Spotify using several processes and GB of memory just play some music and browse a library is an abomination. WinAMP did most of that 20 years ago while using a fraction of the resources.
Discord similarly is an affront.
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God I wish discord just stuck to being a straightforward app without any of the fancy fluff that’s just not needed. I hate the super-flashy things that obscure visibility and divert your attention so much
But it’s what they sell to people, and a minority seems to really like so
They had no viable business plan with which to pay back investors so this was inevitable. It sucks though…not a day goes by where I don’t grumble about what an insult Discord is to their users.
I can recommend Vencord or Vesktop instead, it’s a modified client with stuff like FakeNitro and Adblocker as plugins
I run those thing in the browser, where they belong.
If you have premium, there’s probably a better native client.
Same here. At first, I thought I was going to get a better Discord experience with the dedicated ‘app’. Nope. Another web app crammed into Electron, multiplying the overall browser footprint on my system. It now happily lives on in a normal browser tab where my ad blockers and user-scripts claw back local control of things.
Really? I have it running right now with 0% CPU usage and around 100MB of memory. Something’s wrong with your setup.
Correction, Winamp still does this today while using a fraction of the resources.
Though if you’re on Windows I’d recommend Xmplay instead, it plays basically everything.
I’m on Linux and I use VLC.
Have you tried AIMP on Windows? If so, how does it compare with Xmplay?
Never tried it, sorry
Spotify suck at programming. When using the app offline, I can view and play songs and podcasts directly or from the queue, but the menu to add stuff to the queue doesn’t load.
I hate Discord passionately. I miss the days of Mumble + IRC
IRC was great, but it failed to progress meaningfully.
Except for needing bnc to keep your nick on some networks, it works very well imo
If there’s any upside to the entire situation, it’s that perhaps, maybe, developers will again start paying more attention to optimization instead of just throwing more powerful hardware at it.
Some of the greatest games ever developed for consoles were great because the developers had to get extremely creative with the limited resources at their disposal. This led to some incredibly optimized games that could do a whole lot with those very limited resources.
Best I can do is mandatory Lumen and Nanite. You can get almost-stable 60 fps on a 5090 with DLSS Performance and 3x frame gen, which should be optimized enough for anyone.
My game will sell for 80 bucks, 150 if you want the edition with all the preorder-exclusive content.
I hate that I know what game this is referencing
You don’t even need to go that far back. It blows my mind that the 360 and PS3 have 512mb of RAM. Halo 4, GTA 5, and The Last of Us did some impressive graphics work with 512mb.
Oh wow my mind is blown. Even more so that it’s 256mb of DRAM and 256mb of VRAM separately.
We have really gone down hill and fast ;(
In my brain memory I find it hard to believe all the textures loaded at one time could ever be so small. Im amazed.
tbf, the PC version of console games of the time ran like utter shit on computers with less than 2GB RAM and graphics cards worse than a Geforce 9800. A lot of people were still on WinXP, which was bloated compared to WinME-2000, but by 2006 it was fine.
I always care about how much memory I end up using.
Problem is, most places won’t pay for caring about that. Those that would, are doing so because they are using the product on their own systems instead of some customer’s systems.I think we will first see a batch of alternative apps, which either will get shut down by manufacturers etc., or get tolerated as an alternative.
I’m not sure I know many Electron apps that are worth running.
There is WhatsApp, but I just run the browser version. For Matrix, there’s NeoChat, which uses QML and is definitely better than Electron.I think spotify / discord / vscode (and derivatives) / slack are probably the most installed electron apps.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?O=0&SeB=nd&K=&outdated=&SB=v&SO=d&PP=50&submit=Go
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?O=0&SeB=nd&K=&outdated=&SB=p&SO=d&PP=50&submit=GoA lot of pretty popular packages in those lists are electron apps, unfortunately
android-studio: I guess that explains why it ran so badly back when I had to use it for work.
jdkwouldn’t be an Electron app, right?discordis the only 1 of those that I used in any meaningful sense before and I already stopped using it for reasons other than Electron. So, I guess it’s just a personal thing that I don’t tend to require stuff that is made in Electron.I believe Android Studio is built on top of IntelliJ IDE which uses Java, so no Electron. That being said, Java applications are generally RAM heavy as well and Android Studio was always a pig on resources.
