Agreed. But Electrcn seems to be the only option these days.
Thanks but no thanks.
On the other hand Delphi and its open source brother Lazarus are creating real (not html ones) native apps with sub mb binaries with minor memory footprints using a great IDE that reminds me of VB6.
This is definitely the way to go for desktop apps!
Feels nice? Try running an Electron app (for example atom or VS code) on a 4gb ram celeron (like the one I have at my 9-5 work) and I can guarantee that you won't like the feeling :/
I agree a lot of people care about looks and ergonomics, but none tech people complain about Electron apps: a lot of people know the standard things on Windows and these apps behave and look different. For young people this might not matter, but 40+ none technical friends ask me for help a lot with these none standard things where there is no normal menu or preferences is in a different place etc. I tell them to think of it like a webpage and not a Windows app. But it is a Windows app...
It is probably too late to turn things around, but I hope people keep trying. I will anyway. And these kind of articles (and Rebol) give me some hope.
Kivy is looking to have good principles, but the standard UI kit is quite awful. Supports popular targets except for the web. Qt quick (controls) enables both a good desktop feel and an aright one on mobile platforms. Doesn't support the web (but PureQML is an effort to port the language).
Haxe looks promising but public adoption, for some reason, seems very slim. Adobe Air and things like that promise similar things, but example apps are complete garbage.
React Native works quite well on mobile. There could probably be a similar effort on the desktop, it's surely possible to do something - but then again I'm not a huge fan of javascript either.
I have started doing projects in a browser myself because it is so easy to get started and share what you made, so I can understand that people would want to just use the work they did and bundle it up for shipping. It just looks like something could be done for Electron to lose some weight, at least. Why does it require a Nodejs environment and a browser for every app? Why not adopt the browser model of feeding apps into one renderer for display? Things like that. Maybe they'll wake up some day.