I'm going to push back against this just because it feels like sort of the "cool" thing to say around HN. I certainly understand some users on some hardware may have had a negative experience with Electron, but I haven't. I have never felt an Electron app (primarily Slack and Spotify) was sluggish or negatively affected my overall experience on my laptop in any way. Granted, I've always had relatively decent MacBook Pros, but this "common HN refrain" has simply never been an issue for me.
Coming from someone that has been using an old computer for a while, I could definitely tell the difference between Electron and non-Electron apps based on their speed. E.g. Spotify and Discord. They take forever to start (the worst part IMO), there's significant lag when changing pages, and they just feel bad to use. If you've never noticed it, then your computers are very good.
> Granted, I've always had relatively decent MacBook Pros, but this "common HN refrain" has simply never been an issue for me.
That's exactly why it's never been an issue, and will likely never be an issue for you.
Most people (with the exception of gamers, who are still not "most people") do not have relatively recent MacBook Pros - they have machines that are significantly weaker. All of my non-gamer, non-techie friends have 4-to-7-year-old computers that are significantly weaker than my already-lackluster ultrabook that struggles to run Discord and watch a 1080p YouTube video at the same time. That is the average person's experience on desktop/laptop computers (not mobile devices).
You may never had had to deal with this, but that's because you've only used machines that are far more powerful than the median.
I'm going to push back against this just because it feels like sort of the "cool" thing to say around HN. I certainly understand some users on some hardware may have had a negative experience with Electron, but I haven't. I have never felt an Electron app (primarily Slack and Spotify) was sluggish or negatively affected my overall experience on my laptop in any way. Granted, I've always had relatively decent MacBook Pros, but this "common HN refrain" has simply never been an issue for me.