The march toward systemd-electron continues.

This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.

> This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it.

Microsoft did this ages ago, they lost a big anti-trust trial over it.

Aside from that, people ship electron because it works the same across different OSs, if you just want to target one OS, you are better off using that OSs native dev toolkit. Although good luck finding anyone who knows how to write native apps for desktops anymore, and if you are on Windows, good luck figuring out what toolkit you are supposed to use now days!

And Linux has had the decades long problem of QT vs GTK.

So really the only platform with a native toolkit is MacOS, although when it first came out there were actually multiple toolkits to choose from there as well, and now days I think there is some argument over using Swift of not still (not sure, don't keep up).

Or you can just use Electron and skip the above mess entirely.

> people ship electron because it works the same across different OSs

Why does Microsoft build the very VisualStudio installer with Electron then?

To me it seems companies ship electron because it's easy to hire a JavaScript developer.

> Why does Microsoft build the very VisualStudio installer with Electron then?

> To me it seems companies ship electron because it's easy to hire a JavaScript developer.

When I worked at Microsoft, one team I was on, very ironically, had a really hard time finding Windows developers.

We actually resorted to drawing straws to see who on the team would have to learn native Windows development!

IMHO a large part of the problem is that native Windows development is a career dead end, unless you work at Microsoft, there are relatively few well paying jobs for what is now a niche skillset.

Unless one works for the games industry, does IT at big corp, embedded devices programming.

None of which are particularly sexy, unfortunately.

Given the hoards of candidates for game development and IoT jobs, putting up with the pay and hours, at least two of those are quite sexy.

Game development, maybe. The IoT people just want something to pay their bills.

Games pays badly, big corp IT pays badly, and unfortunately despite the difficulty, embedded tends to pays poorly unless you are at one of the big tech companies.

And yet the reason why they pay badly is the endless queue of people trying to get one of those jobs.

Visual Studio installer uses WPF.

They did indeed try to use Electron, and the backslash was big enough they went back to WPF.

> Although good luck finding anyone who knows how to write native apps for desktops anymore

Hi :-)

TBH, in a room full of HN regulars, to find a developer to write a native GUI app, you can throw a brick and hire whoever says "Ow!"

Because I'm old and I'm sick to death of everything being a web app. Because I hate web app programming so it limits my employment options :-)

I feel the same.

I'd be more mad about this if building native applications wasn't super shitty these days. Xcode crashes all the time. SwiftUI is terribly documented and buggy. And lots of standard things you see apple do in their apps are basically impossible to do from 3rd party code. And its impossible to debug anything because its all closed source. And windows has about 8 different native UI libraries that all look and feel different, and they're constantly making new ones instead of making one UI be good and well supported.

I hate electron with a burning passion. But at least the web has open standards, good debugging tools and modern, performant, well documented and pleasant to use UI libraries like React, SolidJS and so on.

Just don't ask about rich text editing on the web. Oh god. Its been decades and its still so shit.

> why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it.

Because it's a wrong approach to a problem that was solved decades ago by much smaller and faster system libraries for UI development.

Apparently these libraries and the languages they are designed to be used with failed to offer sufficiently easy way to implement the UX people want.

I myself strongly prefer classic desktop GUIs adhering to the 90s Microsoft and Apple design guidelines, also well-designed (rather than chaotically evolved like JavaScript) programming languages too yet the objective reality seems like that's not what the demand is for - real-life companies and people prefer fast-entry non-proprietary languages like JavaScript and virtually-unlimited expression like what CSS gives. The only libraries I know can technically be good alternatives to Electron are Qt Quick, WPF (and its spinoffs) and JavaFX but they all have downsides which limit their adoption.

Microsoft already did that with Windows 98, it was called Active Desktop.

And you're mixing Apple with NeXT (NeXTSTEP) and Sun (NeWS).

> why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it

You're describing a system webview, which is a thing on Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS.

Isn't Chrome OS a better fit for his description?

One attempt, XULRunner didn't work out.