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Comment by anoncake | Hacker News Reader

You found that you had to download too much bloat to use Okular so you made an Electron app? Im pretty sure you dont have to download all of KDE to use one of its apps, just the package manager and the libraries Okular uses.

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I can't confirm if this is still the case, but a couple years ago you had a web installer for KDE on Windows and I could just deselect everything except Okular and a couple other stuff I wanted and that came out to a couple hundred MB disk space overall.

That was the windows installer for KDE 4, yes. I used to install it on every windows PC I had to use.

From a quick check now it is possible to install individual applications (Okular is not there):

https://community.kde.org/Windows

But it's not the same thing. At the times one was able to install the while kde4. That's a cross platform app!

I found this, which seems to be a build of Okular for Windows: https://chocolatey.org/packages/okular

(I haven't tested it -- happy Okular Linux user here. It was linked from the site you linked, though.)

The Electron bloat of Polar buys you much better cross-platform features than the KDE bloat of Okular.

Okular is ok as long as you run only linux. In theory you could run it also on macOS or Windows, but you have to jump through the hoops. That's not optimal for a productivity application.

What kind of cross-platform features does Electron provide that Okular does not have?

I just told you: a friggin installer. All cross-platorm features are inconsequential if you can't easily distribute the application on multiple platforms in the first place.

Here in linux land we don't give a damn about installers. We prefer to install and update all software via a single interface.

"apt install okular" requires an extra 195 packages and 194MB of space on a Ubuntu machine I have handy.

It's not all of KDE, but...

Somehow I don't find 194 MB that bad if the proposed alternative suggests a 197 MB download as "probably easiest to install", but why let details like that let an opportunity to promote your project over someone elses go to waste... If someone with a Debian box handy wants to try how much in dependencies the .deb pulls in...?

The snap package linked in GP is also ~200MB. If you're the kind of person to be frugal with your hard drive, that's cool. But I don't think an electron app is the answer.

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