 24, 2019 @03:46PM (#21348478)
>VS Code for ages didn't put titles on windows you minimized

The fact that they eventually put it there tells me that it wasn't a fault of Electron in the first place, but fault of the designers/devs. Electron allows you to do all those nice things you love if you want to, so I don't see how it is Electron's and not designers'/devs' fault.

Re:Electron 7.0 by inferiorhuman on Thursday October 24, 2019 @03:51PM (#21348515)
The fact that they eventually put it there tells me that it wasn't a fault of Electron in the first place, but fault of the designers/devs. Electron allows you to do all those nice things you love if you want to, so I don't see how it is Electron's and not designers'/devs' fault.

That's not something a native MacOS application dev would ever have to think about. If Electron requires extra work to make your app behave like a normal app that's absolutely a fault with Electron and means that Electron apps will often present poor the user with a experience.

Re:Electron 7.0 by stephenson on Thursday October 24, 2019 @03:28PM (#21348318)
I think congrats are in order, he did not get distracted with a minor part of the market but is focused on delivering value to the bigger market. He can always add more clients later.
Re:Electron 7.0 by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Thursday October 24, 2019 @03:27PM (#21348298)
So really you only care about 2 operating systems, and you're willing to give up all the native integration opportunities on both of them for the minor convenience of only having to write one (bad, bloated, totally-out-of-place) GUI.

Developers in the 90s often supported 5 or more different platforms. How is it that modern development is so much worse?

Re:Electron 7.0 by boernard on Thursday October 24, 2019 @03:34PM (#21348373)
that 'minor' convenience is a quite huge one given that he stated that the other apps wouldn't exist if not for electron.
Re:Electron 7.0 by inferiorhuman on Thursday October 24, 2019 @03:54PM (#21348537)
that 'minor' convenience is a quite huge one given that he stated that the other apps wouldn't exist if not for electron.

That's an awfully bold, if unbelievable, claim given that cross-platform toolkits have existed for a long time.