I started developing an electron app earlier this year and after trying all the available boilerplates and clis I ended up with an app based off nextjs electron-typescript example which uses electron-builder that I’m very happy with. (Nextron is a cool project but is more than I needed)

The major pain point with the existing clis/boilerplates was building the app for multiple platforms in a container and then running automated tests using Playwright, and also being able to run those tests locally if I wanted to, without needing to do any futzing with configuration between environments, and also having basic dev perks like reloading on src code changes and nextjs bundling when building prod.

Also, it’s hard to overstate how nice it is to just not have to deal with webpack configuration.

What do you get from this that you don’t get with just using electron and react out of the box?

Built in file based routing is one thing that comes to mind: https://nextjs.org/docs/routing/introduction

But why would you need routing if you are building a desktop app without an address bar?

Managing navigation state via the familiar URL-based approach. You have to manage “where am I in the app?” somehow.