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> The worst one is the single UIs for Windows and Macs. There are some ways to customize them but not as heavily as it is possible with Linux.

Which is why Windows and Mac still get native UIs for many desktop products, while Linux if a product actually targets it, gets Electron.

Do they? There's no lack of Electron UIs on Mac and Windows. What's even a native widget library on Mac and Windows today? Do Swift-UI and WinUI (v3 nowadays) count? It's not as clear cut as it was in 2000s.

Yes they do, that is why I clearly mentioned "still".

Native widget libraries is whatever the OS vendor puts on the SDK, and ships on the installers for their compilers.

The large majority of Electron apps that happen to land on Mac and Windows land, usually come from GNU/Linux shops, that also feel like targeting other operating systems, and since that is the solution for GNU/Linux, they dump it into everyone else.

In the process they help Google take over the browser ecosystem, and then talk about how M$ used to be all over the place with IE.

Native widgets libraries were historically those, who were only one that knew, how to talk to the display server. So if you wanted to write another widget library, you had to link to them anyway, to use them as a proxy. That's how Qt, for example, runs on Windows or Mac, using the old win32 api or Cocoa.

But meanwhile, the OS vendors got creative and pumped out a bunch of new, _more modern_ libraries, which have abilities that the old, "system" ones do not have. You want Acrylic design on Windows? Better be satisfied with WinUI -- which, in v3 is the recommended way to write native applications by the platform owner, and which is decoupled from system releases and from Windows SDK.

Electron apps are coming from any shop, that want to throw together some installable, locally running app and figured out, that paying HTML+CSS devs is cheaper, than paying C++ (or ObjC) ones. Having shorter development time is also something positive. It has nothing to do with Linux shops; there are Electron apps, that could be running on Linux if there was a will, but aren't (Whatsapp), or almost-electron-but-edge_webview-instead (Teams).

In 2024, the recomend ways to write GUIs in Windows are Win32 (your native widgets library), exposed by WinForms. WPF has parity with WinUI 3, in recomended way by the platform owner, officially communicated at BUILD 2024.

Doubled down at .NET Conf 2024 during the last week.

Regardless of the GUI framework from Apple, and Microsoft, those are managed bindings to the underlying native APIS (Win32 and Cocoa), which is why they also expose handles to do lowlevel stuff if one so desires, coding like 2000.

Webviews are a different matter, as they don't require shipping Chrome with the application.

It definelty has a lot to do with Linux shops, as they can't be bothered to support GNOME, KDE, Sway, XFCE, or whatever everyone else uses, so Electron it is.

And then they want Mac OS and Windows customers as well.

> In 2024, the recomend ways to write GUIs in Windows are Win32 (your native widgets library), exposed by WinForms. WPF has parity with WinUI 3, in recomended way by the platform owner, officially communicated at BUILD 2024.

So maybe Microsoft should update their own guides then: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/get-started/?...

| Many apps for Windows are written using Win32, Windows Forms, or UWP. Each of these frameworks is supported and will continue to receive bug, reliability, and security fixes, but varying levels of investment for new features and styles. For more information about these app types see the following tabs.

Yes, in Build 2024, there was backpedaling back to WPF, since WinUI is in terrible shape.

> Webviews are a different matter, as they don't require shipping Chrome with the application.

Electron also doesn't ship Chrome with application; it ships the rendering engine (blink) and javascript engine (v8). Which is exactly the same, as edge webview. Unlike edge webview, they are not dragged in by Microsoft Edge, the browser (so you get it whether you have an use for it or not).

> It definelty has a lot to do with Linux shops, as they can't be bothered to support GNOME, KDE, Sway, XFCE, or whatever everyone else uses, so Electron it is.

So how do you imagine such support would look like? I know a thing or two about development on linux, but I have no idea what would supporting XFCE or Sway explicitly in an app would involve. Unless you hyperbolize, right?

The only real decision would be choosing Gtk or Qt; the desktop environments have no real impact on your app and with Qt, you are getting the multiplatform support, that is supposedly behind the electron usage of those linux shops.

Also, what exactly are those linux shops, that target multiplatform by using electron? Is it like Cisco? Or Meta? Maybe Bitwarden? Discord? Figma? Microsoft (skype, vscode)?

Rollout of Wayland has not been the smoothest and I think among its major issues is the slow pace of development - it took it 10+ years to become default and certain features present in X11 are still missing. Having said that, after I switched to KDE Plasma 6 with Wayland (on Intel and AMD graphics), I've noted a significant improvement in responsiveness and snappiness of the desktop. I know nothing of how Wayland works, but I assume this is the reason the replacement was needed in the first place. I had to replace my GPU from NVIDIA to AMD, but I don't regret it (all my deep learning compute is on the HPC cluster anyway).

One reason was, that the security model wasn't enough anymore. E.g. every application was trusted and can listen to key inputs e.g. steal passwords and credit card infos. Btw there was an issue that screenshotting in wayland was not possible. But easy in X11 because everything was visible.

Don't know much about the architecture about wayland but I think grahic driver handling changed in wayland too.

>The reason is that everybody has a different workflow, different aesthetic preferences, different ways of doing things

>The worst one is the single UIs for Windows and Macs. There are some ways to customize them but not as heavily as it is possible with Linux.

You're right, and I forgot to touch on this before. Just look at Windows for instance: it's not a monolithic thing, because it's changed over time. Lots of Windows users criticize the new(er) versions, and say that Win7 was the peak of the Windows UI. Lots of people absolutely hated the new "Metro* UI in Win8. So clearly there's no agreement there either, so how could there possibly be broad agreement in Linux?