"Useful" as long as you don't care about battery life, memory usage, taking advantage of features of the host platform, or the native UI.

As an end user why do I care about "openness"? If I pay a premium for my platform, why would I want second rate cross platform software?

> As an end user why do I care about "openness"? If I pay a premium for my platform, why would I want second rate cross platform software?

Falsehoods HNers believe about how people buy/use software. Didn't stop Slack/Discord from become ubiquitous.

"But native tho" just becomes a circlejerk. Talking about what users care about, most people don't know what native means nor if a given app is it. They don't know if Zoom is using more memory or CPU than it "should".

I use Slack and other Electron based applications because my job requires it, imposed by our IT or customers, not because I freely have chosen to use them or have the liberty to look for alternatives.

Other than VSCode for Rust and TypeScript, my own personal computer is as much Electron free as possible.

So don't mistake market share for freedom of choice.

VSCode is a great example. We’ve already established that the average joe out there doesn’t care about whether an app is implemented in electron or not. But VSCode’s success at the expense of every other editor out there indicates that even developers don’t care that much.

The important thing is features - which VSCode has, and the speed at which those features are developed and deployed on all platforms - where VSCode is nearly peerless.

If developers cared about performance and resource consumption above all else, no one would be using VSCode right now (you included). They’d be using vim, emacs or perhaps Sublime. But that isn’t the case.

So why does HN keep flogging the “electron is bad” meme?

The day Microsoft releases Rust support for Visual Studio, VSCode gets kicked out of my PC.

Also, I wonder how much the Electron love overlapps with VSCode, after all many of those developers were pushing for Atom before VSCode was born.

Not much, at least here. I was a Sublime Text user for years. I tried Atom but it was an ugly, janky mess. I switched to VScode quickly after its release because the features it provided over Sublime Text were worth it, and the performance was good enough, even though not on par with ST.

And me thinking that it was probably about those $80.

I expect things to go the other way. Visual Studio will eventually be phased out for VSCode or something like it.

I think Microsoft chose Chromium for Edge mostly because they have big plans for Electron.

Some do, while I can't speak for the emacs community the (n)vim community is very active and engaged. There are modern vim plugins for nearly everything. The developers using VSCode tend to be developing on overpowered workstations where the difference is less noticeable. It doesn't mean it isn't wasteful. At some point we'll hit some upper bounds as an industry and have to rethink how we develop software, the trend back towards statically typed, compiled languages like Rust, Swift, Go are already leading us in that direction.

Edit: a word missing

> the trend back towards statically typed, compiled languages like Rust, Swift, Go are already leading us in that direction.

Indeed, even Java and .NET are improving their AOT stories, while available since the early days, weren't as widely deployed as they could have been.

Hopefully soon Java will have a friction-less path to compiling to native. As of now, its quite difficult for anything that isn't trivial.

It has been trivial since 2000, but you had to buy a commercial JDK to get it.

It is not trivial. Have you tried compiling any large app with graal? Anything with Weld or hibernate or H2 embedded? It has a lot of friction and isn't as easy as just running mvn package.

Because some things being good does not mean we shouldn't criticize the bad ones.

No, criticise whatever you want.

I'm just saying users don't care. They'll still use software that has the features they're looking for, on the platforms they use, as long as performance is acceptable.

I'm pushing back against the idea that performance nuts on HN who won't install a single electron app are somehow representative of the population at large.

I use Visual Studio (not Code) for C#, Python and Node now.

Let's not forget that MS Teams has more paying users than Slack....

How many people know that Slack is battery draining monstrosity?

The only people that pay for Slack are companies. The definition of Enterprise Software is where the user is not the customer.

MS Teams is an Electron app too. This very post is about React Native for Windows and Mac, which are being developed by MS because they're used for the front-ends of much of the rest of Office 365. Microsoft clearly thinks that it's worth rewriting large parts of their crown jewels using cross-platform frameworks.

Hmm this one is tough Office 365 has more paying users on teams. I doubt anyone is paying for teams, also they are not direct competitors. We use both, likely to get phones with teams in the future as well.

Whether it is fair or not that Teams comes with Office is irrelevant. This is Slack's competition. They have to convince companies that it is worth paying extra for their product.

In the famous words of Jobs about Dropbox -- chat isn't a product, it's a feature.

What I am saying is, we dont pay more or less for teams, its a SfB replacement.

I remember when Spotify 'upgraded' from a native to a js application on MacOS. It bricked my wife's computer. She never installed Spotify again. This is someone who doesn't usually care about software. She did care about that annoyance.

If Spotify bricked her computer, it was an issue with computer, not Spotify. It just so happened that you installed Spotify before the computer was bricked. If Spotify did that, you’d have heard stories of other Macs just completely dying out there if this was an actual issue.

It works fine for hundreds of millions of other users

Indeed. I had this argument with some of our non-tech staff countless of times. They absolutely prefer Slack, Basecamp & Co. as separate app. Doesn't matter if it's just an electron container - to them a browser tab/window is a subpar experience compared to an icon in the dock and its own exclusive window. Hardware requirements and the fact that each app needlessly runs itws own browser obviously aren't a concern to them.

> If I pay a premium for my platform, why would I want second rate cross platform software?

Are you paying for your software or getting whatever you can find for free? If you are paying, is the software's leanness something you value - that is, will you buy some software because it is leaner over some other software that is heavier? Would that be even if the heavier software has more features?

