Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

Windows is especially bad at this due to so much legacy reliance, which is also kind of why people still bother with Windows. Not to claim that Linux or MacOS don't have similar problems (ahem, Catalyst) but it's not as overt.

A lot of the blame gets placed on easy to see things like an Electron app, but really the problem is so substantial that even native apps perform slower, use more resources, and aren't doing a whole lot more than they used to. Windows Terminal is a great example of this.

Combine this with the fact that most teams aren't given the space to actually maintain (because maintaining doesn't result in direct profits), and you've got a winning combination!

I think this blame is fair. Electron is the most obvious example, but in general desktop software that essentially embeds a full browser instance because it makes development slightly easier is the culprit in almost every case I've experienced.

I use a Windows 10 laptop for work.[1] The app that has the most lag and worst performance impact for as long as I've used the laptop is Microsoft Teams. Historically, chat/conferencing apps would be pretty lightweight, but Teams is an Electron app, so it spawns eight processes, over 200 threads, and consumes about 1GB of memory while idle.

Slack is a similar situation. Six processes, over 100 threads, ~750MB RAM while idle. For a chat app!

Microsoft recently added embedded Edge browser controls into the entire Office 365 suite (basically embraced-and-extended Electron), and sure enough, Office is now super laggy too. For example, accepting changes in a Word doc with change tracking enabled now takes anywhere from 5-20 seconds per change, where it was almost instantaneous before. Eight msedgewebview2.exe processes, ~150 threads, but at least it's only consuming about 250MB of RAM.

Meanwhile, I can run native code, .NET, Java, etc. with reasonable performance as long as the Electron apps aren't also running. I can run multiple Linux VMs simultaneously on this laptop with good response times, or I can run 1-2 Electron apps. It's pretty silly.

[1] Core i5, 16GB RAM, SSD storage. Not top of the line, but typical issue for a business environment.

It's not an easy task, and it's not something that anyone has really done. There are plenty of single platform examples, and Flutter is about as close as you can get in terms of cross platform.

There are also alternatives that can use the engine of an installed OS browser. Tauri is a decent example for Rust. Also, Electron isn't to blame for the issues with Teams. VS Code pretty much proves you can create a relatively responsive application in a browser interface.

It has been done many times.

Not only that, if you want to use a web page for a GUI, then do it by making a local web server back end and just use the web browser.

This idea that electron is somehow the only way to get cross platform GUIs is some sort of bizarre twilight zone where a bunch of people who only know javascript ignore that last three decades of software.

Also, I never said Electron was the only way... I specifically mentioned Tauri in my comment as an example of a browser renderer. And it doesn't need to use a local web server either.

And it doesn't need to use a local web server either.

Shipping an entire browser so someone can pop up a single window is not a positive. Again, if you want html as your interface, use html and let people use their own browser so that the entire program is 400KB instead of 400 MB

FLTK, no accessibility features

WxWidgets, really limited theming, not even close to html+css. Cross platform compatibility is hit and miss, usually requiring a lot of one-off platform corrections.

Also, as I said, you don't need to ship the entire browser... not once, but twice... try reading slower.