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> I struggle to see where you would prefer Qt for frontend code if you don't need a native app.

How about actual native UIs instead of ugly, non-intuitive, slow and massive Electron apps?

I say this being a dev who works with both Qt and Electron on a daily basis. Electron has its place - but its place isn't good desktop and mobile apps. Qt is much better suited there.

Electron is only well suited if your team is extremely familiar with web dev but nothing else and you have no ability to hire a good desktop team or you need to interact with a web-only frontend library.

Just about everything in Qt is preferable - native look and feel, proper layouts, high performance rendering, small distribution size. I struggle to think of any way in which Electron is better except for perhaps library support these days.

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> Electron has its place

Yeah, and it's called Hacker News - beyond that no one really cares, and uses Qt.

This might sound like a troll, but the bubble effect on HN really is that strong. The community sometimes has a strong tunnel vision and doesn't realize how it's constrained by what's on the HN front page.

Except for the millions of people using apps such as Slack or Discord or people using the new Keybase desktop offerings, or people using Atom, or VSCode.

Electron (sadly imo) is being used in plenty of newly developed cross platform applications, a lot having users that have no clue what hackernews is.

Is Electron newsworthy? Sure. At the same time there's vastly more paid Qt devs than Electron devs at this time, and more apps by orders of magnitude, including many with millions of users, and big new ones every week. Along with many application domains Electron isn't even an option in. But you wouldn't know it from HN coverage.

None of these apps feel quite right though. Even Atom still doesn't do DPI scaling properly. VSCode does, but opening 2 panes sometimes causes it to break.

Sample problem (left pane blurry, right pane sharp - view at 1:1 scale on ~100dpi screen to notice it easiest, but it's quite visible to me with scaling even): https://i.imgur.com/Ju0UK2K.png

I've never had any issue with Discord feeling "not quite right".

You dont know what he means? They dont feel like native, they feel like web apps.

I have noticed that with some Electron apps in the past, but I had actually never noticed that with Discord. I thought it was native for the first 4 months I was using it because it was just done so well, no lag and such. The one thing that usually gives away electron apps is their lack of custom right-click handling, meaning a right-click will give you the generic context menu you would normally see in a browser. Discord seems to handle all right-clicks with their own context menus which is why I never caught onto it at first.

What gives away electron to me is the really giant non-native UI elements. Its like everything is as bloated as the underlying system!

> really giant non-native UI elements

You act like this is a problem exclusive to Electron apps. People have been doing shit like that forever.

Sample weird behavior from Discord:

Make the window too small and the buttons overlap in the titlebar. I didn't even pick an extremely small size or anything, this was about half my screen width on my Macbook. But this is the kind of thing that making a proper native app forces you to think about, but that making an Electron app often doesn't.

http://i.imgur.com/MOaESLC.png

I can pretty much tell within a minute of starting an Electron app because things just don't feel right no matter what the app is. Sibling mememachine is also pretty accurate - Discord is very oversized like many other Electron apps.

Not using native platform widgets is also incredibly noticable. Every time you're not using native platform buttons or menus it's so easy to tell, it feels weirdly slow, has excessive gaudy animations, the spacing is wrong, text size is wrong, etc. That's not to say that it can't be done right just that you're on an existing platform and that consistency is key.

While you do raise some valid points, and some that I disagree with, I've grown to appreciate such apps as of late. There was a time not long ago where half the shit on my computer was Java because that was the only practical way to make a decent cross-platform application without having to relearn different things for each platform. Yeah, the whole "apps built on web-technology" movement could use some refinement to reduce bloat and such, but when done correctly, it seems to work out pretty well for the most part.

I use RStudio on a daily bases and it works amazingly well. VS Code has become my daily driver on Linux and Windows. I think there are plenty of good examples of electron apps and bad electron apps.

Qt is great but electron has certainly been getting better and better.

Those load times on Electron apps, though... I'm a big fan of VS Code but 30 second reload times when updating extensions are a real PITA.

There is I think something up with your computer, or your VS Code.

I have a 4 year old mac and VS Code goes from closed to a file opened in about 4 seconds. Still a stupid amount of time for a text editor, but no-where near 30.

I have a 8 year old Dell running OpenSUSE. I counted 9 seconds to open the app. It was 6 seconds to reload after updating 5 extensions.

> Just about everything in Qt is preferable - native look and feel, proper layouts, high performance rendering, small distribution size.

While we're here, honest question: how do Electron-based apps fare in terms of accessibility (e.g. to screen readers like Orca) compared to native-based apps (GTK, Qt, MFC, Cocoa)?

Qt has more restrictive (or expensive) licensing for proprietary usage. Electron can freely be used in proprietary projects without buying a license.

As a developer I'd also prefer to use QT. I actually enjoy C++ a lot and writing performant, pleasant apps. Slow bulky electron apps are the bane of my existance but maybe they look good to an over-budget project manager.

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