Linux @lemmy.ml LemmyHead @lemmy.ml 3 mo. ago

What's your experience with Electron alternatives

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,...?

62 comments

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
  
  It will?? When??
- 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.
  
  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.
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
- 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.
  
  Qt and Electron are different technologies
  
  Yes.
  
  that achieve somewhat different goals
  
  No.
- 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.

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