Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust

I build and ship a production application using tauri and linux support is the most painful experience I had in a long time.<p>They use WebKit GTK which is really not a good fondation IMO, its hard to test for all versions, its much slower than other browser, it has weird bugs.<p>In general the idea of not shipping a browser bundle is nice, in practice it doesn&#x27;t really work for a startup. It&#x27;s just too much unrelated testing and debugging work you need to do to support old outdated systems.<p>We were very excited to use tauri since we are a rust shop, but we are strongly considering moving to electron unless we get a way to bundle a renderer.

&gt; One of the main core differences with Tauri is that it uses a Webview instead of using chromium like in Electron. This means that every desktop application doesn’t have to ship with chromium and can rely on the native browser’s webviews. The downside here is that because it is using Webview you have to deal with different quirks of different operating systems.<p>ElectronJS is a cross-platform framework. It is bloated because it ships a full cross-platform browser (Chromium) in order... well in order to be cross-platform.<p>Tauri wants to be less bloated, and therefore removes Chromium. Which makes it... not so cross-platform, apparently.<p>Genuine question: why not going for a JVM-based technology? That&#x27;s cross-platform, and it doesn&#x27;t require a web browser &#x2F; webview to show text.

Is it just me or do others find the Electron bashing a little over the top as well?<p>I mean VS Code, Discord, Slack and Obsidian are all in very widespread use and work perfectly fine for me.<p>Are there alternatives to Electron that require less resources? Tauri seems to be proof that there are.<p>But I think there is real value in large communities and backing. Electron seems to work perfectly fine to me for everyday use as is evident by the applications mentioned above. I would personally choose Electron over Tauri even for greenfield projects, simply because Electron seems to power applications that are in much more widespread use.

I remember reading about the performance-first development of Linen here on HN a few weeks ago. In that thread I also heard about Zulip for the first time.<p>Both look good. I am not sure which to proselytize to my groups. Most groups I&#x27;m in just use Discord because of its momentum, but I really don&#x27;t like Discord that much - it feels chaotic (I&#x27;ve learned it does have threading and maybe even forum mode now, but nobody seems to use those...), and it&#x27;s not open-source.<p>Indexability is an interesting feature, of obvious use for public or semi-public groups, but certainly not something I&#x27;m interested in for private groups. Can it be disabled?<p>I also really like that Linen has two-way sync. This would massively reduce friction in switching. However, the lack of mobile apps could be a bigger source of friction. How is Linen as a PWA?

&gt; Tauri is an open-source electron alternative that is built in Rust.<p>I&#x27;m not familiar with Electron development, but isn&#x27;t the code mostly JavaScript in that case? Does Rust have a meaningful contribution to the performance and the safety of the codebase here? I feel like Rust part would be &quot;spin up the WebView&quot;. There is no code in the repository, so I couldn&#x27;t check that out myself.

I understand this is more tailored at communities and such (being the Business plan the last in the tier), but for Linen to be a Slack alternative we&#x27;d need App integrations (Google Calendar, Jira, etc) as well as other features such as to send scheduled messages, snooze&#x2F;bookmark incoming messages for later, a strong channel administration&#x2F;management, and a few other features that increase productivity and we can&#x27;t live without.<p>As I said, businesses are probably not the main target customers for Linen so it&#x27;s completely understandable, I would&#x27;ve loved it though. Great work!

Looks interesting, though I would definitely need Android&#x2F;iOS clients before considering it.<p>We migrated our small, private slack group to discord when slack changed their retention policy, though it&#x27;s become less active since then.<p>I think a lot of the members use slack already, but are not inclined to deal with discord. Maybe a different app would be better, or maybe it&#x27;s &quot;slack or nothing&quot; for some of those folks.<p>What I really want is slack to just have a reasonable pricing plan for small, low activity groups, like Linen has. So props for that!

