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Comment by leetharris | Hacker News Reader

Yes. It is by far the easiest way to make a nice looking cross platform app. If you can't handle the extra RAM you are always welcome to use the CLI

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I wouldn't call Electron apps nice looking. They always stand out like a sore thumb, being slow and non-native.

https://www.qt.io/product/ui-design-tools

Depends on how much one actually bothers to look around.

Buying specialized tool, hiring C++ UI devs just to create your average HTML page and make a couple of snob tech-bros happy, great investment.

When one goes free, it gets the quality they deserve.

I guess anything goes helping Google to spread Chrome all over the place, it gives them a warm feeling.

Chromium is open source

And?

Not sure what you meant by your first sentence, but if I understand correctly - you’re just proving my point.

s/C++ UI/React/

The statement still holds. This one is just the status quo

Tooling for React is miles ahead of anything C++ UI related while being “free” and free.

Only thing I can't handle is how Red Hat, with its bllions, can't afford a few extra dollars for user-respecting, secure native GUIs.

I hate Electron apps, too, but I've not heard people complain about security before. What's the security problem with Electron apps?

I understand that you're basically running a Node.js instance for each app, but why is that more insecure than running, say, a GTK app? Since GTK and Node.js are written in C and C++, respectively, my gut instinct would be to assume they're equally likely to have security bugs.

Quick search https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...

The difference is that no-one would load remote-user-supplied C++ code at runtime and expect it not to result in vulnerability, but people remotely source JS, or allow remote-user-supplied HTML to interact with their JS, and the stakes are higher than they would be in a web browser, because Node (and therefore Electron) has APIs to e.g. read and write to your filesystem and browsers have sandboxes to block that.

(Electron offers sandboxing too, but you're likely to actually want to use the OS features so it's not as simple as always disallowing the access.)

Why does a linux-only tool need a cross-platform app?

It's not linux only? Podman desktop runs on Windows (I'm using it right now) and Mac

Even if it were Linux only, it’s not like GUI and application bundling is standardized across distros.

It effectively is if you're ready to ship your dependencies. If you're happy to depend on major versions that come with the system, qt isn't bad either.

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