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,…?

  • @Aux
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    -49 months ago

    All the best dev tools are created or owned by either Google or Microsoft, you can’t avoid them.

    • @just_another_person
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      39 months ago

      Nah, that’s not even close to true. I’d say MS has the worst track record with community engagement overall, with the last 3 years being an exception.

      Somebody slap me - because I hate them with a passion - but of the Big 5, Meta has probably kicked out the most important FOSS contributions to the Data and UI arenas in the past 10 years with the React ecosystem. Almost every modern app has a touch of React in there somewhere, and it was adopted, forked, and deployed quite widely, so they can’t even take it back if they tried at this point by switching up licenses 😁

      • @Aux
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        -39 months ago

        You must have been living under the rock, but Microsoft is supporting devs since 1990-s. VS was pretty much a pinnacle of IDE world until recent times. MSDN was pretty much the best source of documentation for all kinds of tech, not just WinAPI. And then they donated web related MSDN content to MDN and made redirects to MDN more than 3 years ago. VS Code, TypeScript, ReactiveX, GitHub, man, the list of MS contributions to developers is pretty much endless.

        • @just_another_person
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          49 months ago

          Been heading FOSS-based projects and teams for quite some time. I think you confuse “enterprise” type engineers with the vast majority of the rest of the world working as engineers.

          Past few years is the first time I’ve seen FOSS devs picking up VScode to use it at all, and that’s basically because it’s a continuation of Atom that MS extended after they bought GitHub.

          Never known anyone to use MSDN as a definitive resource anything, they’d rather use Stack Overflow, Man Pages, or docs directly. Never seen a Python/Ruby/JS/Whatever dev go to MS anything looking for answers, for example. Maybe in the Windows world 🤷

          GitHub was bought by MS, and up until then, they had no similar repo tool out there for people to easily consume anything they put out in the world. They just used GitHub like everyone else lol

          I won’t even go into the mess that MS’s activities had on the open web in general. You shouldn’t be saying that to people publicly if you do this for a living. If you want to make such an argument about anyone on that front, Mozilla would be that benefactor to kind comments in that regard.

          I mean…if this is your experience, go for you, but I’ve doing this a looooong time, and your experience matches very few outside of the enterprise world, who are generally speaking NOT the arbiters of good will in the FOSS community, so…

          • @Aux
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            -29 months ago

            Past few years is the first time I’ve seen FOSS devs picking up VScode to use it at all

            VSC was released in 2015, it became #13 most used code editor in 2016 and #1 in 2017. That’s a bit more than a few years IMHO.

            Never known anyone to use MSDN as a definitive resource anything

            MSDN was the main source of info for web development as it had the most comprehensive knowledge library for HTML, CSS and JS. It still has great C/C++ docs.

            I won’t even go into the mess that MS’s activities had on the open web in general.

            SVG is based on MS proposals. Microsoft was instrumental in development of CSS and IE3 was the very first browser to feature CSS support. The second ECMAScript implementation called JScript also came from Microsoft (the first one called JavaScript came from Netscape, which pushed ECMAScript standard). Microsoft has invented loads of tech like XMLHttpRequest, etc. One must be totally ignorant to think that Microsoft did not invest heavily into web standards.

            And then you conveniently forgetting about tools like TS, RX, etc which are used worldwide for decades. Microsoft was also instrumental in bringing the very first open computer architecture (together with IBM) - PC. Your whole IT experience is enabled by Microsoft.

            • @just_another_person
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              29 months ago

              No, nobody is forgetting the historical contributions of MS as an entity, but the majority was that was decades ago, and not the context of what was being discussed 🤣

              • @Aux
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                -29 months ago

                Well, I guess you’re having issues following the context then…