If you do that and open slack immediately afterwards it feels painful instantly. The difference in how it feels is quite scary.
There is NO "mandatory" electron apps... But there is some great software made with electron that has become very popular.
I am confident if something has been made with electron, there is native alternatives out there. Don't like slack? Then use IRC.
Don't like my joystick to keyboard/mouse remapper with an electron frontend? Then don't, use one of the many alternatives (Too bad if they don't provide what you are looking for and no one of them seems to be able to modulate output in order to emulate analog controls. But at least it was written by a pro!)
I do not use Slack. I use self-hosted Mattermost as a replacement of Slack, I use IRC, and I use Element (formerly known as Riot.im).
That only works if you can control what others use (maybe not in the case of Slack, but that's the exception as messengers go).
What people don't understand is that it's not a "mentality", it's an economic imperative.
It makes sense, business wise, to "throw more hardware at it", and "lowering the barrier to entry" obviously also means that somebody can develop something with lower costs/faster time to market.
It's not a question of spoiled devs.
It's a question of savvy business people.
People not understanding this don't understand how economics works.
Native does basically nothing for me that matters when it comes to accomplishing things. Just OS lock-in. Loading a little faster or being a little snappier is a small consolation.
Some people don’t care about coffee, caffeine and brown slop is good enough.
Some people do care. I feel the difference in native and it’s worth it for apps you spend lots of time in.
Electron and Qt are not in the same league.
No, they're certainly not. Qt takes a lot of effort to produce apps that look like garbage on every OS while Electron takes no effort to produce apps that look great everywhere. VLC Media Player - arguably the most popular Qt app - looks like dog shit.
Qt will have you coding in an old shitty programming language or using duct-tape and glue to bind it to a more popular language while Electron will have you coding in the most popular programming language and getting things done in a fraction of the time.
Qt is register-ware that is moving closer to being closed-source while Electron is 100% open source.
This! The old joke of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping for Emacs is not relevant today any more. Same will happen with Electron, developer productivity will trump anything.
Especially the fact that the “hardware resources” isn’t even your cost it’s your customers cost.
This is why, the devs who settle for Electron more often than not are not interested in doing cross browser support either.