this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 227 points 11 months ago (32 children)

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”

[–] [email protected] 44 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think proprietary Electron apps better run in browser anyway because of trackers that you can disable via extensions.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Running electron apps becomes a genuine ram issue when running heavy ram workloads like running heavily modded games

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Download more ram, problem solved

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Just to nitpick, RAM is usually not idle.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Alright, let's nitpick! No, it is never ever idle, every few cycles is a refresh cycle, which is work.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

It's great that you mention this, but this is a different layer of abstraction than what we were previously talking about.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (3 children)

A lot of the time, the alternative would be a website running in the browser.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Have fun updating those Electron

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I know that Electron is a browser. But the issue is that it's a different browser, and AFAIK Electron applications don't share libraries etc. like Chrome/Firefox tabs would, which makes Electron apps even more inefficient than web apps.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago

Well, there's also Tauri which requires slightly more testing since you actually use the device's built-in browser, so there might be differences. The upside is a much smaller bundle size, quick start-up times and often less RAM usage than with Electron.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Doesn't Qt provide native, cross platform UI? I agree with your post though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

C++ is generally more difficult to use than JS. Styling is also more difficult.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (12 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

VS Code is low than a text editor these days. It's frequently used as a full fledged IDE now.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Even native apps usually use cross-platform toolkits which usually have very good Linux support. E.g. Qt, .NET, WxWidgets, GTK (maybe)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Maybe we should make that a trophy

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