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by Dylan16807 2361 days ago
That's missing the point. $2 of RAM in exchange for security is a good deal. Go ahead and use the command line version yourself, but if you're not going to contribute to a native GUI version then don't be a party pooper about Electron.

Electron's only a problem when there's lock-in of some kind.
4 comments
StavrosK 2361 days ago
I think that people who say this think "yeah, running one Electron app is no problem". The problem comes when everything is Electron and now, like the ocean, you have no memory.
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Dylan16807 2361 days ago
You don't need everything open at once.

And you can fit a whole lot of Electron apps into an extra 8 or 16GB.

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bscphil 2361 days ago
The newest baseline Dell XPS 13 (not even Inspiron) comes with 4 GB of memory by default. The very idea of an extra 8 GB is hilarious because manufacturers haven't kept up with the times (my laptop purchased 9 years ago had 8 GB), and by extension the median consumer's laptop hasn't either. Nobody has an "extra" 8 GB outside of people with the money to just unthinkingly buy the top of the line model or developers who know what they're doing.
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Dylan16807 2361 days ago
We're talking about buying extra memory, not defaults. And while an XPS 13 is trying to be a macbook, on an XPS 15 you just pop open the back cover and shove more memory into it.
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dependenttypes 2361 days ago
Sadly you do need a lot of things (such as chat programs, an email client, a browser, and potentially an editor) open at once.
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tjoff 2361 days ago
Nope. Many laptops can not have more than 16GB. And you have to pay hundreds of dollars even for that privilege in many situations.

An electron app will hurt adoption, give the project a bad name and reduce the likelihood of a proper UI to never materialize. Please don't.

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oefrha 2361 days ago
Never mind 16GB. There are quite a few 8GB or even 4GB laptops (4GB ones are usually >= 4yr old, but it's not uncommon to keep crappy laptops for that long outside the tech-savvy circle) among my friends and family.
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Dylan16807 2361 days ago
I'm just replying directly to the "I would have bought less" comment, which implies having control over your memory amount. It's not hundreds of dollars when that happens. You can get all sizes of laptop memory for under $4 a gigabyte. And if you've maxed out at 16GB, you're not really at a spot where .3GB is a big burden.

> An electron app will hurt adoption, give the project a bad name and reduce the likelihood of a proper UI to never materialize. Please don't.

As opposed to having nobody use it in the first place.

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Wowfunhappy 2361 days ago
> $2 of RAM in exchange for security is a good deal.

1. I don’t know what RAM you’re buying, but mine costs way more than that. It’s especially bad if you’re using AMD.

2. How does using electron apps make me more secure than using native apps?

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deepersprout 2361 days ago
> 2. How does using electron apps make me more secure than using native apps?

The electron app exists. The native app does not.

You think that ranting against electron is somehow making a native app appear, but the reality is that there are way more js/electron devs than there are qt/gtk/wpf devs, and the choice in most cases is either an electron app or no app.

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Dylan16807 2361 days ago
> 1. I don’t know what RAM you’re buying, but mine costs way more than that. It’s especially bad if you’re using AMD.

DDR4 at 3200MHz, plenty to make Ryzen happy, is available at $4 per GB on Amazon. That gets you half a gig for $2. But that's not even our max budget. If we use oefrha's estimate of 300MB of RAM eaten by Electron, then we have a budget of $6.80 per GB. That gets you very nice RAM.

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dependenttypes 2361 days ago
If only it was $2 of RAM...

> in exchange for security

Electron is not famous for its security. See for example https://www.trustwave.com/en-us/resources/blogs/spiderlabs-b... and https://securityboulevard.com/2018/06/june-vulnerability-of-...

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AgentME 2361 days ago
Those issues are only relevant to applications that display arbitrary HTML and already have XSS issues. Avoiding XSS is doable; with most web frameworks you're protected from XSS by default and have to specifically turn off the safeties to get XSS.
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dependenttypes 2361 days ago
> Those issues are only relevant to applications that display arbitrary HTML and already have XSS issues

Such as signal! https://ivan.barreraoro.com.ar/signal-desktop-html-tag-injec...

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