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Comment by elliotlarson | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree with this. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I feel like Electron is really helping here. I've been a Mac user since 2003, but built an Ubuntu based desktop recently. The fact that I can run Figma, VSCode, Slack, etc. means it's actually a workable solution. I know Electron is slow, but I don't think producing native software for Linux is economically viable or commercially interesting for a lot of companies. But if a company is building with Electron, I get the impression that it's not a lot of extra work to support Linux and it means the platform actually gets an app. Ironically, I think this will make Linux a more reasonable choice for day to day work and will eventually result in increasing the economic viability of producing software for the platform.

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I love to hate electron. We all groan about it. But it does bring critical apps I use every day to my desktop. I wish these multi-billion dollar companies like Slack could stomach real native clients, sure they can afford it at a barely noticeable hit to profit, but I’ll take it ya know.

I agree and think that web apps and the SaaS model in general help Desktop Linux adoption a lot.

Office 365 provides good enough Web Apps to get by without having a native Office installation. I don't have any commercial Desktop Software that I'd need specifically for my work: CRM, issue tracker, Documentation, Figma,... - all available in the Browser.

Personally, I wish PWAs were generally better supported so I could skip the Electron bit and could install the same app on my phone. Being a part of the main browser gives better resource handling, better sandboxing that Electron allows but I would prefer most apps didn't have, and access to the extensions I want. Too bad Firefox killed off SSB (site-specific browser) before it even launched.

That would work for Slack and Spotify, but not for VSCode. PWAs can't get file system access as far as I know.

PWAs have limitations, yes. But you just mentioned how 2 of the biggest Electron users could not use Electron without sacrificing much if anything.

I think once you're in this other territory then you should consider full native instead of Electron. Why you choose to use an editor housed in a browser engine with tracking baked into the application is your decision. There are plenty of other native editors, both GUI and TUI, a user can choose.

Nobody chooses VSCode specifically because it's in Electron, we choose it because it's a good editor.

Any app can send network requests, so any app can incorporate tracking. This has nothing to do with Electron either.

But to your original point: yes, the more Electron apps that are really just web apps and can be gotten as PWAs, the better.

PWA's only work when you are connected to the intenet for most of the time. Which is not guranteed on mobile. It is fine for some apps which need a connection to be usable like a messaging or a banking app. But others like productivity apps are useless. Sometimes the browser crashes on mobile as well.

At that point might as well make an app.

I'd say my non-browser apps crash more than the browser.

Offline is one of the biggest reasons to ship a full PWA. This is what service workers are for. The biggest reason to not ship a PWA is Apple barely supports them and you can't siphon as much user data if sandboxed in the browser.

I would LOVE if I could get a basic PWA from my bank that didn't have all of these permissions like trying to read if I'm rooted or not, location access, storage -- none of their business what I do with my device or where I am -- and I could still scan QR codes, check balance, do transfers.

Wasn't Java supposed to solve the platform problem?

Java was supposed to "write once, run anywhere". Instead it became write once, debug anywhere.

Since Electron folks don't want to debug anywhere they just ship Chrome along for the ride.

Ah but Google is taking over the Web and such, blame on all that help them achieve their goal.

Write once, debug everywhere.

FTFY.

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