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by BubRoss 2246 days ago
Qt and widget based programs are absolutely not difficult to make. I don't know where this comes from. They are fast and responsive by default instead of laggy and sluggish on a many core xeon loaded with ram. Even using PyQt and embedding python is like a feather compared to electron and that approach is extra easy.
1 comments

But that's not really the point. How easy is it to make great UIs with them?

How easily can you make a staggered fade and slide in animation? Responsively change layout? Apply complex styles?

That's a good question but what's the point of all this if no one can use the app if they don't have a minimum of 8gb ram? My wife couldn't run Spotify, slack at the same time cause her machine started swapping.

The developer experience is vastly superior in electron and it's reach is massive. There's no denying. But the underlying problems are pretty serious and the people who complain are not just hating for random reasons.

I hope you get how insane it is when your cpu fan starts spinning because of an app that plays music in the background!

So far the pro electron arguments are concerned only about developer experience who generally have beefier specs in their machines.

The lowest common denominator in end user machines are very different and I request you please keep that in mind!

P.S: I'm a web developer and I fully understand how much valuable electron is for me.

> That's a good question but what's the point of all this if no one can use the app if they don't have a minimum of 8gb ram?

Even vscode, which has a gigantic memory footprint due to its plugin system, requires 1GB to run comfortably.

Nowadays you get computers with 4GB of RAM for 60€.

Let's not bother ourselves with irrelevant details.

It's completely relevant. People run more than one application on their desktop computers.

Regardless of what many people say, RAM usage still matters. If every app takes a giant chunk of RAM just to get started ( which many do ) eventually that's going to bite you.

Yes, we do have a ton more resources to work with than we used to, but I'm afraid far too many developers have just stopped caring about it at all -- and that's a very bad thing.

> It's completely relevant. People run more than one application on their desktop computers.

That's great, so that must mean you'll be happy to hear that right now I have two instances of vscodium open, each one running half a dozen plugins, and their total memory footprint is less than 300MB.

Do you have anything relevant to say regarding how much resources are used? Or are we supposed to keep debating if being able to run 40x instances of a text editor is not enough room to work with, or if whether having only 7.8GB of RAM free to run other programs is too restrictive?

I hope this is genius level trolling.

In case it's not: great UI != any of those

This:

> great UIs with them?

is completely opposite to these:

> staggered fade and slide in animation?

> Responsively change layout?

> Apply complex styles?

A UI that can change layout to accommodate your window size and in which UI elements don't confusingly jump around when you click something but transition is bad? I'd like to read about your idea of a good UI.
You can't! You can really only make QT apps with them. I think it's funny that people see the lack of features and visual distinction as an advantage.
Qt apps can have lots of features.. Did you never use KDE3?