I imagine it’s a nightmare to port. I haven’t seen a single electron app ported to OpenBSD. Additionally like mentioned by others - the overhead (resources) and complexity of the whole platform (security) that is not required for most apps.
Is Chromium available on OpenBSD? I assume Node.js is.
This feels like a good Google Summer of Code project for Electron. Getting on more platforms is probably more of a question of removing platform-specific ops code more than anything else.
Is Chromium available on OpenBSD? I assume Node.js is.
Yes we have both Chromium & Node.js.
This feels like a good Google Summer of Code project for Electron. Getting on more platforms is probably more of a question of removing platform-specific ops code more than anything else.
This might be much harder than you make it sound. Take a look at the amount of Chromium patches we maintain ourself as upstream isn’t happy about BSD support.
I’m sure the code is portable but the task is not small.
It is, but it takes hours to compile. If 36 copies of chrome show up in the form of electron, that can substantially delay new sets. I also have my filesystem partitioned to a certain size. There’s a limit to how many apps like this I can install.
Ditto, I think the problem with that is that Chrome (and to a slightly lesser extent node.js) are such rapidly moving targets that having a single “Electron VM” for multiple apps may be tricky, at least at the moment.
I don’t know what this says about Electron itself, but the two Electron-created apps I’ve used most, Slack and Atom, are, IMHO, not great. They’re sluggish, eat memory and have a sizeable disk footprint.
I can see the thinking behind creating desktop apps using web technologies, but is Chrome really the best engine to use (yes, I know Electron uses node.js which needs v8) and do we really need a full-fat browser to run a web-based desktop application? Chrome is a slow resource hog as a web browser, so why would I want to be running local apps that use it? But maybe that’s just me being a grump.
Wow, that’s pretty native looking for an Electron app… is that Mac OS UI chrome on Windows?
One thing I am displeased about is that Electron might be slowly crippling the Mac’s native app ecosystem, which has historically been strong and focused on good polish. (Windows' native app ecosystem is in a coma, despite being the dominant desktop OS.) Now you have sloppy web devs who think they’re native cross-platform (if they just don’t target Mac OS only) devs, and it’s terrible.
A (non-free) alternative I’ve been using quite happily for a while now is Deckset. Same kind of idea, write your presentation using Markdown with some idiosyncrasies and then Deckset can apply a number of themes. Works well.
The concept of markdown as a presentation format is limited to a really small code oriented population. On the other hand, markdown as a documentation format has wide applications.
I.e. Apple Keynote slides vs presentation on teaching engineers a how to use a new tool
Yet another Electron app :(
What’s wrong with using Electron?
A lot of overhead compared to a native application.
I imagine it’s a nightmare to port. I haven’t seen a single electron app ported to OpenBSD. Additionally like mentioned by others - the overhead (resources) and complexity of the whole platform (security) that is not required for most apps.
Is Chromium available on OpenBSD? I assume Node.js is.
This feels like a good Google Summer of Code project for Electron. Getting on more platforms is probably more of a question of removing platform-specific ops code more than anything else.
Yes we have both Chromium & Node.js.
This might be much harder than you make it sound. Take a look at the amount of Chromium patches we maintain ourself as upstream isn’t happy about BSD support.
I’m sure the code is portable but the task is not small.
It is, but it takes hours to compile. If 36 copies of chrome show up in the form of electron, that can substantially delay new sets. I also have my filesystem partitioned to a certain size. There’s a limit to how many apps like this I can install.
Personally hoping someone makes an “Electron Runtime”, like how the JVM works (or Python, or Ruby…), and we could just distribute the web file….
Ditto, I think the problem with that is that Chrome (and to a slightly lesser extent node.js) are such rapidly moving targets that having a single “Electron VM” for multiple apps may be tricky, at least at the moment.
I’ve seen it break some of the accessibility tools (screen readers mostly) in strange ways.
I don’t know what this says about Electron itself, but the two Electron-created apps I’ve used most, Slack and Atom, are, IMHO, not great. They’re sluggish, eat memory and have a sizeable disk footprint.
I can see the thinking behind creating desktop apps using web technologies, but is Chrome really the best engine to use (yes, I know Electron uses node.js which needs v8) and do we really need a full-fat browser to run a web-based desktop application? Chrome is a slow resource hog as a web browser, so why would I want to be running local apps that use it? But maybe that’s just me being a grump.
Wow, that’s pretty native looking for an Electron app… is that Mac OS UI chrome on Windows?
One thing I am displeased about is that Electron might be slowly crippling the Mac’s native app ecosystem, which has historically been strong and focused on good polish. (Windows' native app ecosystem is in a coma, despite being the dominant desktop OS.) Now you have sloppy web devs who think they’re native cross-platform (if they just don’t target Mac OS only) devs, and it’s terrible.
A (non-free) alternative I’ve been using quite happily for a while now is Deckset. Same kind of idea, write your presentation using Markdown with some idiosyncrasies and then Deckset can apply a number of themes. Works well.
Woah, thanks for that. Great find.
The concept of markdown as a presentation format is limited to a really small code oriented population. On the other hand, markdown as a documentation format has wide applications.
I.e. Apple Keynote slides vs presentation on teaching engineers a how to use a new tool