I am really hoping that this kind of projects will get popular and give an incentive to write actual Desktop apps that are thought as Desktop apps instead of bundling a webapp into a browser and shipping them together.
From my Android experience, Compose is really really cool (it's similar to Flutter and I believe SwiftUI, I guess that's just the modern way). If that worked well on Desktop... I think it would be great.
I don't want a cross-platform UI framework, because Desktop is IMO fundamentally different from Mobile (e.g. mouse vs touch, big screen vs small screen, ...). But sharing libraries seems to make sense. Then from those one builds separate Desktop and Mobile apps of course.
Windows 11 has compatibility that enables it to run applications written 15 years ago using, say, .NET framework 3.5 and Windows Forms. Those even work on Linux with Wine, providing a more stable ABI for programming Linux desktop apps than anything that's native to the Linux world. Wine for macOS might even bring these apps to macOS too in the future. -- So, despite the fact that those developers 15 years ago were testing on Windows XP and didn't know what my environment would look like in 2023, or that I might not even be running Windows, those applications just work.
And the libraries of UI components available through these tech stacks make Compose for Desktop look like a laughable toy.
It was only the generations of technology that came after that had persistent compatiblity problems and made you shoot for a constantly moving target. ...all we need is to get back something we've lost, which doesn't seem like such an impossible proposition at all, at least on the engineering front. Whether there's a business-will just because there's an engineering-way is a whole other question, though.
Between that, the RAM requirements, and the overall sluggishness of Electron-based apps, I’m not impressed. They’ve had what, a decade now to get their house in order?
It’s Java on the desktop all over again. Except now there’s a hegemony demanding that all dev be as cheap and shoddy as possible, so everyone just shrugs and moves along.
What was the problem with Java on the desktop? Maybe I was a bit too young to remember. I just remember that Java apps looked "funny".
But in my experience with the JetBrains apps in the last 8 years... JVM rocks.
I hate ElectronJS though.
Nowadays I have few issues with JVM apps on the desktop other than non-native UI, but that ship sailed a long time ago. And yes, JetBrains is a great example of how to do this well.