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?

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

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.