It uses PyQt. I'm not sure I'd put much money on it being faster than an Electron app. The only other PyQt app I have used is Cura and that is ridiculously slow. Takes like a minute to start up and you can watch it loading the controls when there are a lot of them.
Last time I tried VidCutter it was incredibly slow. So slow that it seemed completely glitched sometimes. It was such an incredibly slow and laggy chore to do anything in the app I could not keep using it.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I only care about the functionality and not whether the button should have round edges or the background having the right shade of grey. The consistent "feel" is nice to have (cough winform/wpf/uwp cough), but I would take "web-ish" applications over no application/crappy native application anytime (especially with Linux)
Native's not crappy, it's the best and most supported. We just happen to be in love with the web aesthetic and cross-platform. And that decisionmaking is mostly made by MBAs who see tech as a means to a financial end and not for the joy of writing good code
Web shit is fucking ugly, it eschews platform native conventions, and it just feels cheap.
But when I load up a winforms-esque app with toolbars and a statusbar and all the nice accoutrements we're accustomed too behaving in the way we are accustomed to... now I feel like I'm going to get shit done.
Literally the only electron app that feels serious is VSCode and the amount of optimizing MS has had to do has cut into seven figures
n.b. just because CPython exists doesn't mean Python is native.
n.b. native vs. web is colloquially a discussion from 00s macOS and 10s mobile about fidelity to the platform's standard UI toolkit.
n.b. when people shit on Electron its because of RAM use and lack of fidelity to the platform toolkit, and the waste of have a full JS engine compiled into an app, ideally they'd all use some base WebView from the system instead of Chromium
They are the overwhelming majority of users, whether you like it or not. This is the free market at work.
There isn't even a valid concern here to complain about. Electron apps are cross-platform out of the box. The tradeoff for open access and low-cost development is more RAM. Turns out, developers are more than happy to make that deal.
> They are the overwhelming majority of users, whether you like it or not.
Yes, and? They're not here. This is not where they hang out. The point isn't why someone who doesn't even know the difference must not run bloatware, but rather why people who do know better frown on bloatware.
> This is the free market at work.
Anything but. The bit that's missing is transparency. As in, both the buyer and the seller know everything there is to know about the product in question and other options available.
> Turns out, developers are more than happy to make that deal.
Yes, developers. Not users, who aren't actually keen on upgrading machines to achieve the same stuff, but have been mislead to think this is how it has to be -- because from personal computer and user empowerment, we got to corporate empowerment. And the same way (too many) corporations outsource costs to society and their employees, we now consider doing the same as very professional. You called it "low-cost development", as if the externalized costs simply don't exist. It's just a few seconds here, a few dollars there, multiplied over thousands or millions or actually-who-even-cares instances.
> Electron apps are cross-platform out of the box
So are apps that achieve the same or more with way, way less. When you talk about the box the users take them out of, that is. When it comes to developers who can "just use what they already know", sure, for them Electron works "out of the box", while other things "require assembly". Okay, so what? Isn't that what coding is?
Imagine architects building shittier bridges that use more resources, because that's easier and quicker. That's perfectly fine for individual architects, but as a trend it's just regression.
> The point isn't why someone who doesn't even know the difference must not run bloatware, but rather why people who do know better frown on bloatware.
Also, computing industry seems to be unique in that tools for professionals and toys for general audience are being developed to the lowest common denominator of the latter. This is what's changed in the past 1.5 decade. Can you imagine surgeons or civil engineers doing their jobs using tools designed to take advantage of Joe Always Half-Drunk and Jane the Long Retired Grandma and the likes?
(This is partially where the idea that "customer doesn't want a drill, they want a hole in a wall" leads people astray.)
> Imagine architects building shittier bridges that use more resources, because that's easier and quicker. That's perfectly fine for individual architects, but as a trend it's just regression.
That is unfortunately happening everywhere, as the "cost function" driving optimization isn't global/general efficiency, but business efficiency. Initially these two are correlated, so any new industry tends to first develop in ways that cut down waste. But then it transitions to reducing costs to company, by generating more waste, just for someone else. Externalities seem to be a general problem for our civilization today.
As to your last paragraph, what really gets me is this:
However much you might save by cutting X corners, or how much you might make by selling someone something they don't need, etc. -- there are hundreds, thousands of companies you're dealing with that do the same to you, to people you love, your co-workers, employees and customers, probably making your life much worse than your own corner cutting can recoup. It might not even make business sense in the bigger picture, because instead of a small slice of something that is at least pie you get container ships full of saw dust or something.
