Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

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> It lets you easily build a cross-OS app on a super optimised, stable and secure platform ... Storage is cheap, and what is 500mb when working with 4K video anyways, so optimising for size is mostly a waste of time

I get this perspective from the developer point of view, but I'm not a video editor. I'm a person who occasionally edits videos. Elsewhere in this thread I mentioned that I use vidcutter, a free and open source tool that does the same basic task. After installation it takes 14 MB on my Linux distribution (it's a 4 MB download).

The thing is, I have dozens or hundreds of tiny little utilities like this installed that make one-off tasks that I do once a month or so much easier. I can't afford for them to be Electron based on my 128 GB SSD. For people who edit videos every day it's obviously not an issue, but I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people who use tools like this don't use them every day. Maybe not even every week. All this extra space adds up.

I think, in fairness, that a lot of the anti-Electron criticism comes from Linux users like myself. Windows users expect to have everything packaged as one gigantic binary with all the dependencies. (Vidcutter is a 175 MB download on Windows.) This strikes most of us as "poorly engineered", which for some is already enough of a reason not to use something. On Linux, the norm is that distribution maintainers put together a package with the dependencies separate, and these are shared between multiple packages. Electron applications are rarely distributed this way, and that's the biggest part of the problem and the source of a lot of the bloat from a Linux user's perspective.

> I get this perspective from the developer point of view

I'd argue also for most end users' point of view as they will most likely get a more stable app when the average developer doesn't have to write C/C++.

> The thing is, I have dozens or hundreds of tiny little utilities like this installed that make one-off tasks that I do once a month or so much easier. I can't afford for them to be Electron based on my 128 GB SSD.

That's a fair point. I also feel the pain of installing large apps on my MacBook with 256GB SSD. But I think I would still take a large app with all the other benefits than an app that might SEGFAULT all the time, but is small because it's written in C/C++ (like what has been my experience with avidemux for example).

> On Linux, the norm is that distribution maintainers put together a package with the dependencies separate, and these are shared between multiple packages

I get this point, and I used to be an avid Gentoo user myself so I compiled everything from scratch and liked the small size and efficiency of a dynamically linked system. I think the biggest drawback with this approach is that sometimes sharing libraries with "compatible" versions will cause bugs because those versions actually have certain tiny differences that cause bugs to appear, whereas with a static build you lock down the whole dependency tree (except the OS level libs), so you know almost for sure that the app is going to work exactly the same regardless of the system you run it on.

Actually because the bundled JS itself is quite small for LosslessCut (32MB), it would be theoretically possible to bring-your-own electron (even from source), e.g. use a single system-installed electron that can be shared by many different electron apps, as well as use the system installed ffmpeg. Then you could run `electron Resources/app.asar`. It might be possible to setup such a minimal build.

> they will most likely get a more stable app when the average developer doesn't have to write C/C++.

vidcutter is written in Python, built on top of Qt, which is very stable.

I very rarely have to cut video. I used to use vidcutter, but I now use LosslessCut. My experience with LC has been far better than with vidcutter. I've never even considered going back to vidcutter. I don't entirely disagree with your criticism, however the reality of the usage can easily outweigh these points (for me, obviously). Which is just to say I would recommend trying it if you haven't.

It's quite possible that LC is far better than vidcutter, I agree. Another reply to me mentioned better keyboard shortcuts, for example. I don't think this speaks to the point of whether or not the extra storage usage is justified, though, as building the application in Electron doesn't necessarily translate to a better experience.

In fact one of the reasons people dislike Electron is that it tends to result in a non-native UI appearance, which can make an application harder to learn and use.

> On Linux, the norm is that distribution maintainers put together a package with the dependencies separate, and these are shared between multiple packages.

honest question from a non-linux user - how much time do you spend in dependency hell? dynamic linking all the things sounds like a recipe for constant nightmare

I've never dealt with dependency hell, even once, on my current distribution. When necessary, distributions can ship multiple versions of a library and the software that requires each version will be linked appropriately. Basically, the answer is that the distribution is supposed to solve all these problems for you - and it does in fact work out that way in practice 99% of the time.

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