The thing with Electron et al is that the GUI dev tools on it are the best thing humanity's come up with, by a country mile. It's vastly, vastly easier to develop a really good, clean app, with a great UI in it — especially a UI that needs lots of unique, new components that aren't in an OS-level GUI api's standard set. You compare really well-built electron apps (VSCode, Discord) with their competition, and it's such a staggering, one-sided comparison in "fit and finish", attention to detail, and not having weird little bugs that never get fixed. I say this as a former OS partisan, but even Apple, previously the trophy-holder for "best gui-builder tools", is way behind the curve. Steam, too, is now an electron app.
The thing that's just the brutal nail in the coffin is — if it just had the attributes mentioned above, it'd be a huge win. But to have "nearly perfect cross-platform support out of the box with no effort?" Jesus.
The thing about electron is — some 5 years from now, we're likely to start shipping electron apps that run on WebASM rather than JS, and at that point, there won't be any valid counterargument. They'll have all the benefits, and run just as fast and lean. Game over.
I'd argue that Steam isn't 'now' an electron app but was the OG 'electron' app. The store and community interface have always been web UI from day one.
Originally it wrapped the IE/trident engine and then transitioned to chromium.
> The thing with Electron et al is that the GUI dev tools on it are the best thing humanity's come up with, by a country mile. [...] even Apple, previously the trophy-holder for "best gui-builder tools
You've never used Delphi, FP/Lazarus, or even Visual Basic, have you?
The thing that's just the brutal nail in the coffin is — if it just had the attributes mentioned above, it'd be a huge win. But to have "nearly perfect cross-platform support out of the box with no effort?" Jesus.
The thing about electron is — some 5 years from now, we're likely to start shipping electron apps that run on WebASM rather than JS, and at that point, there won't be any valid counterargument. They'll have all the benefits, and run just as fast and lean. Game over.