Avalonia is a cross-platform technology and it is not by Microsoft but I get what you mean.
It's part of the reason why I think the criticism of Electron apps needs to be contextualized. There is often a pretty darn good reason why people choose to use Electron for desktop apps. You can say what you want about react, I don't like it personally, but it's here to stay and it's much more here to stay than any Microsoft UI technology.
There's GTK, but it's not viable on Windows, and it already starts feeling like a 2nd class citizen when you use anything different from the GNOME desktop environment, while Qt forces you to interact with C++ and have to really care about portability, or you use QML which is much slower.
IMO web based technologies are worse. We're just making Java JVM again in the form of Chromium but with infinite dependencies and half your codebase not being written or controlled by your team.
About the JVM… maybe. I mean, the JVM was never a bae idea. But Java GUI toolkits are so bad, a well-written Electron application typically feels faster, even though the underlying runtime is less efficient than the modern JVM
I tried it a couple years ago. Back then, it was still a little bit too slow and inefficient on desktops. It would not match the performance of a well-written Electron app like Obsidian or VSCodium.
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u/chic_luke 2d ago
Avalonia is a cross-platform technology and it is not by Microsoft but I get what you mean.
It's part of the reason why I think the criticism of Electron apps needs to be contextualized. There is often a pretty darn good reason why people choose to use Electron for desktop apps. You can say what you want about react, I don't like it personally, but it's here to stay and it's much more here to stay than any Microsoft UI technology.
There's GTK, but it's not viable on Windows, and it already starts feeling like a 2nd class citizen when you use anything different from the GNOME desktop environment, while Qt forces you to interact with C++ and have to really care about portability, or you use QML which is much slower.