electron good - IDEs, markdown editors, visual git clients, things that are front and center
electron bad - music players, tray notifiers, app launchers, things that work in the background
On windows and mac I use foobar for music and greenshot for screen grabs because they use minimal resources.
And none of the native solutions allow me to shape and design the UI like I want to without compromises.
Electron may not the best in every aspect. But it was the only sensible and feasible choice for what I wanted my app to behave like.
For me, a small performance hit is justified for being able to make exactly what I want.
But for windows, which i primarily use, it is better that what .Net gives me. And it apparently works flawlessly on mac.
I was quite surprised by the CPU and memory usage though. Surprisingly lean. I ran a bunch of music players along side it and it averaged the same memory and CPU as colibri, vlc, foobar, and swinsian. Clementine stood out from the pack as an absolute hog, burning up my desk with 33% cpu usage, where nighthawk and the others stayed below 1% most of the time.
That's pretty impressive performance.
The basics are simple, but if you want to do styling tweaks or anything approaching a "custom" UI, you need to start hacking away at an obscure C++ SDK or an even weirder mishmash of GDI+ and old JavaScript.
If there was a modern and easily customizable frontend to foobar2000's core audio and media library engine, I'd be in love. Something like Zeit's Hyper, but for music. I'd be willing to trade off Electron resource usage if it meant I could set up the UI just how I like it.
I am listening to full albums most of the time and don't like shuffle play at all. So I am looking over all artists / albums every time I want to listen to something different. A big plus for me is a beautiful list with all the album covers.
Same goes for desktop environment "ricing".
Between that and xld I don’t feel like I’m missing foobar too much.