Top 7 Electron Apps For Windows, Mac and Linux

Electron is a framework for developing cross-platform applications using web technology and languages such as Javascript, HTML and CSS. Many people have a negative opinion of Electron apps, but I have found a few Electron apps that are truly excellent. Today, I share with you 7 Electron apps that I use occasionally (or every day, in one case).

CORRECTION:
While Stacer was originally an Electron app when I first covered it on video, it has now moved to C++ and Qt. Regardless, it's still a great app and worth checking out!

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[TechHut]

This is a bold video. Whenever I cover an electron application I never even mention it. That way I get a bunch of engagement with software elitists being mad and writing paragraph rants on why electron is bad. 😂

[sangamshrestha]

VS Code may be the most used electron app. Almost every developer may have used it.

[LongestYardstick]

Have you heard of Ventoy dude? I know it doesn’t fit the electron theme here today but mentioning balena got me thinking of bootloaders, and I was blown away how well at works, you can choose any ISO on the whole usb drive and boot it.

[supertrooper]

I never though I would see this video from the man who gave us "sudo is bloat"

[Artoooooor]

VSCode changed my way of thinking about Electron. The program has good performance (well... everything runs well compared to IntelliJ Idea), and just feels finished. Most of electron apps I encoutered have some default menu (why TF would I use refresh on desktop application) and run terribly. But I see that every tool may be used well.

[crzyruskie]

I love balena etcher. I use it all the time and it is easy as heck to use. Looks great too.

[xynyde]

The thing is, how slow or fast an application is entirely depends on the developers and engineers working on it. You can have fast electron apps and slow C++/C/Rust apps. Languages don't have speeds... their implementations do.

[maxwellkjr]

I'm glad you mentioned daily use apps that anyone can use and not just text editors like VS Code or Atom

[maacpiash]

I used to use Mailspring, but I had to stop using it because it does not support adding GPG keys AFAIK (not out of the box, at least).

I love Balena Etcher. If you plug in a large USB storage device, such as a portable hard drive or SSD, it shows a little warning label beside its name that it's a large storage device that you may not want to format. Love this little but helpful feature.

Haven't tried the rest of the apps. Gonna try out some.

Excellent video, as always 🙏🏽

[whirled_peas]

A large number of applications just wouldn’t exist without electron

[RedBearAK]

Fedora Media Writer is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and I feel like the Raspberry Pi imaging app is too. At least I remember it being available for macOS, so why wouldn’t it be for Windows? But I use Etcher and have since before it was “balena”, so I can’t say how good the alternatives are. Others are generally far less intuitive and quick/easy to use, even if they technically work just fine. Still usually need Rufus and a Windows install for Windows ISOs, unfortunately. Microsoft just has to be different. Ventoy did not work for my use case (booting Linux ISOs on old Macs) and the dev was not interested in improving it.

[saidimon]

Omg! Thank you so much to advise about Raven Reader. I will give-it a try =D

[deama]

Stacer looked real nice, I'll be adding that to my stack.

[JamieKitchens]

How can I display that transparent panel that you have on your desktop? The one with the time and so forth.

[splatink]

Since you mentioned balena etcher, what's your opinion on ventoy?

[kenos]

Etcher is actually spyware and adware. It phones home (according to the source code), and it promotes you to other stuff while you are flashing your images.

[AceofSpades]

From someone who has used Python and Rust, generally I've found Rust apps to be reliable and fast while Python are pretty and configurable (very generally speaking). Consuming libraries, in particular, show a lot of reliability in Rust and frequent issues with Python that are hard to debug. I love both languages but that's been my experience with those 2 languages in particular.

[geoffbeier]

mailspring is creepy AF.

I tried it out and learned that it was embedding tracking info to see when people open messages I send them and reporting back when they read my messages or click links I include. It did not warn me that it was doing this. Gross.

I didn't notice it was doing this until I clicked that little graph icon above my inbox by accident.

[OktayAcikalin]

Uhmm.. Mailspring looks nice but how can I scroll the e-mail content? The cursor keys just switch to the next or previous e-mails even while having an e-mail open.

[botnet]

my logic is simple. If it's written in electron, I see the alternatives. Don't even have it installed in my machine. I'm not really against webapps running in a browser though. That said I understand the appeal of electron. People usually already know html, css and javascript and electron make it simple to ship something to the desktop. But there are really good alternatives like QT. It can be compiled everywhere and making the interfaces with that is as easy as dragging and drop plus the signal and slots mechanism makes things very intuitive even though it's C++.