It would be nice if the man childs who need to point out "electron bloat" in every thread could go back to arguing about vim vs emacs.

I recently put some time into experimenting with Electron, writing a simple media gallery app for viewing all the images and videos in a directory (https://gitlab.com/steve-perkins/MediaGallery-electron).

Certain things were easy, due to the fact that it's largely a web app under the covers. Certain things were frustratingly impossible, such as detecting whether a video is supported without adding it to the DOM and attempting to render it. Other things fell somewhere in between. HTML/CSS/JavaScript is a secondary skillset for me, so it felt like I swimming upstream to make a web app format and behave like a desktop app.

My primary skillset is Java, and I haven't yet had a chance to tinker with JavaFX (i.e. Java's answer to Microsoft's WPF and XAML). So I decided to write a JavaFX version of the app for experience (https://gitlab.com/steve-perkins/MediaGallery-javafx).

It was still a pain in the ass to learn a completely new GUI framework. But it was a relief to work with layout managers that actual want to function in a desktop paradigm. It was also nice to have unfettered access to local API's beyond the web-server-focused ones available to Node.js, and to have cleaner integration with the main process and the renderer thread. Interestingly, Java supports far more media types than the Electron browser engine.

Here's the kicker. Not many people know about it, but modern JDK's ship with a "javapackager" tool that bundles up your app into a native executable with a stripped down embedded Java runtime (and even a platform-specific installer). Believe it or not, the standalone installer for my JavaFX-based app is about 25% SMALLER than the installer for my Electron-based version.

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that JavaFX is a panacea for cross-platform desktop development. There really IS no ideal solution for that space, because so few people still care about it these days. However, I will say that Electron seems to make sense only for distributing apps that are basically just web apps, or perhaps have very limited native interaction outside the DOM (i.e. loading and saving plain text files, or spawning external processes). If you need to write a cross-platform desktop app that really IS a desktop app... then I think you're stuck with a C++ framework like Qt or xwWidgets, or perhaps JavaFX.