Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

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There at least 4 good native clients in very active dev atm:

* Fractal (https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/fractal.html) from the GNOME community (who just had a big hackathon in Strasbourg last week: https://wiki.gnome.org/action/login/Hackfests/Fractal2018). They're looking to add E2E and VoIP in the relatively near future.

* Nheko (https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/nheko.html) - a very Telegram-looking Qt client, which has been in very steady progress for ages. They're actively working on E2E right now.

* Quaternion (https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/quaternion.html) - a more IRC-like looking Qt/QML client, also in very active dev.

* Gomuks (https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/gomuks.html) - this one's new; a really nice dedicated text-user-interface client written in Go - again, in very active dev.

Meanwhile we're also doing everything we can to improve Riot, but for desktop usage a native client will always beat an electron one :)

The most popular OS is Windows. And Qt is not a native client, at least for Windows. Something modern built with UWP would be nice. Second popular OS is macOS. And native for macOS is Cocoa.

PS not requiring anything, just my 2 cents. I, personally, like Riot.

Qt's native support on Windows is very very good these days, as apps like the Telegram desktop client show.

Last time I checked, Qt still used completely its own rendering, input handling, etc, imitating platform. So it's conceptually not different from, e.g. Java Swing. Probably imitation is better.

That said, Windows is bad at UX consistency. Native used to mean WinAPI with built-in window classes handling input, buttons, etc (and wrappers like MFC or Windows Forms). Then it was WPF with its own DirectX-based stack. Now it's UWP with even different code. I guess, Qt is not the worst solution. macOS is much more coherent ecosystem when it comes to native.

So it's true that Qt may not be perfect at mimicking native Windows UI, but in practice people don't seem to care too much for apps if the end result is still ergonomic & responsive and integrates nicely with the overall OS (unlike Swing or XUL). And Qt seems to do that quite well. In practice, I'm not sure anyone would even want a mIRC-style pure-windows UI Matrix client...

>macOS is much more coherent ecosystem when it comes to native.

Then again if you try to run a gtk3 app like Fractal mentioned above on Mac OS, you will see that it looks exactly like a Gnome application.

yup. Qt seems to get it much better on MacOS (at least from comparing Fractal with Nheko).

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