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Comment by user432678 | Hacker News Reader

Following the author for some time and his main point is that “electron” won already, even despite the fact that the author himself doesn’t like it. And he’s not wrong. Majority of desktop users probably don’t care already if it’s native look or not (don’t cite me on that). The goal of the project to provide a way creating quite performant desktop apps with a DX of Clojure. And it’s a nice goal.

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There's no native app, even on desktops. There are a bazillion of different UI frameworks with different look & feel on Windows alone, even within Microsoft products. On Linux or macOS, the situation is no better.

Native is what doesn't run in an emulator, in this case everything non-Electron fits the definition.

There are native apps, but appa are native to a desktop environment rather than to an operating system.

Unfortunately desktop environments on some proprietary operating systems are themselves comprised of apps written with different toolkits and bearing different looks and feels. But that's just a problem specific to them. KDE apps are all maybe to Plasma, GNOME apps are all native to GNOME.

WinUI 3 aims to be native, but of course Windows is a tapestry of many eras of Microsoft UI styles. If Microsoft doesn't again change their mind on how Windows should look, then WinUI 3 is indeed the look and behaviour that people will be expecting on a Windows machine.

I can relate (I think). I mean, I don't care what the general look of the app is, even if gimmicky of what native desktop looks, as long as the design, general aesthetic, and cohesion are kept well defined, structured and organized. I do not like Electron, I hate to have "little chromes" just so I can do X and Y. I crave true native apps, even if they still look kind of web'ish.

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