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,…?

  • Sentient LoomEnglish
    81·
    9 months ago

    I’m using pywebview, a cross-platform python web view GUI framework. I like it so far, it’s fairly straightforward. I just wanted a python API around my database, and I’m building most of the app in the front-end with vanilla JS and html.

    I didn’t want the (alleged) bloat of electron, and I didn’t want to jam async/await onto everything in the backend, so I found this alternative.

    The 3rd contender was Tauri, but I didn’t want to bother learning Rust for a simple API. But it was very tempting, and Tauri is an option you should consider.

    I haven’t finished my current project so I can’t completely vouch for pywebview yet. But so far it’s great and I recommend it if you don’t mind using python (I do long for a statically typed backend TBH).