Because nobody is investing in native UI development. Electron is proof that if there were a simple to use GUI stack that companies would adopt it.
But if I want to, say, develop the app for Windows. That is easy. You get a tiny binary to just opens a form and runs with a double click. No install necessary.
The same thing on Linux? Impossible. There is no guarantee the machine has any version of GTK or Qt installed at all, so to be self-contained you need to ship the entire OS. Now your file size is huge. I can't use Python, because now Windows users need to have Python or I have to ship an interpreter.
The only plausible alternative is something like Java. Now you have a single .jar file that runs on any system. But then Oracle changed the license, and JavaFX is no longer part of Java (Swing still is).
Honestly, I just want to display a menubar with keyboard shortcuts. Why can't there be a menubar VM or something that gives me access to a menubar on all OS's without having to deal with all of this. We are already shipping the entire browser with Electron. That is stupid. The way it should work is users install a something like Flash but for desktop apps and every app just uses that platform.
It's probably easier to ship a DOS game than a desktop app because everyone who wants to run a DOS game will just have a DOS emulator installed.
This will run on Windows, Linux, MacOS, and Tcl's starkit/starpack system makes it easy to generate a single executable file for each OS that can just be copied over and run without any installation needed.
So don't be self-contained. I mean, you depend on an X server or Wayland, right? So why not depend on GTK or Qt being available?
(Of course, it _is_ tricky to be able to depend on any of several versions of these, but still.)
On Linux that doesn't happen. First of all you HAVE to ship the source code if you want it to keep working on every machine because people need to compile it on their machine for it to work, so you're practically forced to open source your desktop app. I know the notion of having a closed source app on Linux sounds weird, but it's more weird that this isn't an option as a side-effect of the how the whole system is designed. Second of all, even if you do ship the source code, you're going to be forced to maintain it. If you made an app in GTK 1 (which looks beautiful, by the way, compared to modern GTK), people won't be able to just install it because GTK 1 is so old that it's no longer in the repositories.
An app made in Java 8 runs in the modern VM. An app made for Windows 95 still runs on modern Windows.
It's only on Linux that I feel like the developer is pressured to open source it and make it the user's problem because the system won't provide support.
Binary compatibility means closed source has a chance to grow in an ecosystem. It requires "responsible" developers to put more effort into designing APIs and keeping them alive. It adds complexity that requires a more stable set of long-term developers; in contrast, the constant churn in FOSS requires lower barriers for contributions. With stable APIs/ABIs you have to live with decade-long mistakes. You cannot "just fix it" in a next major bump.
You mean openssl? That said, if we can have /dev/tcp, why we can't have /dev/ssl?
That's so very not true.
Most Linux distros allows for custom repositories. So you can just setup the build infrastructure on your side and then have the users include your repos on their side. No need to open source code and users have painless update notifications.
> It's only on Linux that I feel like the developer is pressured to open source it and make it the user's problem because the system won't provide support.
Lots of users have never seen the source code of their software, they just get the binary package. The pressure you're talking about is imaginary.
WINE is often somewhat jokingly called a more stable platform for Windows programs than Windows is but there's truth there.
I’m not sure if Google actually already gave up on Fuchsia, I’d be surprised if the work actually stopped, but it’s clear now that it will not be a panacea and if it will ever get released and gets some traction, it’s still like a decade away from becoming a major OS.
It's basically like building a website with div and basic CSS.
gpui-component exists: https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component
Up until sometime late 2025 GPUI wasn't even on crates.io, and it seems like the GPUI-component ecosystem still promotes using git deps. It was also in "read the code for docs" state for a very long time
It's been a while since I've used it, but there were weird things missing too like the Scollbar was located in Zed's UI component crates instead of core GPUI. Arbitrary text selection also is not possible, which is something I really value about egui.
What we need is a framework that is easy to use, cross platform, open source, and ideally can be used from your programming language of choice.
There's at least Qt, GTK, umm, and, I guess Juce and wxWindows, right? Oh, I see there are more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_G...
Can you explain what's deficient about the first two I mentioned?
Arcane build system. I mean, I guess it technically supports CMake these days, but I have never been able to get anyone else's Qt project to build without much gnashing of teeth.
Emulated native widgets try for pixel-perfect, but tend to feel wrong somehow.
> Gtk
Outside of a Linux/Gtk native environment, Gtk applications are awful. Take GIMP on macOS, for example: it's had window focus issues (export dialog getting lost behind the main application window) literally ever since Gtk on macOS dropped the XQuartz dependence. And that's the flagship application for the toolkit.
I looked at this: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/cmake-get-started.html ... and I'll admit they seem to be hiding some nasty stuff under the hood. But it still seems workable. I guess the devil is in the details?
Granted, not the best measure of memory usage. But the GTK 2 version was 30mb.
That's one word that should never been used in an design meeting. None of the GUI I've used has managed to do this right. Even Emacs and Firefox. The platform are totally different (and in the case of Linux/Unix, there's a lot of different HIG competing). So trying to be cross platform is a good illustration of the lesson in https://xkcd.com/927/
The best bet should be a core with the domain with a UI shell. And then you swap the shell according to the platform.
So why would you want Discord to be consistent, when you're mostly using the same desktop (or switch between at most two) for hours.
The thing is when HIG were followed instead of everyone trying to create their "brand", everyone knows where the common actions were. You learned the platform and then can use any app. With the new trend, you would only have one computer, but any new app is a new puzzle to figure out.
Two apps can have different CSS while being easy to understand because the core flows and ideas are the same. While many older native apps feel like junk draw UI with crap thrown everywhere and weird app specific quirks and patterns. Even if it all does use native inputs and windows.
I've rarely seen that turn out very well. Typically it works ok on whatever desktop main developers use, and not so much on the others. That means using multiple frameworks, witht their own idioms and quirks and having to repeat a lot of work. Unless your UI is very simple it is pretty expensive to maintain multiple separate versions of it.
Yes. It’s more work than dumping Electron on users. Quality often is.
I think we'd all be better off if we just declared qt the standard gui library and rid ourselves of the chaos we find ourselves in
I think it is more of a staffing problem. Plenty of people know web development, so you want to use those people for desktop as well. Having desktop be JS (electron) helps a lot with that.
> These days the term native app is so confused it's hard to come up with a definition that doesn't include electron.
Electron is _not_ native.