I can't think of anything good that has come out of electron. Seriously. Maybe slack (haven't used it) but that is probably about the worst use case for electron imaginable and would be utterly trivial to implement in a proper language natively.
Have you tried to develop a cross-platform app for Windows, macOS and Linux recently recently? I do not know what you mean by "trivial", but using HTML/CSS/JS is the fastest way to develop UIs, and so, apps/programs. No contest. (about performances or resources management, that's a whole other story).
And using different techs for each platform to have a native app is not what I call trivial for developers in terms of complexity.
This makes it useless for any non-trivial app that is CPU bound - including, games, audio, video, 3D, and many many more.
Just because it's easy to build a house with Lego doesn't mean it's a good idea, or that it's going to compete with professional building materials.
1. Use current dev team to develop only the web version?
2. Hire X teams to develop for X platforms? (there goes your linux support)
3. Hire 2nd team to work on a cross platform native desktop client?
4. Open APIs and leave it to the wolves?
Everyone on here is acting like a few hundred meg of ram and barely 0.5% CPU usage is the end of the fucking world.
Also, you'd be surprised how fast 4gb gets used up by the time the OS, the browser, and various Electron apps take their cut. I can't browse the web while having Slack and Spotify open or things start thrashing. I think it's past the point of ridiculousness when a simple chat app takes more memory than a full featured IDE like IDEA.
With javacript you have to constantly fight the language, the frameworks the performance etc. This will actually end up taking more time and effort than doing it properly in native languages once you get past the proof-of-concept stage.
Having a cross-platform core and then doing a platform specific GUI for each platform is a bit of work up front but hardly a big hurdle all things considered.
The advantages are that you actually get an app that looks and behaves the way it is intended on each platform. And an app that actually can be user friendly. Did we all just stop and say, hey, users suck. Why should we care about them? Let's give them an ugly mess that doesn't perform.
That by itself is a tragedy, but what is astonishing is that it is done for no good reasons.
Some of the appeal of electron is code-reuse and being able to use something other than javascript will make it easier to share code with native software rather than web pages. That would be a huge benefit in my eyes.
If something like Slack is "utterly trivial to implement in a proper language natively", why was Skype so awful for so long, to the point that they've now switched to Electron?
Among terminal emulators for example, Hyper is the only one I can think of.
Don't forget HN is a bubble : Electron is very much appreciated outside of this particular community.
There might be tons, I just haven't seen anything usable.
Not seeing "anything usable" is pure bad faith.
But yes, VSCode is probably the exception. But they have had to spend a truly impressive effort to combat the shortfalls of electron and are to my knowledge the only ones that might have succeeded in making something relatively performant.
If that is what is required to make electron decent then few arguments in favor of it remains.
Yes I get that different sets of features on different platforms is an issue. But often that is half the point, if everything could be done on a website there is in the vast majority of cases no need for an electron "app".