LOL. Conveniently, electron is everything other than the kernel. Also, as much wasted RAM as an entire second instance of chrome that shares nothing, but oh well.
reply> LOL. Conveniently, electron is everything other than the kernel. Also, as much wasted RAM as an entire second instance of chrome that shares nothing, but oh well.
replyWell, with RAM being so cheap, why bother trying to trying to be memory efficient? It's not like OpenAI has an infinite pool of "AI" software engineers to work on this...
Oh wait...
Yeah, but if you use Qt like I did, you're shipping libstdc++, some other crap and Qt.
replyYeah, I was kind of surprised recently that there's no solid native way to build desktop apps on Linux! I was thinking I'd build something actually native with AI but then the options were QT or or gtk...
replyQt is as solid as it gets. It's very, very high quality. Much higher quality than Microsoft's frameworks on Windows.
replyWell yes, I was surprised by the situation in Windows too! So my stack is now split like this
reply- Apple: SwiftUI/AppKit
- Android: Jetpack
- Windows + Linux: Avalonia (C#)
Avalonia seems good so far. I couldn't do Qt because I can't deal with that qBittorrent look. GTK is aesthetically pleasing for me, but it only runs on Linux. Avalonia lets me target both of these UI-toolkit-less platforms with something native-ish. Flutter is probably good too, but I am using uniffi-rs and that doesn't generate Dart bindings AFAIK.
Would love to hear other options.
Isn't Qt themeable? I also recall at one point they "emulated" native widget look and feel in their own renderer but I might be misremembering.
replyIndeed! I wrote my note-taking app with a block editor (like Notion) in Qt with QML for the UI and C++ for the logic and it's been an incredible experience![1]
replyVery nice, thank you for sharing!
replyHow would you know? It's impossible to have done a thorough analysis of all the Windows UI frameworks, five have been released since I started typing...
replyYou don't care what were you trying to build but for a quick me alone Linux app I used Flutter.
Honestly it's my go-to when I want to have a quick native app on any platform but dont want to bundle electron.
replyFlutter is solid choice, and Canonical seems to be putting weight behind it for Ubuntu as well. Canonical is also now the new lead maintainer of Flutter Desktop.
replyQT and GTK are as native (and solid, I guess) as it gets, since there's no "default" UI toolkit that's shipped along with the kernel, unlike e.g. Windows or macOS. Speaking of Windows, why do they even ship browser-UI apps as a part of the OS? Do they find native Windows UI development too hard or feature-limited even with LLM assistance?
replyBecause Microsoft screwed up their native UI story. They are slowly starting to go native again with WinUI3, but Microsoft went through a rough period with UI frameworks, I mean how many do they have now all still "supported"? WinForms, WPF, MFC, WinUI, MAUI, etc.?
replyWell what does native mean? An XWindow? Native on gnome is different from native on kde or xfce or lxde…
replyI mean there is the no true linux argument, but covering the main stream desktops you basically have kde which is written with qt(so qt is native) or gnome which is written with gtk and both frameworks/DEs do implement other things besides "just" the gui, so you are native.
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