Electron is a widely hated framework on Linux, but what about the alternatives like Neutralinojs?
In their own words: In Electron and NWjs, you have to install Node.js and hundreds of dependency libraries. Embedded Chromium and Node.js make simple apps bloaty — in most scenarios, framework weights more than your app source. Neutralinojs offers a lightweight and portable SDK which is an alternative for Electron and NW.js. Neutralinojs doesn’t bundle Chromium and uses the existing web browser library in the operating system (Eg: gtk-webkit2 on Linux). Neutralinojs implements a secure WebSocket connection for native operations and embeds a static web server to serve the web content. Also, it offers a built-in JavaScript client library for developers.
Do you experience alternatives like Njs to blend more in the desktop layout, install less junk, use less memory, are more compatible with Wayland,…?
https://tauri.app/ is very popular and does not need electron. It uses the OS native we view.
And 2.0 will support Android and iOS
I wanna use Rust to build mobile apps so bad. I don’t really know what I want to build, but I want to use Rust to do it
Reinvent Winamp for Android and iPhones.
It will?? When??
I don’t know, but probably soon. They release beta versions already.
Tau’ri, you say?
I have been using Tauri for a personal project of mine and I absolutely love it
what apps use Tauri? I only know about Dorion which doesn’t really work well from my experience
edit: ok so Dorion works well in an Ubuntu VM but it doesn’t have a build for any other distro :/ also i found this https://github.com/tauri-apps/awesome-tauri
Came here to say Tauri.
No matter how much I like an alternative to Electron. It cannot save me from bad Electron apps.
Are there any good electron apps? Like genuinely
VSCode and Obsidian work great.
Until you want to integrate with the system and use gtk window controls.
I hear great things about obsidian but I haven’t used it since it’s not open source
Im willing to give them a pass on that since they don’t vender lock the notes I’m taking.
Sure, but all it does it give you a nice UI for local markdown files. There’s no lock-in.
I will catch flak for this, but discord works fine. You could be fooled into thinking it’s native. Audio, video, attachments… pretty seamless. Zoom sucks ass though.
Count yourself lucky because discord desktop is one of the worst pieces of crap I’ve ever used
Na, Teams is worse than discord any day.
Desktop audio streaming has never worked. Bug report has been outstanding since the beginning and Discord has just… never addressed it.
You could be fooled into thinking it’s native.
It doesn’t look like a native app at all though. It’s not really following any operating system’s design guidelines.
It’s not like all native apps do either. It’s obviously a foreign toolkit. My point was there were no obvious issues accessing hardware, files, drag and drop, etc.
The best native apps do look native to the platform though.
Hey hey; discord is rumored to be doing ads now. No talking good about them!
Really? Even on windows I feel like it’s slow and you can tell it’s an electron app.
Is zoom Electon?
It looks like shit and feels like shit. I thought it was native tbh… given how chunky UI is. Looks like GDI programming to me. Or they took design from Android 2 and ported it to Desktop.
I’m at least 60% sure the Linux client is. Either way, it’s sandboxed as hell. I have to copy backgrounds to its own special snowflake folder or it can’t use them.
It starts to break down on Wayland though, screen sharing doesn’t work, drag and drop looks to work but errors when sending, and probably other things.
Edit: Yes I’m already running it with
--ozone-platform-hint=autoWell, Wayland support is something new for most distros. Can’t really fault the app for not being ahead of the curve.
Yeah, but also I really didn’t expect Zoom to have working screen sharing on wayland before discord.
I would say it’s seemless on Windows, not Linux.
I wouldn’t know, I don’t use Windows. But I have no complaints on Mint.
I don’t like Discord much, but don’t understand the dislike for the app. Perhaps because I use it rarely.
The company sucks, but the app works fine to me. I don’t get the hate either. I use the flatpak version in Linux and don’t feel any friction for it being an Electron app. There are native flatpak apps that cause me grief.
I haven’t use any alternatives, and haven’t developed with electron, but I know that there are another alternative – Tauri. It also uses web-view. It’s built in Rust and allows apps to be developed in JS (providing JS api) and in Rust.
What I can say – JS support won’t be cross-platform, like we have with NodeJS in electron. Special debug per platform might be required.
Have you tried Flutter? https://flutter.dev/
React Native is good, and isn’t just a web view. It uses native UI widgets so the apps feel truly native. Many Android and iOS apps use it, and Microsoft ported it to Windows and MacOS and use it in some of their apps (notably, the Xbox app, parts of Office, and parts of Windows like the old Mail app in Windows 10, use it). Unfortunately there’s no stable port for Linux :/
In theory, someone could port React Native to use Gtk, Qt, or WxWidgets, but I haven’t seen any such efforts recently - there’s a few old projects but they’ve all been abandoned.
Have you tried Flutter?
I didn’t develop on it, but I’ve used recently one app written in it and it was hot pile of garbage.
It was slow as a slug, and eat lot of CPU. I’ve also checked web eversion and was astonished as it rendered everything into canvas. It’s really poor design choice to render everything by app itself.
I guess it was just buggy app, but I didn’t try other apps in flutter, so can’t compare.
