I would say most industries. Anything that requires creating any kind of digital content (images, videos, CAD models, electronic schematics, chip design, PCB layout, etc), most of the scientific software, all rely on the computational power and the speed of the desktop applications.
While there are industries that still use local compute and local rendering, that is exactly what it's about: industries. You might have image and video and audio manipulation. There could be hardware control. Maybe there is 'appliance'-like functionality such as POS and vending systems. But those aren't really the mass-desktop scenario that it used to be. That is mainly 'work' usage.
There is this section that you can carve out that does still exist in the traditional form and that is gaming. But that essentially turns the 'desktop' into a gaming console.
Legacy configurations that require things like an actual mouse pointer and multiple windows (or that dreaded MDI document-window-in-a-window interface) are generally left in two categories:
1. bad implementations
2. niche implementations
The first one means investment to fix, which is generally not going to happen if there is no commercial incentive for a commercial piece of software. The second one is a niche and doesn't represent desktops in general.
It would be more precise to say: Desktop business apps are dead. That is almost 100% true. Some lingering ghosts still exist.
While the backed is nice, that React UI feels like crap compared to the old UI. The only reason we are using an React UI being that "it's modern". Not every app should be an web app.
Can you elaborate? The last time I looked into this (including a little now) showed that, yes, you can create multiple windows, but there are not good solutions for communicating between the windows. Electron's own documentation shows two, options between local storage and Electron's IPC mechanism. From what I've read, IPC is not good for more complex multiple window apps. So one needs to use a local network communication method.
https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/faq#how-to-share-data...
If this is all the case, I would hardly consider it full support.
The only reason Electron exists is to enable Javascript developers do desktop apps without learning other languages and frameworks. Electron is not a solution for desktop development, it's a solution for lazy developers.
People keep saying this, but they obviously have no idea. Desktop isn’t dead and nowhere near it. Just because web and mobile app developers think so doesn’t make it true.
There are several industries in which desktop applications are a must. Any application with the needs of multiple windows automatically rules out web and mobile stacks, even if they happen to work on desktops.