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Linux is the reason Windows apps are bloated these days
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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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Electron is the only cross platform gui toolkit...
If you ignore QT, GTK and everything else.
I'm so glad that Microsoft makes an awesome cross platfor--- wait, no, but they contribute code to--- hmmm ... Hey, what does Microsoft do to make apps more portable again?
The real reasons often are:
Also a lot of Windows-only apps are Electron apps, only because the manufacturer wants to go "fuck you", even putting protections into the code just in case you wanted to run it on Linux.
EDIT: Forgot the "live embeds" reason.
Another reason is when developing the Web version first. Draw.io is a good example, where we get a bonus desktop(electron) version "for free" though the product was developed as a web app.
one of the funniest (and sadly accurate) things i've heard said about linux backwards-compatibility is that its most stable API is Win32. you can run really old windows software on wine because they support stuff even windows doesn't anymore.
of course this is because the expectation is that you can just recompile old software to work on new systems, which is not really a thing on window.s
The most stable system is one that is out of support. No updates == No breakage! ๐
Itโs very amusing to imagine devs carefully watching for an EOL/EOS date and starting to build software only after
I think this is the point of Debian stable, and also why some devs hate Debian stable.
It's so portable! With maximal efforts we support both windows 7, windows 8.1 (but not 8.0), windiws 10 and soon Windows 11 !!!
/s
.net
.net cli apps are cross platform and can be portable :p
Gui in .net isnt fully cross platform ( maui is everything except linux ) but frameworks like avalonia ( .net ) and imgui fix all that :')
Thanks for reminding me why Maui doesn't support Linux. I saw Maui mentioned in an earlier comment and was baffled why KDE would make something not working that doesn't work in Linux. It's because Microsoft stole the Maui name from KDE: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-KDE-MAUI
Flatpak
AppImage
Snap
Hell, let's not forget
Python Perl
Java
POSIX
The first 3 are Linux only. It's irrelevant.
Also each is pretty bad in terms of usability and practicality, either losing integration because "containerized" or taking GBs of space or both.
Edit: guys relax, I'm not a linux hater, I use it daily. But windows does have a unified environment, which makes deployment so much easier, while linux doesn't. And that's a problem since you either have old broken apps on distro repositories, or impractical, potebtially bloated, and even more fractionated environments like those I mentioned. They are patches and we should work towards a more standard environment, not adding more and more levels of abstraction like electron does.
Even Torvalds says it so.
AppImages can get quite large because each app is self-contained, but the "losing integration" part is nonsense these days for any of these formars. That's why we have portals, and if those aren't enough you can still give the app full permissions.
Appimages are usually quite reasonable in size, it's Flatpak that usually require 2/3 GB per app since every package has its own version of KDE/Gnome or other runtimes so every app still has to download a new one.
That's simply not true, if the required dependencies are already downloaded they get used by every Flatpak app. If you have three apps requiring the Gnome 46 libs those only exist once.
I don't know where this myth about Flatpaks always being gigabytes in size originates from or why it's so persistent, but it's wrong.
GTK is not accessible anywhere other than Linux and is therefore not a serious option outside of Linux.
GTK is available for windows. https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/windows
I said accessible not available. If you don't know what it means, accessibility means integrating with the OS screen readers and other similar tools so that everyone can use your app, not only people by people with good eyesight, and capable of using a mouse.
I mean... Windows could probably contribute to GTK if they wanted to expose their accessibility APIs. This would in theory be a good use of time.
You can even do inefficient UIs in Python using tkinter, which is part of the standard library in python.
Python tkinter interfaces might be inefficient, slow and require labyrinthine code to set-up and use, but they make up for it by being breathtakingly ugly.
Ugh, and they're just weird. I can handle ugly but ktinker popups go across virtual desktops and over other windows for some ungodly reason, and never seem to dismiss themselves properly