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Comment by vetinari

Native widgets libraries were historically those, who were only one that knew, how to talk to the display server. So if you wanted to write another widget library, you had to link to them anyway, to use them as a proxy. That's how Qt, for example, runs on Windows or Mac, using the old win32 api or Cocoa.

But meanwhile, the OS vendors got creative and pumped out a bunch of new, _more modern_ libraries, which have abilities that the old, "system" ones do not have. You want Acrylic design on Windows? Better be satisfied with WinUI -- which, in v3 is the recommended way to write native applications by the platform owner, and which is decoupled from system releases and from Windows SDK.

Electron apps are coming from any shop, that want to throw together some installable, locally running app and figured out, that paying HTML+CSS devs is cheaper, than paying C++ (or ObjC) ones. Having shorter development time is also something positive. It has nothing to do with Linux shops; there are Electron apps, that could be running on Linux if there was a will, but aren't (Whatsapp), or almost-electron-but-edge_webview-instead (Teams).

parent vetinari 2 years ago

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