hello i like to make video games and stuff and also have a good time on the computer. look @ my pinned for some of the video games and things. sometimes i am horny on @squishfox
i think everyone i've ever seen say "just make a native app" has been a windows user, i.e. someone who can safely take for granted that a native app would actually target their platform
how would your opinions on electron change if your options were "electron thing" and "thing that probably only runs on linux"?
As a Linux user with the power of hindsight I would actually rather have nothing than Another Simultaneous Copy Of Chromium Running
also i think the worst offender is mac only software.
linux only software? gWSL and youre good to go
windows only software? wine and youre good to go
mac only software? lol buy a mac or pray that your CPU is compatible with a VM
An important point of nuance is that these tools have only matured into broadly compatible and polished states relatively recently!
Wine has been a long and slow development process until recently when Valve took an interest in it for their Proton fork and the state of compatibility dramatically improved for everyone.
WSL is a recent development too, before that you could port to MinGW32 or Cygwin or Interix but those are discrete platforms and not a drop-in compatibility layer.
And then Darling... exists. It can just about run unmodified Xcode CLI tools, but now that you must have a real Mac to sign binaries it seems a lot less useful...
you're right there's no need to write windows software any more. just write it for linux. windows users have wsl
as someone who got fed up with explorer and just started using a linux file manager on windows, yes, unironically this (if you're targeting people who know how to install WSL)
to be clear i would rather use something relatively well supported by WINE/wsl over electron any day of any week, because even run through those the "native"-ness of the interface is still far, far, far closer to anything electron could shit out even on the best days
relying on wine is cool because maybe the program will update and now it just instantly crashes forever and the author doesn't care
i think this is true if you have a relatively powerful computer, but as someone who uses a pretty old laptop, electron definitely doesn't count as 'targeting my platform' since it would probably freeze my computer even if the program can technically run.
