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Comment by friedman23 | Hacker News Reader

> At the end of the day, so many people fail to realize the success of Electron is in making desktop applications so much more approachable for those that are mainly front-end focused developers/hackers

Front end focused? It makes desktop apps accessible period. Someone inevitably mentions QT in these conversations. Find me a single successful QT based app. Electron is really the only cross platform option.

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> Someone inevitable mentions QT in these conversations. Find me a single successful QT based app.

Let me start with Telegram. The ux is universally liked (yes, even by the Mac crowd!)

> Front end focused? It makes desktop apps accessible period.

If someone just wanted to create cross platform applications quickly and push them upon people who don't have a choice (i.e. in an enterprise) there always used to be Java Swing as well.

Far easier than Electron, even approaching VB6-simplicity in GUI design, but with a sane language behind.

So, GP was right: It makes it easier for frontend devs.

Edit: yes, a lot.

>Find me a single successful QT based app

What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#Applications_usi...

What a weird thing to say. Ableton, 3ds Max, Photoshop Elements, Google Earth, Mathematica... Qt probably has a longer list of success stories than any other cross platform UI toolkit.

One might wonder if this comes up because qt is a good cross-platform toolkit... which is to say, it promptly fades into the background and you don't notice you're using it.

Musescore? Wireshark? Transmission? TeXStudio?

I don't want to be dismissive and those apps are definitely successful and good at what they do but they all look like they were designed in the early 2000s. And I'm pretty sure some were.

And that's good. Early 2000s had a consistent no-nonsense look made for real work, instead of this fad with every application trying to mimic a phone app or a startup landing page.

Good? I wouldn't say it's good, it's completely neutral and unrelated to morality. There is so much emotional and moral language that goes on in every discussion about electron that is just not relevant. People talk about "wasted resources", we aren't talking about plastic bags here. Electron apps aren't bitcoin or fossil fuels. If we were to take a look at things contributing to climate change electron would be irrelevant to the future of our planet.

No-nonsense? Why does software have to be no-nonsense? I'd prefer for software to be beautiful.

I would say that there is an indirect consequence to wasteful resource usage: e-waste. I have a pile of old laptops and cell phones that are still perfectly functional hardware-wise but are basically useless because of the bloat of modern software. Sure, one electron app using hundreds of MB of RAM doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but when you run 6 of them and your machine only has 2 GB of RAM, now more than half your RAM is gone. And for what? A "beautiful" software experience? I'd take a functional and fast program over a "beautiful" one any day, no question.

Good means many things. Pleasing. Useful. Not just virtuous.

People complaining about resources mean the limited resources of their computers usually. But it does lead to wasted natural resources by making hardware obsolete faster. And wasted financial resources. And slow and inconsistent interfaces waste cognitive resources.

No nonsense means functional. Not ugly.

Keep in mind that there are maybe 100 or more users with electron apps for each cryptocurrency miner.

You just show how disconnected this discussion is from reality.

The goalpost was

> Find me a single successful QT based app.

And you've been provided a long list. Please don't move the goalpost.

If you are into 3d printing or design, Fusion 360 is another application you might encounter.

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