Visual Studio Code (not Visual Studio!) is Electron based but I’ve always had good performance with it.
Visual Studio Code
Yeah, that’s one that I can’t talk badly about.
While I have used MS Visual Studio and know how slow it was, I tried VS Codium once or twice and it worked pretty smoothly. Someone probably put quite a bit of effort into making it so.Apart from Android Studio, which ended up not even starting up properly on the work computer, Gradle itself also takes quite a bit of time and resources. I was using the NDK with a C++ project and it took way longer to setup than any BSP, despite only being able to compile for a single version of Android.
Best I can do is vibe-coded performance optimizations
The upside to the situation is that electron has been a more successful cross platform development framework then literally anything that came before it, from Xamarin to Java. And it’s entirely based on open source software, and open web standards.
I think pretty much every dev understands the issue but they are limited in what they can do about it. Quitting a job because they won’t let you optimize is noble but unrealistic for the vast majority of devs.
I would love for optimizations to start being prioritized. More specifically, I would love to see vendors place limits on memory use in apps. For example, Steam could reject any game over 50gb. I do not believe for a moment that any game we currently have needs more than 50gb except maybe an mmo with 20 years of content. Or Microsoft could reject apps that use more than X ram. They won’t ever do that but without an outright rejection, this won’t be fixed.
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until curl rewrites in electon and you don’t have enough ram to run it anymore
“On next week’s episode of whycombinator”
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back in the day people would download more ram and put it on giant tape-based backup systems. Big companies started downloading massive amounts of high quality ram this way. This created a ram shortage, and companies like corsair are now using their massive reserves of downloaded ram and filling empty ram sticks with them and making lots of money. That’s why ram is so expensive today. Any ram you can download today is low quality ram, and the only high quality ram can be had on physical sticks, which were filled by the companies with ram reserves. 1969 was the peak of the ram harvesting, so you’ll probably get some really great ram if it came from that year.
Thanks, Calvin’s Dad!
Is that why everyone’s going to Ram Ranch now? To harvest high-quality RAM right from the source?
But what if I want more RAM while I am waiting for my additional RAM to download?
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It’s kind of an abomination when VsCode, supposed to be a lighter IDE, runs like dogshit compared to JetBrains, a fuckin’ Java based IDE. Since when was Java light on RAM?
(Caveat: I haven’t directly compared their memory usage, my experience is in very difference codebases for each)
Lmao this is quite frankly, horseshit, upvoted by people who have never used an IDE.
VScode is lightweight, snappy, and fast to open. VSCodium gives you all of that without any of the Microsoft. And even runs in a web browser.
It’s not “horseshit” - I gave you a caveat precisely so that you can understand the limitations of my comparison, and so that you don’t need to be so antagonistic.
lightweight
I launched VSCode fresh this morning. Just now, 4 hours later, I closed it and watched my system memory usage: 1.3GB. I am doing remote development, so there’s a whole server process as well which is chomping a few GB. My old laptop repeatedly ground to a halt until the OOM killer woke up/I rebooted as its measly 32GB of RAM couldn’t cope with two VSCode sessions (plus other normal apps) after a while.
Two VSCode sessions are NOT the problem if your system with 32GB of ram is stalling lmao
Drawing strong conclusions like ‘VSCode is an abomination that runs like dogshit and is worse than an Oracle product’, from an admittedly flawed comparison that does not demonstrate that, is inviting some antagonism.
Electron is the abomination, not VSCode, and JetBrains IDEs are developed by… JetBrains, not Oracle.
In my experience VSCode on Windows runs like dogshit. I blame Windows for that. VSCode on Linux runs like a dream. I can have four different sessions open and it still runs great (I haven’t tested more than that because I’ve never had a reason to).
I can confirm this has been my experience as well.
Anectdotally, the only people I know who say vscode is lightweight and snappy are devs that have have primarily used it, visual studio, jet brains, or some other common and bloated application.
It’s not really an IDE and it’s not lightweight either.
It’s not snappy. Sometimes just moving up a couple lines fast causes my caret to lag, which is not pleasant.
That might have more to do with when you have lots of plugins for LSPs, etc, but who uses vscode without any plugins?
Claiming that VSCode is not an IDE is just pedantic.
It is literally just a modular IDE that lets you pick and choose which piece you want rather then being like Visual Studio or XCode that is tailored for a single language / development flow.
