What happend to using native platform controls?
All these toolkits look out of place on any platform.
All these toolkits look out of place on any platform.
This appears to be X11-specific, and X11 essentially does not have native platform controls. Also if you're in X11 you've quite likely already given up any real hope of all your windows looking the same. You also seem to be casually assuming this would be cross-platform, but this would be the equivalent of implementing something in raw Win32 API calls. There's zero cross-platform concerns here, on the grounds it'll never be cross-platform. In fact, given that it's pretty likely the move to Wayland would be completed by the Linux community before this project could reach a point where it would be something you might consider using seriously for a non-trivial project, it's debatable whether it's even good for one platform.
Sometimes there's violating your own rules to push the State of the Art forward and this will eventually become the new standard. Then there's violating your own rules because you don't value consistency.
Most organizations with enough software are pretty guilty of that latter one, but destroying any semblance of consistency because it is economically convenient for the development team doesn't seem like a step forward to me.
Also, a big part of an individual’s platform preference boils down to things like conventions, look + feel, workflow, etc. By using electron one is tossing these choices made by the user in the garbage bin in favor of whatever the developer feels like supporting or what the designer thinks would be fun to design.
Besides, I wasn't talking specifically about electron-based apps, I was talking about apps in general which don't use the native widget toolkits.
Also, I can't speak for everyone, but my preference for a platform boils down to whether it provides a Unix shell and how pushy it is about forcing me to download updates or upload personal information. Consistent widget look and feel just doesn't matter when I spend most of my time in a browser or shell anyways.
Other multi-platform toolkits do not do better. They all violate platform's conventions. QT, Swing, GTK and co do have their own look and feel and conventions that do not match the platform's they are in, so I don't see how worst the web is in that aspect. Don't single out web techs on that specific aspect.
That said, I favor projects that have per-platform true native clients with a platform agnostic core over those that chase the “dream” of write once run everywhere. Transmission is a great example of how well this can work.
more and more windows applications are theming/drawing their own look and feel onto their UIs to give more consistency across the organization's applications rather than consistency with windows.