The electron hate train needs to pull in to the station and be retired. We can just admit that it was a good solution for the problems of its time just like JQuery. Electron was conceived over a decade ago and it was an imperfect solution, but there’s no denying that it was a solution.

Election predates WebAssembly by 5 years and hit the scene only one year after Rust was first created.

And just like JQuery, its time is coming to a close as better frameworks are available now that weren’t available back then.

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afdbcreid 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

We could, if people would stop doing it today.

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pjmlp a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was only a solution to Web developers that refused to learn anything else.

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qlte 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Before Electron/VS Code popularity, finding an official Linux release for popular GUI software felt like winning the lottery. You'd occasionally see an exuberant front page Reddit post about some random chat client finally releasing a Linux version after 12 years of "coming soon".

Post-Electron it quickly became the norm to support Linux at release and people would expect to see it on day 1. Especially for anything vaguely dev related like the YCombinator startup of the week.

And it would have 1:1 feature parity with the Windows/MacOS version by default, not missing half the features or frozen in time at V1.0 like some "in name only" official Linux ports I remember having the misfortune to use.

It's been memory holed by now after Electron became ubiquitous and associated with bloat. But it (and webapps in general) made a huge difference for "year of the Linux desktop" to be as viable as it is today.

	▲	pjmlp 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The year of the Linux desktop has been made viable via WSL and Virtualization Framework, or shipping the Linux kernel underneath ChromeOS, WebOS and Android. Electron has made nothing to change that, only a even worse experience than what GNOME and KDE apps have offered since the early 2000's. Don't worship stuff like i3 stuck in the 1980 early window managers, and the apps will be there.

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hackernud3s a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I made a bunch of Electron apps in my time. I always tried to talk the client out of it. "Just make it a website" I would say. Still, there were times where it made sense.

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bigstrat2003 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We can just admit that it was a good solution for the problems of its time just like JQuery.

We would be lying if we did that. Electron was never, ever a good solution. It was something solely used by devs who prioritized their own ease of work over the actual user experience, i.e. bad devs.

	▲	rpdillon 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Its a straight-up business decision, generally made by MBAs and with advice from engineers and executed by the engineers. That's because it changes the shape of the org when you need a separate team for each platform, so any org where the benefit of doing so doesn't get articulated sufficiently, will end up with fewer devs covering more platforms. Acting like this is a decision the ICs make is disconnected from why electron is so prevalent.
	▲	Grombobulous a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		If it’s so easy to provide a better user experience using something else besides Electron then logically you should be able to point to chat apps that won over more user adoption than Slack and Discord. Someone would have been able to disrupt that market by making a much better chat app since Elecron is so bad for user experience.
	▲	kristiandupont 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Do you have an employer?

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s3p 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I never thought election was a good solution for the problems of its time. Just call it a web app and don't lie to people releasing something "native" for them to download.

	▲	Grombobulous 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Discord actually launched as a web app, and then moved to adding a desktop app, which has quite obviously become far more popular than visiting discordapp.com and using it in the browser. Why do you think that is? I'll give you a hint: if I close my web browser, how do I get a notification that I got a new message? Make sure you also pretend it's 2015 (launch year of Discord) and that I might be using Firefox, Safari, or Edge. The funny part about this complaint is that you can literally just use the web app if you hate the desktop Electron app so much. That's one of the main benefits of Electron!
	▲	Kuraj 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Noone is claiming that, though. Discord isn't packaged as an Electron app simply because it pretends to be native, but because it has an entire system integration layer that isn't available in the web version.

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Brian_K_White 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was never a good solution and there is no reason to ever stop calling a turd a turd.

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bee_rider a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Electron was an ok solution to the problem they were looking at, “how do I waste as much compute as possible.” Unfortunately it had the side effect of drawing a bunch of stuff on the screen.

Luckily in the modern era we have invented language models, which allow us to expend vast resources on text generation instead.