Switching to ripcord on my laptop was a breath of fresh air. I always wonder why don't these companies develop proper desktop clients that dont wreck mid range laptops...
As an older dev who's eye sight isn't as good as it was 30 years ago when I started, it's getting harder and harder to use native apps because the default fonts are so goddamn small.
Oh sure, you can dork around in the font preferences dialog and change some things, but there is no option to scale all of the UI (UI => Scale => 120%). It ends up being a hodgepodge of unreadable small text mixed with reasonably sized by but poorly styled and colored larger text that's nearly as hard to read because of the lack of space separating elements. Of course everything gets more crowded when you increase the size, instead of doing what it should do and also increasing the space between elements to let everything breath.
In an Electron app, I can Ctrl-+, Ctrl-+ and everything looks great. I have yet to find a single native app that I use regularly where this isn't an issue. The only ones that comes close (no surprise here) is Sublime Text.
These problems just don't happen with Electron apps. Electron technology may be slower than native, but it sure nails UI scaling. I'll take a UI I can actually see over one that runs more efficiently any day.
Honestly, I think it's an accessibility issue. Most devs are simply used to the small GUIs, so that's what they build. They don't give it any real thought or put any actual design effort into it. It's the same with accessibility, it's not my problem so it's not a problem. And while native GUI's help with some aspects of accessibility, they don't provide the tools to make scaling easy and obvious so it doesn't happen.
And that's why people throw fits about software being inaccessible, because it's literally unusable for them. I'm lucky, I just want everything to be 20% bigger by default because it makes my life a little easier. Others don't have that luxury. That 20% can be the difference between being able to use your software or not.
Even just focusing on the usability of zooming in a browser-- I wonder how much even the best Linux desktop environment (or even OSX) trails behind browsers. Off the top of my head:
* the obvious keybindings (even across browsers?) that are the same for tabs/windows regardless of the content inside them
* in FF the zoom percentage animates itself into existence when you go below or above 100%, then remains viewable and clickable to return to normal
* most of the popular web pages are designed for zooming so that text reflows in a readable manner when zoomed
* when zooming, fonts remain readable without the user fudging around with DPI or rendering settings that no mortal ought to understand
* zoom level and scroll position is remembered in case I click the back button
Well, the desktop doesn't even have a notion of the back button so I'd say we're already at least a few years ahead of the desktop.
It's an accessibility problem, not a resolution problem. Electron apps don't have this issue because you can resize each app individually to match your needs/screen settings. You can't do this with most native apps.
"Features
- Not made from a web browser"
Their first marketing bullet: "It's not made from a web browser" :D
Understanding on why Slack is unable to create a performant desktop-client for their users is beyond me. I also wasn't able to use Slack and Discord at the same time on my MacBook without it swapping on the SSD. So Ripcord seems to be a good lightweight alternative for me.
I just wish it supported Keybase Chat so I can ditch that Electron garbage too.
I suspect that "Why is Linux competitive with Windows" has many of the same answers, in the end.