Posted by archb 3 days ago
It's not actually about paying money or not, I've signed up for many a patreon or what not to support open source projects I use. I fully believe in paying people for software. But for core things like this I do prefer MIT/APACHE.
Going by me and my friends, no.
> striking the best balance between resource footprint
If this is the best balance possible, then that balance is horrible. Having to pull along a whole browser is a massive ball and chain on any program that I wish I could cut off anywhere I see it.
> no additional local apps on their device
This isn't an advantage for my use cases, nor any of my friends apparently.
> still preserving their native UI
As in preserving Discord's or your OS's UI?
I don't care about the former. I'd use DiscordMessenger[1] if it was mostly feature complete and Discord didn't ban third-party clients.
The latter isn't really preserved in any meaningful opinion by shoving it into a browser. The difference in UX post-install between a PWA and a seperate browser window (or a seperate app) is zero to me. It's still not native.
Electron apps do this. PWAs do not because you are already running the browser.
> > no additional local apps on their device > This isn't an advantage for my use cases,
It objectively is, because (a) you don't have to run Electron next to a browser (b) your Electron app lags behind in security fixes compared to Chrome or whatever you use to browse, and (c) PWAs have a much stricter permission/capability model than native apps, so you can run PWAs from publishers you don't trust that much.
Sometimes, I might actually not be running the browser. And even if I am, a native app is still better.
> you don't have to run Electron next to a browser
I don't quite see the point you're making here?
> your Electron app lags behind in security fixes compared to Chrome or whatever you use to browse
Any app I download is sandboxed to the point I don't see this as a benefit of any magnitude.
Not to mention I might want the option of not updating (although I think this is an option with PWAs nowadays, although I've never actually tried).
> PWAs have a much stricter permission/capability model than native apps
Ditto.
> so you can run PWAs from publishers you don't trust that much.
I don't want to do that in the first place.
Native apps can do all those things better already. Can we please just have native apps instead?
With a native app, which I still welcome for perf/mem reasons, I'll have to configure opensnitch (or smth of the sort) to take care of the outgoing telemetry calls... A system-wide uBO would be a nice to have!
Activities will apparently still use Tauri. Is that going to be a compatibility nightmare due to WebKit? (At least until CEF comes out)
Also, what real choices of owned plattforms besides old school forums are there?
And you might be impressed how far forums have come. Open source Discourse forum now has built-in Discord like voice and video chat, along with real time text posts. (It also powers some extremely large communities with millions of users.)
ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, to name a few.
Bully on me for expecting narcissists to grow a spine.
I've always disliked Electron apps in principle. The idea was you could write once, run anywhere, which is something we've heard before so many times but it never really works out that way. Back in the early days of Java we heard this mantra with applets and Java desktop apps and the reality was "write once, test everywhere".
The cost is simply too high. Nobody wants an entire browser engine packaged to run a desktop app. Security-wise, this is a nightmare. It's such a huge attack surface (eg [1]). And resource-wise it's also a nightmare. Honestly, Electron apps can't die fast enough for my liking.
What I think we'll see is a return to desktop apps because the cost of porting them to new platforms is dropping like a rock.
There are modding issues with Discord's migration but I believe modding itself is going to be an issue in a world where it's going to be increasingly easy to find and use exploits.
I also wonder if Discord is the best we can do here. I've always hated Discord from a UI/UX perspective. Nothing about it is intuitive (IMHO). There are like 3 different settings buttons. You join a Discord and you get yet another custom flow of having to go to this channel and select roles and do something before you can do something else blah blah blah. Everything feels shoe horned. And Discord channels are a worse repository for information than the old forums were.
[1]: https://www.sentinelone.com/vulnerability-database/cve-2026-...