Comment by evv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evv | Hacker News Reader

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Congrats, Emil and team! I'm most excited for this as an extensible platform for further desktop tools, built on FB's robust stack of front-end tech.

Although I must admit, I'm disappointed that they didn't use react-native-web to build this app in a cross-platform way. I agree Electron is a good choice for the current landscape, but I'm hopeful that we will be able to move past it. If Sonar was implemented with React Native's layout API, it would be easily portable to projects like react-native-macos, React Native on Windows, or projects like Proton Native, once it matures and stabilizes.

Of course Emil knows this, because he is one of the primary maintainers of Yoga, the cross-platform flexbox implementation in React Native. This is one of the primary technologies that will allow us to move away from Electron one day, if people would just stop using CSS!

what about linux users?

Like I get that people don't like Electron because of it's resource heavy nature but it's been a boon to us Linux users who have finally been getting a lot of cross platform apps and I truly appreciate that.

getting a Mac is generally not an option - it's too expensive just for a few GUI apps (and overall pushes the bar of development quiet a bit higher) and in all honesty, it's not great for the developer ecosystem to stick to one platform either (new Macbook with the touch-bar is a good reminder of that).

I am currently fortunate enough to own and work on OS X, but I do remember when I was in university with a Lenovo T420 running Ubuntu 12.04 having issues with quite a lot of tools when I was just getting started.

Agreed that Electron has been a great boon to Linux users. There is no need to loose that.

If the app was built with RNs layout API, you could continue supporting Electron via React Native Web. But there are awesome upcoming projects like Proton Native that support Linux UI properly on top of libUI.

There was a react-native-ubuntu experiment that unfortunately died down because it forked RN, rather than the Windows approach of using real RN releases.

Gtk+, Qt, wxWidgets, JUCE, Eto, ....

There are quite a few options without packing a browser engine with the application.

If that is the only way to get applications on Linux, then we should just all move to ChromeOS and dump the Linux desktop attempts as is.

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