habitat VS tauri

And many more such as Scaleway, Oxide, Fuchsia, MeiliSearch, Vector, embark, Chef, BBC...

https://github.com/habitat-sh/habitat written by Chef devs

Personal anecdote: Habitat was developed as a sort of application deployment / configuration management tool in Rust, and the architecture there is roughly equivalent to an ECS. I found it a joy to work with and work on. Not sure if it's fundamentally a better software pattern, but it at least meshes with my brain better than how most OO-style software is laid out.

https://github.com/habitat-sh/habitat

Tauri is the star here. Instead of bundling a whole Chromium like Electron does, it uses the operating system's own webview and ships a small Rust binary next to it. You write your UI in plain web tech, and anything that touches the disk, the database or the OS goes through Rust commands. The result is an installer measured in single-digit megabytes instead of hundreds.

The repo says all three platforms are supported, but since signed installers aren't published yet, Linux and Windows users build from source the same way macOS users do. The Tauri v2 prerequisites differ per platform — check the Tauri docs for your distro.

The second option was Tauri, and I genuinely spent time there. I started a real implementation, laid out the architecture, got the first interactions running. On paper it held up: lighter binary than Electron, frontend in whichever stack you want, Rust backend for the sensitive logic, cross-platform distribution with minimal friction. But as I went deeper, two things sharpened up.

Tauri v2 — https://tauri.app

I wanted something open-source, fast, and lightweight that just works. So I built DBX with Tauri (Rust + Vue) — the installer is only ~15 MB because it uses the system's native webview instead of bundling Chromium.

I thought so too at first. It is definitely something interfaced on top of Tauri[0] with some sort of 'server-side logic' framework[1]. But looking at Tauri's site, it is really hard to disentangle if PyWry is a binder about WRY[2] or not.

"OS-efficient cross-platform HTML-based UI toolkit" is a great technological thing, but neither PyWry and Tauri's sites make that clear, or meaningfully advertise what they do. Which is a shame, because there is myriad software which might benefit all to use this.

[0] Tauri is akin to Chromium, I think? https://tauri.app

[1] and also a rather large amount of LLM integration; the source for PyWry has a whole section for Claude bindings

[2] the Webview Rendering librarY (WRY) used in Tauri https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry

- When transcribing, I don't like the workflow of extracting a complete audio and transforming it midi, so I thought having this helper on the side, but still do most of the work by myself could be very useful.

Disclaimer: the app is limited by the model's performance. Basic-Pitch is a relatively small model which runs super well on consumer laptops. I get around 50FPS of inference on my laptop (AMD Radeon 780M).

Of course, this wouldn't be possible without:

- Tauri: https://tauri.app/

Ubuntu 24.04 and later moved libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev out of the default packages. Tauri users on newer distros have to install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev manually and pass a -tags webkit2_41 flag. Fedora has deprecated the 4.0 package. There is an active discussion on the Tauri repo asking to replace WebKitGTK with Chromium entirely because of instability (tauri-apps/tauri#8524).