[rtpg]

It should be noted that Ventrillo requires DirectX. This is part of where the "hundreds of megs" are hidden.

Though honestly, crossplatform software too often just bundles Electron rather than relying on the entire OS layer (on Mac and Windows anyways) having all of this stuff built-in. For bugs and reproducibility it's nice, but it really sucks for "downloading the same bytes over and over again". This is downstream of OS vendors just historically not fixing bugs, but in an alternate universe people would have working OS stacks and we would use that.

[Gigachad]

I’d much rather have to redownload the same bytes a few times than have the program I need not work on my OS.