I can't believe you're comparing developing desktop apps to surgery and civil engineering. The stakes here are zero. This is what open source software is all about: making apps accessible to more devs, and more users.
For most, yes. But for software where stakes are non-zero, for software where errors could kill people or cause billions of dollars of damage, the tooling is... exactly the same. For example, the infamous "Industry 4.0" and "Industrial IoT" buzz-phrases are, in big part, about your usual garden quality open source software - mostly webshit - orchestrating the actual control systems in factories and manufacturing plants. I shudder to think what "Industry 5.0" will look like.
You are making weird moral judgements about desktop app frameworks. There is nothing wrong with Electron, there is no "regression". There is a reason why you're losing this battle, and it's because for many devs developing small apps, Electron is easier. That's it.
What I really can't understand is how people get so heated about tech stack choices like this. We're not talking about civil engineering, we're talking about an ffmpeg wrapper. Electron is just a means to an end. If your alternatives were better at what devs and users cared about, they'd be more popular. Clearly that isn't the case.
You should be excited that frameworks like Electron allow more devs to make powerful tools accessible to the public so quickly. This is what open source is all about!
Not according to your standards, and that's fine, for your standards.
> There is a reason why you're losing this battle, and it's because for many devs developing small apps, Electron is easier. That's it.
What "battle"? Decent software still is being made, I'm still using it. But if someone is presented to the world, saying why I would never dream of using it is fair, no?
Why should I care what's easier for some "rando dev"? I'm the person who would use their resources to run it, while not using things that are faster and don't introduce even half a second of "waiting" (who does that?) when starting them, doing the thing, quitting them; even when I already have dozens of similarly well made programs running. So while someone else might say "oh this is great, because I don't know about Avidemux (or would rather wait 5 seconds just staring at nothing than spend 2 seconds hunting for the menu option)", I don't. Either you accept both types of reaction, or none.
> We're not talking about civil engineering, we're talking about an ffmpeg wrapper.
Exactly. Why again is that over 100MB big? Even making it in Love2D or something would be a million times more sane. And again, I'm not talking about civil engineering either, the alternatives I presented were "an Avidemux tutorial" which would be like 5 sentences and 3 screenshots, or Avidemux minus all the other stuff.
> If your alternatives were better at what devs and users cared about
My opinion of something isn't about what other people care about, in their state of what I'd describe as ignorance. And you aren't even saying what you care about, you are talking about "the average user", which is a complete waste of time. Bring even just one actual non-technical person in and let each of us make our points, let us show them the process of installing and using each respective software, and you'd have the start of an argument.
It's also not that everybody and their dog drives a SUV because that is sane. I don't care about what leads people to doing these things. I see the outcome, so whatever the root cause is, I see it as something to be improved, not accepted. If everything that anyone did was perfect by default and shouldn't be criticized, because that'd be a "weird moral judgement", why talk about anything?
> You should be excited that frameworks like Electron allow more devs to make powerful tools accessible to the public so quickly.
Why? Why can't you be excited that I can don't find them powerful, because they do 1% and take longer to do it, then sit there constantly taking up more space? After saying I am making "weird moral judgements", now you tell me what I should be excited for?
Because developers need to eat, this should not be hard to understand. It is cheaper and faster to build an Electron app and have it immediately work cross platform, than to build several native apps just to please some random internet purist.
And if that eating is already covered? To say nothing of QT, Avalonia, Uno, GTK, and others. Many of those manage to figure out cross-platform with native controls.
But no, we have to use electron because she can throw cheap oversaturated webdevs at the problem and call it a day.
Because it's easier. That's it. You can argue about "equivalent alternatives" until you're blue in the face, but you're wrong. It's just easier for many devs to use Electron than whatever you just spouted, and that's why it's more popular.
You are acting like Principal Skinner going "No, it is the children who are wrong." What I can't understand is, why do you care so much?
Why do you care about why I care so much? I have my reasons. I have outlined them. They are much better than anyone else's reasons, by my standard, and I am going to stick to them.
It's even easier to make a 3 screenshot tutorial to explain how to do it in Avidemux. Slightly more work would be to fork Avidemux and rip out everything but the lossless cutting. But then you'd at least have a tool worth calling it that.
It's not a one-way street, either. Even just putting a link in front of me is asking for my attention. I then read the description, which doesn't mention that it's giant and totally pointless if you use Avidemux, and have to click to the releases page to realize yes, it's another one of these that seem to quickly become the norm, and that I know won't be maintained in 5 years. But hey, I don't have anything better to do with my time, surely!
I'd take Electron over that tbh.