That's why I used it for my example. Past systems are a useful benchmark for what it's practical to do with a certain level of computational horsepower.
> Slack is taking less than 1% of my Ram.
My system has 8GB, so 3.7%. I'd rather have 3.4% of my memory back.
More broadly, we should consider that we may run many bloated apps. Even if Slack doesn't do too much harm on its own, if all your desktop apps are using 10x the resources they could be using, it adds up to you spending more on hardware than you should have to.
You paid for that 16GB of RAM. That should let you do a lot more than old computers can, rather than doing the same things we did 15 years ago with bloated software.
> At the time AIM was the dominant chat client, and it probably took more like 5% of RAM available.
Right, like Ripcord, it did roughly the same thing Slack/Teams do, using far fewer resources.
Honestly though, why would you rather have that 3.4% of ram back?
Is the bottleneck in your system actually ram usage? Because I think implicit in your view is that you have a better usage for that ram. If so, what?
Because I really struggle coming up with more than about 5 electron apps I might ever run at any given time (Slack, VSCode, Discord, maaaybe Etcher..., and I'm basically out of ideas). Even then, two of those apps are both chat apps and I probably shouldn't have Discord open for work, and I don't use slack for any personal reason.
Basically - Electron apps are all applications that are UI heavy. I don't have the mental power to manage more than about 5 open and active UI apps before I'm the bottleneck, not the computer.
So at 5, you're spending 15-18% of your RAM on 5, 5! apps that you want to be interacting with rich GUIs at any given time. I just don't see it.
At least for my use cases, electron apps almost always make up a trivial amount of my total ram usage. Docker/Development Env/Vms DOMINATE in comparison.
So while I get that it could be faster, the reality of the situation is that without electron, none of the apps I listed would work on Linux at all. Instead they all do by default.
So right now on amazon, 16gb of ram is 53 bucks for a decent module. 150/16000 = .009. So basically - I paid 49 cents, and got apps that work by default on my platform of choice. That's pretty fucking amazing compared to old platform specific apps.
Plenty of people only have 2-4GB of RAM, and Slack eating up 360MB along with a couple other bloated apps and some God-foresaken autoplaying video ad can easily start requiring swapping and slow a computer to a crawl.
Sure, people could spend more money to mostly sidestep the issue (supposing they didn't have any workloads which actually benefited from all available RAM), but that doesn't make it a non-issue.
I'm guessing you're not going to run Slack unless you're at a company. And I'm guessing if you have 2-4GB of RAM you are not running a company issued computer. And if for some odd-ass reason you are running on a personal computer with 2-4 GB of RAM and NEED slack, why not just run it in a chrome tab?
It will use about the same amount of memory when run in a Chrome tab, as that doesn't much differ from the application version (essentially just a bundled Chromium browser). It would save you from running two different Chromium browsers at once, but I don't think the saving is all that significant. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25167153 )
That's why I used it for my example. Past systems are a useful benchmark for what it's practical to do with a certain level of computational horsepower.
> Slack is taking less than 1% of my Ram.
My system has 8GB, so 3.7%. I'd rather have 3.4% of my memory back.
More broadly, we should consider that we may run many bloated apps. Even if Slack doesn't do too much harm on its own, if all your desktop apps are using 10x the resources they could be using, it adds up to you spending more on hardware than you should have to.
You paid for that 16GB of RAM. That should let you do a lot more than old computers can, rather than doing the same things we did 15 years ago with bloated software.
> At the time AIM was the dominant chat client, and it probably took more like 5% of RAM available.
Right, like Ripcord, it did roughly the same thing Slack/Teams do, using far fewer resources.