What sort of software have you bought? I'm asking seriously, not trolling - i've bought Total Commander myself exactly because it was lean (check: windows calculator vs one of the most feature packed file managers[0]) but i do not think there are many that value things like that.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/LYzN3Cj.png

As far as desktop software, the only software I pay for are subscriptions to Office 365 and JetBrains R#. I don’t really use my personal computer for too much of anything besides Office and a Plex server - I paid for a Plex Pass solely to support the developer.

On mobile, I’ll pay to remove ads and I won’t use any software or games where I can’t remove ads.

With the economy in the crapper, I’m starting to voluntarily pay more to support my favorite content producers.

This is funny because you just listed a bunch of cross platform software.

The argument is not about cross platform software. It’s about native client software.

Office is not written using one of the cross platform frameworks and is usually only around 3-9 months behind when it comes to taking advantage of new features as Apple releases them.

Plex is server software. The UI is a web page.

R# itself is a plug-in only for Visual Studio for Windows. Yes Rider is cross platform, but I don’t have a need for it.

The only other software I mentioned are games. No one expects a native experience from games.

Just bought the wonderful native git client Fork, even though it works for free and the Electron GitHub Desktop is also free.

As an end user you might not get that software at all if no one is motivated to build it.

But junk software is still junk and not worth the trouble.

Are we to presume you think that using native SDKs saves your junk software from being junk? I'm not sure how else to interpret your comment in this thread.

Having software that doesn't act like native software makes it junk. I've deleted a lot of software that was created with cross-platform SDKs that just didn't behave the way every other program on my computer did. I don't have time for that. It's a lot more likely that something created with a native SDK will behave like a native app than something slapped together with the cross-platform SDK du jour.

> If I pay a premium for my platform

this is something that you might value but I think it's fair to say it is already a minority position.

phones and the web have become the primary platform for software delivery, and people do not treat their desktop if they even have one as some sort of premium platform, it's a terminal for the internet.

at this point, people are probably more familiar with the look and feel of web applications than they are with native applications and value similarity across platforms over features of individual platforms. The operating system and the hardware are increasingly becoming irrelevant and a detail compared to the web on top.

Follow the money. People pay for what they value. Who is paying money for desktop software besides games, Office 365, and the Adobe Creative Suite?

Who values desktop software enough to pay for it? I know in the Mac market at least, the few indy developers making money are not writing apps using cross platform SDKs.

Lots of business running Windows on their labs and using desktop software for various use cases, like data analysis.

Plenty of money to be made desktop solutions to life sciences, manufacturing, factory automation, aren't plugging their air gaped dashboards to the web.

Anyone doing music composition, graphics, animation, infotainment systems.

In Europe there are enough Win32, WPF, UWP, Qt related jobs and consulting projects with hourly rates to do a comfortable living.

As for B2C, it is always going to be an uphill battle regardless of the application type, there are only so many application types that one is willing to pay for outside established brands, and SaaS is a much better way to avoid piracy and get everyone to pay.

We are speaking specifically about B2C where the users are the customers.

But either way, you kind of made my point. Consumers aren't paying for applications built on cross platform frameworks outside of games.

Kind of, most consumers that aren't willing to pay for desktop software aren't also paying for games.

In most countries they just need to go the local market or get hold of one of those lists distributed among students.

Someone is paying for games. What other B2C software is making money from the general consumer (besides MS) and not the “prosumer” who is buying software to help them run their business?

Just like someone is still paying for desktop software, in spite of piracy and SaaS.

All those small companies that manage to have their software exposed on shops like Saturn here in Germany, or do direct sales over their web site.

And just because it is B2C, Prosummer or used via a tablet plugged into a docking station, it doesn't stop being desktop software, from the points of view who's paying and selling it.

And regarding games, anyone with experience on the field knows how much harder it is to make any kind of living out of them versus regular desktop software.

The success/failure rate is much higher, with the large majority of studios never making any dime.

Office already uses react native for parts of their desktop and mobile platforms, win32 is in the process of integrating react-native support. So does Adobe at least if their github is any indication.

And if you look at the end consumer software which have billions of users, who in one way or the other pay for it, it's almost always built on web tech these days. Discord, Skype, Slack, Spotify, and so on.

Of course there's professional or industrial software written in native code. But that's not because it's popular, it's because it's niche and specialised. The business model of charging upfront isn't exactly a sign of popularity, if anything it's the opposite.

Consumers don’t pay Slack - businesses do.

No one cares about the Spotify UI. People don’t interact with Spotify that much. They listen to it.

The business model of charging upfront isn't exactly a sign of popularity, if anything it's the opposite.

In a capitalist system how else do you measure value than what people are willing to pay enough for to have a sustainable business? End users aren’t paying for Slack. They are using the free plan because it’s good enough.

I literally can't follow your points. Of course people care about the Spotify UI, that's how they interact with Spotify. And it doesn't matter if end users or businesses pay for Slack, people do pay for Slack and its software and UI is part of what they pay for.

Are you just going to find a different reason why you're going to ignore software built on a web tech-stack? Add up the market valuation of all companies using web technology to bring software to their users. Then compare it to the native market. It's not even close.

It's perfectly fine to use market value to estimate utility in a capitalist system. You just can't ignore every piece of software you don't like.

False dichotomy. Native applications can be cross-platform.