Best way to build desktop apps? Should I use electron?

Hey all. I'll keep it brief as I can. I'm a web developer coming from the front end, and have lately been interested in building out desktop applications for various purposes. I'm curious to know what the best tool for that would be.

I looked into Electron (js) and found it intuitive and easy, coming from my background. However, I've read that it's a memory hog and running a chromium instance is highly inefficient. While easy to code in, that inefficiency bothers me. However, looking into alternatives, none really stand out.

What is the standard for building desktop apps, these days? Is electron really the way? Are there viable alternatives?

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UPDATE:

Lots of great comments on here with good suggestions. Thanks all!After doing some research, I've decided to use Tauri. In case any one is curious as to why, here are my thoughts/opinions:

QT and similar UI packages seem cool (especially QML + QT Quick), but the barrier to entry is high, as I'd have to learn a whole new markup language with an entirely different set of conventions (most of that stuff is rote memorization, so the cost to switch from HTML/CSS to QML is high). Moreover, the proprietary ecosystem is a little gross.

Flutter and similar frameworks felt way too bulky and opinionated. Talk about bloat-- maybe when that code compiles, it's more efficient than electron, but the developer experience seems sluggish--so many IDEs, SDKs, etc--it was over a gig of downloads just to get started. I also didn't want to bother with learning Dart, which seems like a fairly niche language and not worth investing in.

Tauri seems like a good compromise: it still uses html/css/js on the frontend, but is more resource-efficient than electron. It's also a small framework/tool and and is easy to understand and navigate. I've been able to jump right in using React to build out my UI with no problems so far, and the developer experience is nice.

Comparing these frameworks and approaches has been interesting, because they embody entirely different approaches to development; the bottom up approach with tools like Kotlin, Flutter, and QT / C++, and the top-down approach with web frameworks and react wrappers for native components. I can't help but think the top-down approach is much easier and more accessible, though that may just be my own experience bias at play... Still, as much as I think react is overkill in many scenarios, tools like React Native and Tauri seem leagues simpler (and nearly as effective) as more traditional incumbents (Kotlin, C#, Flutter, etc).

Just my take of course, based on my background, etc.

Thanks again for all the help!