Mark Shuttleworth Talks Of New Ubuntu Installer Ideas With HTML5/Electron & Snaps

[andre30correia]

I'll try it in a while, hope it doesn't use more resources than Gnome with Unite extension.

unity 8 works with a phone like bq aquaris e4.5 and was super fast

[starshipeleven]

VS Code. Atom. Whether they are "great" remains debatable. Anyway, I can't understand all the fuss - we are talking about an installer tool, right? How often does this get in your way? Most likely: Once per installation. Should I care about memory consumption? Don't think so. Will the lack of speed be an issue? I suppose not.

Inb4 "I cannot install Ubuntu on my PC that has less than 4GB of RAM because the installer crashes".

Currently this is an issue for Debian-based distros only once you start getting in the less-than 256MB systems.

[starshipeleven]

I think the opensource community is in need of a reimplementation of Electron technology, because the idea is good but the execution is horrible.

Being this Canonical, it's highly likely that they will reinvent the wheel on Electron too.

If we talk about making something better than Electron, then that is open to debate.

[sarmad]

Why would anyone use HTML5 when they can use Qt/Qml to get a cleaner and more maintainable code that also happens to run faster?

[zanny]

Why would anyone use HTML5 when they can use Qt/Qml to get a cleaner and more maintainable code that also happens to run faster?

If you can manage to write your application in strict javascript / QML or something like PyQt + QML then I'd agree, its way nicer than the browseresque hellscape that is Electron / React / all the new age Javascript reinvented wheel frameworks.

If you have to get into C++, it should be obvious why almost anyone using Electron is using it over C++. Developers that can write C++ competently are way more expensive, and thus the codebases way harder to maintain (beyond just the regular C++ overhead you also have Qt rewriting the entire std itself).

[Luke_Wolf]

If you can manage to write your application in strict javascript / QML or something like PyQt + QML then I'd agree, its way nicer than the browseresque hellscape that is Electron / React / all the new age Javascript reinvented wheel frameworks.

If you have to get into C++, it should be obvious why almost anyone using Electron is using it over C++. Developers that can write C++ competently are way more expensive, and thus the codebases way harder to maintain (beyond just the regular C++ overhead you also have Qt rewriting the entire std itself).

Ehm no it's not so obvious... C++/Qt is a whole nicer creature than normal C++, and it solves the much complained about memory management by using parent-child hierarchies, with that taken care of it's not really that much harder to deal with than the alternatives especially electron, with which you have to use Javascript which was never designed for you to write applications in and so is a complete mess to try to do so as a result. Oh they've gotten better sure... but at it's core it's still a language that is really only good at providing interactivity and being glue. That's a lot worse than "OMG I might have to manage some memory guise... I'm gonna die".

And what exactly is wrong with the Qt alternative to std? std sucks, it's a lot more difficult to work with than it's Java and .NET competitors, Qt fixes that. The only "downside" to using the Qt replacements is it tightly bonds you to Qt which isn't really a problem because if you're using Qt there's no point in making platform specific interfaces rather than just going pure Qt.

[brrrrttttt]

std has also improved a _lot_ from c++11 onwards. Memory management is fairly trivial in modern c++, even without Qt. It's certainly a hell of a lot cleaner than the JS ecosystem.. and your code isn't going to be obsolete in 2 years..

[Nth_man]

Memory management using parent-child hierarchies is much easier than other alternatives. With Qt people can accomplish much more than with std.

[Mez']

Oh, puhleeze. I can still the yearlong rants about how horrible and abysmal, how mind-numbingly stupid Unity was. It obviously needed extra distros and flavours to get rid of this cancer called Unity. Now they've put Unity to rest and all of a sudden people like you pop up and start whinning. Don't get me wrong: I found Unity quite usable but at the very same time I don't have any problems with Gnome Shell either.

The rants were coming from people like you. Not from people actually using it daily and satisfactorily.
Those people did not have much to complain about since the DE was tailored to their needs and the workflow they got out of it was a perfect fit.

Of course those people would start whining when their favorite workflow getting things done is no more. I'm one of them. Never complained (but for the dodge functionality being removed circa 2012) since it was exactly what I needed.

[Pajn]

So the examples that Mark makes of "great applications" are both proprietary. Can he name even two great libre applications that use electron?

VS code and Hyper. And there are more: Etcher, Mailspring and Cerebro to name a few of the ones I have installed and prefer of any "native" variants.