Unrelated question. Anyone know if it would be difficult to write a SwiftUI “compiler” to non-Mac architectures, including wasm? (I’m not a ui developer). I mean, I realize it is probably non-trivial, like most cross-platform ui, but I have been imagining that Apple would do this since they released it, so that their webapps could be written in SwiftUI instead of whatever they are doing now…

I see all these &quot;Alternative to $FOO&quot; type projects that differ in the implementation but not in the result; IOW to the end-user the product looks and behaves practically the same as $FOO.<p>I understand wanting to produce an alternative, but I can&#x27;t help but wonder why not produce an alternative that is <i>substantially different?</i>[1]<p>From the screenshots Linen is almost a clone of Slack, with (I think) the biggest difference being &quot;google-indexable&quot;. There&#x27;s literally, on the landing page, no compelling reason for using this product over Slack.<p>Looking at the landing page for Linen[2], I don&#x27;t see <i>anything</i> about why one would choose Linen over Slack other than &quot;google-indexable&quot; and &quot;advanced thread management&quot;[3].<p>I think the biggest differentiator is pricing, but that is not an issue for companies using Slack, and unprofitable targeting anyone who finds Slack too expensive.<p>[1] The easy &quot;substantially different&quot; thing to do would be to rearrange the layout. The hard &quot;substantially different&quot; thing to do would be to actually have a performant chat program that starts in &lt;10ms and consumes under 100MB in normal and active daily use.<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linen.dev&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linen.dev&#x2F;</a><p>[3] Managing conversation threads in IM is not a problem I&#x27;ve heard anyone complain about, TBH.

&gt; Mac - 4.17 MB<p>&gt; Windows - 4.13 MB<p>&gt; Linux - 73.8 MB<p>One is not like the others.

Good. I&#x27;ve been looking for a Slack alternative<p>Slack&#x27;s app broke the basic functionality of the main input box where the home and end keys jump to the start and end of the entire input rather than the current line. This turns simple text edits into a chore. I pointed this out to their support staff who responded that the issue wasn&#x27;t important enough for them to fix. Very disappointing

Discord alternative would be a better description, considering Slack isn&#x27;t meant for communities but companies.

&gt; Building a slack alternative<p>I&#x27;ve always thought slack was the alternative, to IRC.

Do you plan on releasing the source code for the client at any point? I&#x27;d love to possibly use it as a reference for some of my stuff

Tell me you&#x27;re going to support video&#x2F;audio calls in Firefox, and that you&#x27;re not going to randomly shuffle the list of contacts in the “Direct message” section, and you&#x27;ll have a better UX than Slack already.

My tip for the main product Linen:<p>At the moment I hop into many of the chats and they aren&#x27;t too active. Which is fine but makes discovery a bit boring.<p>Why not have the feed of the latest messages from your top 50 trusted Linen workspaces (should I call them sheets? duvets? covers? :-)). Then I can see active discussions that are happening and join in.<p>Also use Linen for your own day to day team activities. Assuming there is a private channel concept for stuff that is secret that&#x27;ll create more activity and make it interesting to follow.

I wish they&#x27;d used EGUI etc instead of another web UI. It&#x27;s Rust; might as well leverage the performance.

The discord sync feature combined with it being google indexable does seem nice but is there a way to control what can be indexed? Some discord channels are somewhat private on purpose even if the entire server is public. So can you control which channels are indexable?

Just out of curiosity, is the server-side self-hostable? I want to just try it out.

Main thing that bothers me with electron is RAM usage (300mb I think?). And when I tested a WebView&#x2F;tauri demo, RAM usage ended up being about the same since it had to load webkit.

Really, if it uses Web techonology, target the browser(s) I already have installed.<p>This coming from someone that has mostly done Web stuff in the last 20 years.

With Figma being so incredibly performant and robust as a web assembly app, why don&#x27;t more apps turn to this approach instead?

Regarding the development &amp; deployment speed, electron is still the king. it is just a little bit bigger.

Unsolicited Advice: instead of building an alternative that is mostly similar from an end-user perspective, think more deeply about communication within organizations. Followers copy and extend. Innovators lead the way to a new vista.

Core tenets, not tenants

Mattermost?

Too bad Elixir&#x2F;Rust wasn’t used.<p>It seems to be the perfect platform for a communications service (and is also what Discord is built on).<p>And before that, WhatsApps was strictly Erlang.