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Comment by brodock | Hacker News Reader

I think we got there also by desperation of lacking good cross-platform GUI toolkits.

The current state is, you either use something that looks like Windows 95 in all platforms, or web app.

What the web made possible is to anyone to create a decent custom UI with little effort. I still remember how messed up was to create a custom component for Java Swing, which I believe is still one of the easiest to do. How would you do that for QT? GTK? WxWidgets? etc

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I'll take Win95 in a heartbeat; consistent, accessible, responsive and clear. Vastly superior to the majority of web interfaces.

Also totally inflexible, you better have the right-sized screen/resolution: too small and you can't see that "ok" button; too large and you'll have a ridiculously small and crammed winform to fill/see your information.

Most cross platform toolkits support layout managers, since Motif days.

Actually even WinForms supports them, even though too many are happily doing fixed canvas positioning without using them.

Windows has shipped an accessibility magnifier since the 90s, before hidpi was a thing.

Take a look at Telegram client, looks great on Linux, not sure how it looks on macos or Windows.

Interesting Telegram has both a native (Swift/Obj-C not sure which) and an cross-platform-codebase app for macOS. The former is called Telegram for macOS and the latter Telegram Desktop. Both are on the app store even. So it would actually be a very good case to compare performance, etc. The native one presumably shares a lot of code with iOS which is probably why it exists at all, and it supports secret chats. Otherwise they have similar but slightly different design and features.

However, I think the Telegram Desktop client is not Electron either, it is just regular C++ compiled on different systems.

Yes, Telegram Desktop is a normal C++ app: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop

So a cross-platform is quite easy, Electron one would need to be tested for different webviews on each system.

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