I don't understand how can you diss Electron when you see something like VS Code or Atom.
The benefits are clear. This software could grow plugin ecosystem vastly exceeding anything that was previously possible even after pouring millions of dollars into it.
Electron is better than everything else by various engineering metrics. Just not RAM or CPU usage. And despite large RAM and CPU usage it manages to be way faster than many native IDEs that came before.
It's surprising to me that a Linux/Unix enthusiast of all people is so incensed about Electron and web tech.
The alternative to Electron isn't that all their apps would be faster and more stable. It's that many of them wouldn't exist (either on Linux or in general), and the ones that did exist would inherently be more resource-constrained on the development side — potentially resulting in increased bugs, instability, security vulnerabilities, worse performance, lack of feature parity, and/or ultimately even premature deprecation to focus on higher-priority platforms. The web is a great equalizer.
I'll put this another way: given the option, all else being equal, would anyone honestly choose to run the same app in the form of WinForms + Wine rather than just Electron? It might be a little faster for certain apps in the best case scenario, but on average it's going to be worse in just about every way; that's before taking into account that in real life all else is never equal (see previous paragraph).
You have multiple cores and all of them constantly do somehting when your computer is on. You have graphics processors that run code every frame which probably half of is bot strictly necessary.
Is the cpu load from blinking cursor good or necessary? Definitely not. Is it important? Mostly not when compared to all the benefits.
And this issue was resolved pretty effortlessly (if you omit trolling).
The benefits are clear. This software could grow plugin ecosystem vastly exceeding anything that was previously possible even after pouring millions of dollars into it.
Electron is better than everything else by various engineering metrics. Just not RAM or CPU usage. And despite large RAM and CPU usage it manages to be way faster than many native IDEs that came before.