this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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I know it's easy to dunk on Electron... but have any of yall written any desktop apps with native frameworks? I wrote a small GTK4+Vala app once and I discovered desktop frameworks are very different than developing webapps. Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you're not supposed to customize it.) Web development is waaaaaaaay more friendly towards customization. Which as a company, you want your app to look like your company, not some generic OS bundled app.
And then you have to repeat all that effort for crappleOS and Wangblows?... And then you gotta hope that it's even possible to do the thing you want in different OSes. Sheesh.
I mean, I'd be happy if everything was native apps, but I also understand why people don't tend to choose that route.
Once upon a time, we differentiated our apps based on their capabilities and gave them a consistent interface so people who knew how to use Windows|Linux|MacOS apps would already be familiar with how they operated. Now we differentiate on looks/user experience, and many of them arent capable at all.
People took the wrong lessons from beautiful GUI design. Anyone who felt it was just aesthetics missed the point. It wasn’t just flashy UI on what boils down to a database.
Sometimes all of this is there for a reason. I used to really hate standard Windows (and I still do) but it had one big advantage: everything was accessible, in the sense that it all worked very well for blind and vision-impaired people. Usually when people create their own custom look and feel etc. they never accommodate accessibility at all.
That's kind of the point of the frameworks though? Electron apps suck not only because of resource footprint, they don't look and feel native, if they have any accessibility it's usually custom and different for every program. Too much customization is bad.
I remember the times before UI toolkits took over. These programs had soul and were beautiful in their own way, but you had to learn how UI elements worked in each of them separately. The same thing happens with web apps now. Tab and the other usual keyboard shortcuts rarely work, controls are all custom.
100%, but man these are making me nostalgic.
Then I have a read for you this Sunday: https://www.datagubbe.se/utildisks/
X-Copy with 81 sectors?! What kind of madness is that?
Dated 1993, so probably it deals with some advanced copy protection from impossible sectors? Idk
Consistency of UI used to be treasured.
Holy shit, he figured it out!
So yeah, it turns out that platform human interface guidelines are a thing, and for good reason.
Honesty Electron is fine as a concept
The problem lies with the implementation. I see no reason why many of these apps couldn't just be links to a website.
Sorry but the window real estate of an application isn't meant for branding and advertisement. For that you have splash screens and the about dialogue, or even the help pages. And for more branding your webpage.