Think about how much time people spend in front of 24&quot; screens with a keyboard. &quot;Desktop&quot;, or whatever that evolves into, is overwhelmingly where real work still gets done. For as critical as that environment is in the modern workplace it&#x27;s historically been drastically underserved by this community.<p>Yes, there are a lot of tools like Swing, Qt, Cocoa, GTK, WPF&#x2F;WinRT, but their development communities are much smaller than the javascript&#x2F;web ecosystem. They also create enormous portability problems, particularly in an environment (especially in the business world) so heavily dominated by Windows machines.<p>This community is acutely aware of what happens when the barrier to entry is lowered and the development tooling improved. The tooling that Electron provides via Chromium is also something that should not be understated. Chromium&#x27;s dev tools are remarkable and improving every day. Few other ecosystems, especially old desktop ones, have debugging environments as rich. The painting performance &#x2F; profiling tools alone go to great lengths to keeping everything running at 60fps. Furthermore modern CSS layout engines like FlexBox give you an enormous head start on a notoriously difficult problem and is a joy to work with when you don&#x27;t have to worry about browser compatibility.<p>I will admit, the getting-started cost of Electron is high. Shipping all of Chromium and Node is no small feat and frankly probably not suited for a minor utility. However once an app crosses even a modest level of sophistication the benefits of this environment are definitely worth it. There are also several specialized tasks that Node probably isn&#x27;t suited for. Luckily, since you have full process control and the ability to compile native modules any additional specialized task can be run on the side.<p>The past 18 months working with Electron at Nylas have been some of the most enjoyable development experiences of my life. Much of the crap that frustrates people out of web development (compatibility issues) go away. Being able to build an app at the core of people&#x27;s day-long experiences is deeply satisfying and something I&#x27;m indebted to the Electron team for.<p>If you&#x27;re in the Bay Area and still have questions or are just curious, come join us at the Electron Meetup on Wed May 25: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;Bay-Area-Electron-User-Group&#x2F;events&#x2F;230303142&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;Bay-Area-Electron-User-Group&#x2F;events&#x2F;23...</a>