But web demo of flutter UI components with list box was also not so fast. But perhaps it’s just web version. Didn’t know any example of good flutter app.
The thing is, Linux Desktops dont have a unified WebView. I wonder how that would work on KDE and others
Tauri uses webkitgtk everywhere, including KDE.
Hm, I mean that is way better than using an entire Chrome browser, but KDE uses qtwebengine
True. If their goal is truly to use the “native” solution everywhere, they should use QtWebEngine on Qt desktops. For the most part, the advantage with Tauri isn’t so much that it’s using the “native” web engine, it’s that not every Tauri application has to bundle a full (probably outdated) web engine. On Linux, this is achieved regardless of whether WebKitGTK or QtWebEngine is used. The first Tauri application you install pulls in WebKitGTK if you didn’t already have it installed, then every subsequent application just uses the same one. I’m personally glad it’s using WebKitGTK despite being a Plasma user. The less we rely on Blink and Blink-based web engines, the better. Having to spend 100MB of my 1TB hard drive on WebKitGTK to achieve this isn’t making me lose a whole lot of sleep.
I suppose that is okay, and targeting a specific engine is likely needed, to have non-trivial features.
I believe it uses gtk-webview. So on KDE system you would use GTK as a base. But you anyway would have GTK libs in your system.
I’m using pywebview, a cross-platform python web view GUI framework. I like it so far, it’s fairly straightforward. I just wanted a python API around my database, and I’m building most of the app in the front-end with vanilla JS and html.
I didn’t want the (alleged) bloat of electron, and I didn’t want to jam async/await onto everything in the backend, so I found this alternative.
The 3rd contender was Tauri, but I didn’t want to bother learning Rust for a simple API. But it was very tempting, and Tauri is an option you should consider.
I haven’t finished my current project so I can’t completely vouch for pywebview yet. But so far it’s great and I recommend it if you don’t mind using python (I do long for a statically typed backend TBH).
If you need multi platform support in one codebase, Flutter is a good choice. Ubuntu uses it for their new OS installer and GUI package manager.
Quite easy to get set up on Linux (though the recommended route is using Snaps).
No waiting ages for a massive node_modules folder to fill up, nor the general pain of using javascript; dart is a really nice language to write in.
You wont get the smallest binaries with it, but it’s powerful, reliable, and pretty damn performant for a “non native” framework.
Second this. Been working with flutter and dart professionally for awhile now and it’s great
Alternative for what? I never used electron apps and I don’t see any reason for that. If you are a developer, try Qt.
Qt and Electron are different technologies that achieve somewhat different goals
Yet the telegram client is written in Qt and has great cross-platform support.
They have like 3 different, official codebases and clients (and so many 3rd party ones) for so many platforms. No other app I know of is like that, not really a great example imo
Qt and Electron are different technologies
Yes.
that achieve somewhat different goals
No.
You can’t get a website working as a “native” application with Qt, which is exactly what is Electron’s goal.
Which is why Electron reminds me of a little kid who’s just done some extremely difficult but utterlly pointless thing.
Websites belong in a browser. If it doesn’t work in any random standards-compliant browser, then you should be delivering it as a true native application, not some horrific fiji-mermaid-esque hybrid.
You are talking as if all people can make a native app with the same knowledge and amount of effort as it would take to develop a website.
Sometimes, web developers would want to go further with their app and deliever “native” functionality. Sometimes, a person wants to build an app but only happens to know how to build a website.
It’s a much more complicated matter than just some idiots deciding “let’s build an utterly pointless thing and then let other idiots build horrific fiji-mermaid-esque hybrids!!”.
https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2018/10/26/Walking-in-my-shoes/
Generally, my view is if it’s an electron app it’s going to be a crap user experience.
You are talking as if all people can make a native app with the same knowledge and amount of effort as it would take to develop a website.
No, not all people can’t do that, but I think they should learn. It will lead to better results. Or are you saying that web developers are inherently incapable of developing native applications?
Honestly it varies a lot. I’m the kind of user that would rather have self contained apps (even if electron) whenever possible instead of new browser tabs/windows. So unless a electron app is notoriously bad, I’d rather have it avilable than not
Sometimes raising the barrier to entry is a good thing.
Many Electron applications I’ve run across don’t make even a try at loading system settings. For me, that causes accessibility issues related to photosensitivity. For some reason, feeling like I’ve been stabbed in the eyeball when I try to open a program does not endear me to it or its framework.
No application at all is actually better than something built on Electron, as far as I’m concerned, because then there’s a chance that someone, somewhere, might fill in the gap with software I can actually use.
Electron needs to either actually provide the basics of native functionality, or go away.
Then they shouldn’t! Just give users website and be done with it.
Now you can even allow websites work offline and install them “like” an app with proper manifest.
There is a browser working natively in any system. I don’t see any point in bundling a web app together with a browser and calling it a “native” app. The only difference is that you have no address bar in that case.
I’ve just tried Qt based matrix client. Compared to Electron based Element.
It’s nice, snappy, beautiful, and eats WAY less RAM. But it lacks lot of feature. That’s sad.
