You’d expect Electron to be more popular than Tauri because Electron pioneered the category of “use web tech to make mediocre desktop software” and Tauri is a johnny-come-lately that commits the cardinal sin of requiring that you care about the security of your app.

we can form theories about what sustains popularity – why do some frameworks and libraries go from strength to strength and while others plateau or even peter out.

My theory is fairly straightforward:

The long-term popularity of any given tool for software development is proportional to how much labour arbitrage it enables.

Documents show Microsoft’s lawyers admitted to Scottish policing bodies that the company cannot guarantee sensitive law enforcement data will remain in the UK, despite long-standing public claims to the contrary

DevOps is all about making it easier for developers and system administrators to complete software work quickly and efficiently. That’s not been happening.

Instead, out of the tens of thousands of developers surveyed by SlashData’s Developer Nation, a mere 14% can get code into production in a single day. That’s about the same as we saw when SlashData started asking this question in the third quarter of 2020.

"The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

[…]

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

[…]

The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world."