People that are upset about electron should consider it’s not:
Electron App vs Wonderful Fully Supported Native Linux Application
The reality is that your choice is largely:
Electron App vs No App (maybe running their windows app in wine if you can get that to work)
It’s not like companies are going to go build a native linux app but electron got in their way. It was always electron or no support.
So if you like the app, remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something. There’s no trophy you get at the end of your life for “most cumulative ram left idle”
I think proprietary Electron apps better run in browser anyway because of trackers that you can disable via extensions.
So if you like the app, remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something. There’s no trophy you get at the end of your life for “most cumulative ram left idle”
This is a damn homicide lmao
Running electron apps becomes a genuine ram issue when running heavy ram workloads like running heavily modded games
And very true. 32gb is 99 dollars Australia pesos, 16 is about 70 percent that. What a waste to let it sit around.
There’s no trophy you get at the end of your life for “most cumulative ram left idle”
Some people like to use more than 1 app you know.
Also, RAM is never ever idle. It is used as filesystem cache when not used by programs thus speeding up read accesses significantly.
Alright, let’s nitpick! No, it is never ever idle, every few cycles is a refresh cycle, which is work.
A lot of the time, the alternative would be a website running in the browser.
I’d prefer that. One firefox instance can easily run 10 big fat websites while using like 6GB of RAM. 10 electron apps on the other hand? 32GB RAM won’t be enough.
Electron IS a browser. It’s a Chromium browser to be exact with all the Chromium UI elements except the very bare minimum removed.
So the only difference that remains is running a website in a tab or in a fancy window.
What about laptop battery life? More CPU usage = less battery life. WHY DOES NO ONE GIVE A FUCK ABOUT BATTERY LIFE???
The single most reason I switched from Spotify to Apple Music is that I was sick of seeing the Spotify macOS app at the top of the “High Battery Usage” page on Activity Monitor. I also actually noticed less battery life. Fuck Electron. I avoid apps made in it like the plague.
Doesn’t Qt provide native, cross platform UI? I agree with your post though.
lmao, yea. Besides, it’s not like electron is that bad either. We aren’t in 1990, why would you care if electron uses a gb of ram or ten processes or this or that… they think that native means good, but more often than not native means a shitty ugly unusable application that will work (not really) just on windows
If a fancy text editor starts eating hundreds of megabytes RAM without having loaded a file, i think we did something wrong.
Though Visual Studio can do that too without Electron.
Have you ever had, in good conscience, a problem caused by an electron app using too much resources?
Because we are, again, in 2023: the standard is 16GB of RAM, with CPUs much more powerful and with a lot of more cores and thread per cores than the past. Complaining about a PC resources being used when these doesn’t actually create a problem is like complaining about GUI being bloat; or JS/CSS being bloat.
This of course doesn’t mean electron is perfect, cause it clearly isn’t, but it’s a good enough solution that can be iterated upon (see Tauri) and improved (the DX on electron is shit). Nor that every app should be in electron.
I don’t hate that electron is used for everything, I just hate electron itself, mostly. Starting with that it’s memory consumption, measured at the example of Discord (though that may be not 100% accurate as they use a custom version), is higher than just using a separate FF instance, with a separate profile. Works for Discord and Spotify (though spotifyd + spotify-tui is better anyway). Signal etc. is still only available as an electron app.
The biggest problem I have with electron is more of a problem with Nvidia though - combining Nvidia + Wayland is bad enough, especially for windows refreshing below 60 Hz, as this causes them to flicker as in letting stripes of the wallpaper through. Electron apps are even worse, not only do they start to flicker as whole after not being in focus for 10 minutes, which is very annoying with them on other screens, but they also start to ‘lag’, as elements don’t update fluently. That affects EVERY chromium based program - including steam.
We were so close to a much better version of electron. Mozilla just killed off the concept of a separate engine, like chromium is, due to issues with low demand but high cost and instead only has the main FF repo now. A separate FF engine would very likely mean a FF based electron alternative would be built by the community. Bug free, fully compatible with everything, not under Google’s control.
So if you like the app, remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something.
It could be doing so much more if you hadn’t gone with Electron you fuck
From the comments that have mentioned the efficient programming languages, my guess is there’s a bunch of devs in here that never got past the “c++ is hard!” stage.
The first time I saw an office app launch in my browser, I was both impressed that they got excel to work in a browser and appalled that they wanted excel to work in a browser at the same time. And I’ll admit that it does perform well considering it’s running in a fucking browser, but I’ll still launch the native app any time I actually want to work with a file that’s opened in the browser.
remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something.
Remember that house you paid for doesn’t provide value unless you fill it with elephant shit.
That’s consumerism. Another equally shitty statement: your liver doesn’t provide value unless it dies from all toxins in the world.
You know that “no app” and “not using the app” is the exact same user experience right? So you can just not use the app and stop complaining about it existing.
Idk who you think you’re speaking for, but I don’t think it’s as many people as you think lol.
Besides an electron app you don’t use and no app are literally the same thing, so why choose nothing?
