Electrobun: Cross-platform desktop applications written in TypeScript

What's wild about it? It's one person, and they probably mainly use a Mac. If they used Windows, it would be Windows-only at this stage. I have lots of projects that only run on Linux. Clearly, if the project succeeds and gains tractions, the other platforms will come.

With Linux you can dockerize it and make available for all all platforms. With Mac you only reach people that have access to Mac.

I mean for a personal project they can use whatever they want. Just and odd choice to start with if you want the project to gain traction.

It assume it will severely limit its uptake.

If I had to pick one platform to build on, it would be linux. Pretty much every platform has the ability to run linux executables (via Docker, among others).

If this is a personal project, that's cool, but then I really don't care that much. On the other hand, I think an electron-like with something like Bun could be really useful.

At least here in the US, the majority of developers daily drive macs on their desktop. Even (especially!) the ones that deploy exclusively on linux.

Having to run a docker container to get the dev env setup would be even more likely to slow adoption. Nobody wants to do that shit.

> At least here in the US, the majority of developers daily drive macs on their desktop.

The majority of WEB developers.

But almost nobody uses MacOS to run CI, which is usually how artifacts are built for the field. Having linux support first means people can actually use this for production (this project seems from from ready for that anyway) with some inconvenience for local dev.

MacOS only means I can work with it on my machine, but can't actually build it using CI/CD.

I mean, GitHub Runners supports macOS for CI just fine.

Citation needed, Windows is probably still bigger as Macs are expensive.

It's totally fine if it just supports one platform. Just don't say it's cross platform when it's not.

>At least here in the US, the majority of developers daily drive macs on their desktop

Citation needed. This assertion seems very anecdotal.

The apps you build are cross-platform apps. The tool itself isn’t. That’s how I read it anyways, nothing misleading that I saw

> At least here in the US, the majority of developers daily drive macs on their desktop.

Not according to statista.com (I am not a registered user, but it looks like you could register for no cost, in order to check the source):

https://www.statista.com/statistics/869211/worldwide-softwar...

Windows is the majority OS for development, with Unix/Linux and Mac being close to equal, but both considerably less than Windows.

This is also consistent with the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/):

Under the "Operating System" heading it says:

  "Windows is the most popular operating system for developers, across both personal and professional use."

[edited to include Stack Overflow survey]

Recently I saw someone assert that "almost nobody uses 1080p monitors anymore". Meanwhile the Steam Hardware Survey shows that 1080p is the majority resolution among PC gamers, and almost 2/3 of users have a monitor that is 1080p or smaller.

Humans have shown that we cannot even conceive of a reality outside our bubbles.

They said "in the US". The data you have provided says "Worldwide" which doesnt prove the point about the US.

fair point, however I suspect that if you narrow the scope of the data to the US (even the data from those surveys) it will not change the results much.

Out of curiosity, I'm looking for data that is limited to the US, and will respond with results if I find them.

the apps you build will be cross-platform "soon" (no specific timeframe)

https://electrobun.dev/docs/guides/Compatability

It’s the HN link description that’s confusing y’all then? Because the home page, where you clicked before navigating to the compatibility page, says they “aim… to be cross-platform” says nothing of that being the current state

JetBrains makes their survey data available here ( https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/ ):

Based on my calculations from that data (extracting only the US responses, based on their entries for 'os_devenv', I get these numbers:

- Linux: 45% - Windows: 58.9 % - Mac: 51.2 %

That is conclusive enough for me to say that Windows is still the most common daily driver for developers in the US. I'm not one of those developers, as I don't use Windows as my primary development platform.

I suspect this may be a case where people tend to think that because most developers they know use a particular OS for development, that must be true everywhere.

I would not be surprised, for instance, to find out that the numbers of developers primarily using Macs at some big tech companies is much higher.

[edited for formatting]

Okay, fair.

I don't have metrics, but I bet linux is far and away the CI platform of choice.

I am not trying to bash this, but rather say that mac only is likely to limit usage. Early on that can be okay, but there are many people who will be turned off immediately.