Hell you still have to download core parts of XCode / VS after you download and install them, like the development frameworks for your targets, does that mean that they’re not actually IDEs?
I will concede on the “not really an IDE” part. You’re right you can set it up to be like one.
I say it’s not mostly because it isn’t marketed as one. It’s marketed as just a source code (text) editor.
+1
For stuff like editing massive files or huge folders, the least stuttery, fastest IDE for me is… VScode. Jetbrains (last I tried it) is awful.
Code may not use 1MB of RAM or idle dead asleep, but it utilizes the CPU/GPU efficiently.
Now, extensions are the caveat, like any app that supports extensions. Those can bog it down real quick.
Did you ever use Atom?
Notepad++ my beloved
i doo doo love it too.
does it have syntax support for Gcode yet? I do CnC (not the kinky kind) and I love to see shit in color. there’s only a few specialized editors that I have come across that do this reasonably well…Iirc you can create custom syntax highlighting formats for notepad++. So if it’s not there by default, someone else might have made a file for it, or you can start making one yourself, as the format was easy to understand. It’s been like a decade since I’ve used it, but it should be somewhere in the menus.
Kate my beloved
My gripe with Kate is that whenever I open a file and get an LSP error it displays a pulsing warning notification in the lower left of the window. This might be okay except that I cannot read things if something is moving in my peripheral vision and there is also apparently no way to suppress this pulsing warning notification other than to disable the LSP features entirely. I want to use kwrite because at that point I might as well, but there is a long-standing bug in plasma that causes Kate to be defaulted to over kwrite for some file types despite my preferences!
I still prefer this to vscode, but I just need to vent a bit
Meanwhile my Linux runtime still boots for 1G and Emacs is looking pretty good right now lol
And here I was thinking this was about emacs and lisp. Yougster complaining about not knowing how to quit Vi smh they have never experienced the horrors of emacs
I use geany btw
Scintilla my beloved
(This is the text editor component in Geany and Notepad++)
I’m sorry my comment is not deep enough to be his irrelevant to the topic but I gotta ask: Do you know a text editor which is just notepad but remembers the last session when you close it? I just need a scratchpad, even notepad++ is too fancy for my needs but that’s what I was using on windows. Now I use kate but it feels like I’m killing a mosquito with a rocket launcher when a book cover would do.
Unless you want to get fancy for the sake of not being fancy, you will likely be best just sticking with Kate.
Basic editing can be done in vi or nano or even piped to a file via she’ll. I don’t think any of those are necessarily better or worse than using Kate. Vi and nano would probably be faster but you would need to be in a terminal already.
That said, I am curious as well if anyone has a better answer.
On KDE Plasma, I would stick with Kate and hide/disable some the fancier interface features. It might seem like overkill, but since it’s built from common components that other KDE apps use anyway, the effective resource consumption will probably be light. And Kate is quick.
On a Gtk desktop, you might try Mousepad. This is what I used before moving away from Xfce.
The alternative to Electron not existing is that you have slower developed, clunkier software, that’s buggier and has fewer features.
There is no magic bullet of being like ‘just code the exact same thing in C’. There are tradeoffs to every development framework.
Bunch of people complaining about electron in this thread but I’m happy it exists.
Without electron you would get way fewer Linux apps and often no GUI to go with them.
The RAM usage is high sometimes but I have 128gb and unused RAM is wasted RAM. I don’t care how much something is using until it starts to swap or gets oom.
Most people still only have 16gb of ram (like me).
Electron is net good, but only for small teams that need to ship fast or solo devs etc who already know js and just want something to work.
Billion dollar companies using it instead of paying more for native apps is a horrible use case (that’s mainly where my complaints live).
At the very least, I hope we move to something that can use webviews on our system rather than bundling their own which would save on resources (but opens the possibility for version mismatches i guess, I dunno if you can “peg” that sorta stuff to a working version… but i guess thats just how browsers work so…).
GTK and Qt exists. They’re multi-platform, so you don’t even need to port.
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the problem isn’t electron, the problem is that A) html is the only truly cross platform UI framework and B) that html (and the web stack in general) has way too many features and is way too complex, because Google’s been bolting features onto it for decades.
I must be hallucinating here. It clearly states a lot of OSes, but maybe it’s just me.
