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
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
Came here to say Tauri.
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
No matter how much I like an alternative to Electron. It cannot save me from bad Electron apps.
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.
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.
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.
