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,…?

  • winnie@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    I haven’t use any alternatives, and haven’t developed with electron, but I know that there are another alternative – Tauri. It also uses web-view. It’s built in Rust and allows apps to be developed in JS (providing JS api) and in Rust.

    What I can say – JS support won’t be cross-platform, like we have with NodeJS in electron. Special debug per platform might be required.

  • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    Alternative for what? I never used electron apps and I don’t see any reason for that. If you are a developer, try Qt.

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    If you need multi platform support in one codebase, Flutter is a good choice. Ubuntu uses it for their new OS installer and GUI package manager.

    Quite easy to get set up on Linux (though the recommended route is using Snaps).

    No waiting ages for a massive node_modules folder to fill up, nor the general pain of using javascript; dart is a really nice language to write in.

    You wont get the smallest binaries with it, but it’s powerful, reliable, and pretty damn performant for a “non native” framework.