preferably not electron :)

I get the hate for Electron, but to me, despite the issues, it's not going away.

I think a better approach is to figure out how to make Electron more performant in the various OSes.

I haven't gotten into the internals of Electron, so I'm not the one to reflect on the approach, but seeing some of the improvements that MSFT made with Edge over Chrome in memory usage gives me hope that this is achievable, even if it doesn't happen immediately.

Back in the 1990's we faced a similar thing, where web "apps" were ugly and slow, and not as powerful as the desktop apps that many corporations had developed in C++ or VB or Delphi. Today of course, the situation is much different, and we use web apps all the time. I really truly believe that Electron (or perhaps a successor - like how VS Code superseded Atom) will not go away, and in the future we will be much happier with it.

> back in the 1990's we faced a similar thing, where web "apps" were ugly and slow

And when's the last time you loaded an app with the Java VM on the desktop, unless it was Eclipse and you were about to use it to write more Java?

Minecraft. q.e.d.

That's true. I forgot Minecraft. I now have two examples (Eclipse, Minecraft). Although Minecraft moved away from Java to native clients for consoles, mobile and even a Windows native version.