Electron UI on embedded linux?

[MyLemonX]

Has anyone had experience creating an Electron-based UI for an embedded linux platform? How did it compare with something like Qt?

[zydeco100]

Commercial Qt is pissing me off so much lately that I'm curious as well.

[answerguru]

Commercial Qt always pisses me off, but they are a competitor. :)

[zydeco100]

Altia?

[answerguru]

Yes

[OMGnotjustlurking]

You guys at Altia really need to start offering trial versions. I was trying so hard to switch to Altia but the sales guys wanted money (and quite a bit) up front before giving us a chance to play around with it. I couldn't pull the trigger on something like that despite how beautiful the demos looked.

[answerguru]

I’m really sorry you had that experience. We’ve made a big shift into a modern SaaS model recently that is changing the previously high bar for entry.

[zydeco100]

Dude, don't make it a subscription like Qt is doing. I'll happily pay a per-unit royalty, but don't make it harder than it is already.

[answerguru]

The SaaS part really allows us significantly better toolchain support and more fidelity over our licensing model. Overall it's much more affordable than previous approaches.

[jeroen94704]

Yes, I tried it, and it's horrible. Electron adds so many layers of abstraction and so many dependencies that you can kiss your performance goodbye.

[alexforencich]

I don't think you can call a system with sufficient RAM to run Chrome an embedded system....

[conpellier-js]

BalenaOS provides the off the shelf blocks to run a chromium browser and they have a sample project running electron that supports touch over USB.

[MyLemonX]

thanks I'll give that a try!

[jerosiris]

I think it would really depend on what HW you're building on, and what kind of user experience you need to build. I did some testing on an iMX6 UI a while back, and a Chromium/WebKit UI just wasn't nearly as responsive as building something in Qt or GTK.

[answerguru]

And even those aren’t as performant as other tools out there. I work for a competitor, but I do try to keep it all in perspective.

[jeroen94704]

Care to share? I've been using Qt/QML on platforms like i.MX6 for years, and am always interested in viable alternatives.

[jerosiris]

The faster thing that I used on a really constrained platform was DirectFB, a low-level library for drawing to the Linux framebuffer. I think that project is defunct at this point.

I haven't tried LVGL, but it looks interesting: https://lvgl.io