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by jandrese 2396 days ago
What I like is that the clients were written years ago and weigh almost nothing. I can leave them running in the background on even the wimpiest trash netbook and it doesn't care.

Compare to Slack or Signal or Discord where the client is some half a gig chomping behemoth that spins up the CPU fans constantly.

2 comments

I thought I was the only crazy person that hates anything that spins up a fan on my laptop. Why Java sets of fans when I spin up anything (even an empty spring project) in my IDE I just don’t understand. Even IntelliJ and eclipse with no project loaded seem to set off the fan.
Personally; I can forgive an IDE, depending on what I'm doing (just viewing source shouldn't be spinning my fans).

But debugging, deep code inspection and so on are complex features used by specialists.

Slack is designed to be used by everyone; thus I don't give it as much of a pass. Because if everyone in my company is using a CPU core and 1GiB of memory to just talk to people then that's a very high actual cost of resources.

Just like you can forgive specialist software in other areas (final cut, photoshop, CAD) taking significant resources.

Tools designed to be used by everyone should be lean, optimised and feature complete. In my opinion.

You're not crazy. I feel the same. Similarly, I was beginning to think that I was crazy.... As another pointed out, I give a pass to heavy applications like my IDE.... but when my shopping-list app is using a Gig of memory and spinning up my fans, then I want to gouge my eyes out in disgust.
Yes, and lots of data fit into 80x24 xterm vs 1280x1024 Discord. Crazy that I need an entire workspace per Electron apps. I have no idea what goes in on the developers' mind when it comes to unnecessary padding/spacing.