I wouldn't even begin to know where to start with Electron. There are so many web frameworks and they're all badly documented... whenever I have to make a website I usually start off thinking "Right, I'll do it the 'modern' way this time - with React or Vue... and Typescript.. and and do I need webpack? and...??" but there's so much badly-documented half-finished stuff out there I usually end up giving up and doing plain Javascript. Doesn't help that the modern web stack is a total hacky mess.

Not to mention, the HTML/CSS combo is possibly the best we've come up with for designing user interfaces.

Qt/QML abstracts over a ton of platforms, lets you write UI code in JavaScript, is extremely easy to pick up, has a WYSIWYG drag-n-drop editor and consumes a small fraction of the resources Electron does.

The overuse of Electron is not because everything else is impossibly hard; it's just old-school fashion-driven development.

QT is a decade-plus older than Electron, and UI toolkits in general even more so.

Furthermore, Electron hasn't solved anything except the "I want to make a desktop app but only employ JS/HTML devs" (and that problematically).

Electron tries to break the same barrier WebForms did but in the opposite direction. Hopefully it turns out better and doesn't result in a bunch of shitty desktop apps like WebForms resulted in a bunch of shitty web sites.

I want to use html/css/js to create my front-end, Although it is more resource intensive then Qt, it is simply more flexible and has a much richer eco-system to rely on.

Meanwhile the usage of chrome as a run-time is one of the worst parts of electron as every app consumes a lot more memory than a "native" application would need. These days Chrome is so highly sophisticated by now you could easily call it an OS. It comes with a lot of baggage from a Driverstack for Sound, Joysticks and Accelerometers to a whole suite of debugging tools.

Don't get me wrong. Electron is good for what it is: a way to easily write portable apps which can share codebase with a SaaS-Platforms. I would just wish developers would have just taken a different approach e.g. using a more striped down version of chrome or maybe even use Firefox/Servo.

Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.

Electron is sooo simple. I mean, we've run into some pretty interesting issues like with hardware acceleration and difference in color and font rendering between platforms, but if a guy like me can code, sign and ship a fully functional application, anyone can.

Also, I can really recommend Vue and Quasar for anyone looking at building electron and mobile apps. Really fun!

This is more about the experience of the developer. Anyone familiar with GTK or Qt (possibly others) should be able to bang out a UI pretty quickly, in many cases it will be much simpler than HTML+js+CSS. With Visual Studio you could slap together a win32 app pretty quickly.

But for some reason we decided we had to coddle developers who only know javascript.

Also what is the Electron equivalent for QGridView , a table? or you mean Electron + 200+ npm packages, where each project uses different packages and 50% of the packages are the same package but different version

If your dev team thinks in web-like terms, Electron is a more comfortable place to be. Better? I'd agree with you that it's probably not.

The hypothetical business has two choices. Choose Electron, or choose some other toolkit that has native, cross-platform support (like Qt). It's far easier for the business, and the developers there, to take their existing website HTML, CSS, and Javascript; and simply wrap it in Electron (which costs $0), and call it a day. Every other choice is (perceived as being) more expensive.

Qt is a modern toolkit with native-cross platform support, but costs money for commercial use, and businesses and software developers don't want to spend the money on it.

Just looking at your 3 examples, I notice they all depend on Qt ... and hence the Qt UI components instead of the more familiar HTML/CSS of Electron.

So the code ends up looking like:

  const { QLabel, QMainWindow } = require("@nodegui/nodegui");
  const win = new QMainWindow();
  const label = new QLabel(win);
  label.setText("Hello world");
  label.setInlineStyle("color: green; background-color: white;");
  win.show();
  global.win = win;

>Is "just stick Chromium into all your apps" seriously the best we can do as an industry? It's resource-inefficient to high heaven,

The complaints about "resource-inefficient" attract a lot of agreement but also ignore the productivity of the developers that get to leverage their existing knowledge of Chromium-based components.

If whatever alternative to Electron has Superior Resource Efficient Technology also comes with unacceptable extra friction (aka learning curve) for adoption, it will then also lose to Electron.

Yes, I hate Electron, but the alternative is not QT; it's something like Sciter.JS with real Web API compatibility (or perhaps a stripped down WebKit2 which is much less resource-heavy).

Actually I'm not suggesting. I'm witnessing.