Ask HN: What tech to use for good old desktop apps? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What tech to use for good old desktop apps?

3 pointsnunodonato6 comments

So I'm currently planning 2-3 different apps which I "need" to scratch a few itches. I'm tired of web apps, so I'm planning to develop off-line desktop apps. I've been a bit out of this world so I'm not sure whats the best way to go forward in terms of tech.

Electron seems to be a good option for someone who, like me, has webdev experience. Also, the huge amount of JS libraries allows you to do plenty of cool stuff (one of my apps needs to deal with audio). But I also know it takes a regular share of criticism.

So apart from that, what are the options for having good features and good GUIs? I'm on linux, but having windows versions working would be neat as well.

.NET sounds like a good contender, but my (brief) research revealed I may have a hard time working with more advanced stuff in audio.

All advice appreciated!

You should probably explain why you're tired of web apps. You can make them work offline and support other "native" features with service workers and other new APIs. If you already have a browser process running, starting such a progressive web app doesn't take any longer and any more resources then opening a website, so the typical criticism of electron doesn't apply.

I'm very open to using Electron, actually it looks like the best option so far, just wanted to know what else is there. I'm not interested in webapps in the sense of maintaining a server, user accounts, etc.

For anything you can do as an electron app, unless you need some API that the browser doesn't support, you can also do a single page app, use a CDN like vercel to host it and localStorage/indexedDB to store any user related data. No servers or accounts needed.

If you are looking to do audio on the desktop then juce is a nice helper if you're looking to work with c++ https://juce.com/

Check out Flutter, it has good desktop support and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux via natively compiled code, so not like Electron which comes with a browser.

"tired of web apps", "i'm on linux", wants to "develop off-line desktop apps".

All the key motivations for writing emacs lisp packages.

Given you're a web jockey, I suspect emacs is a non-starter but you did say all advice appreciated.

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