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I HATE electron (lemmy.ohaa.xyz)
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[-] immutable@lemm.ee 227 points 1 year ago

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”

[-] Shatur@lemmy.ml 44 points 1 year ago

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

[-] mustardman@discuss.tchncs.de 35 points 1 year ago

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

[-] KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 17 points 1 year ago

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

[-] rambaroo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Download more ram, problem solved

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[-] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 33 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] nicoweio@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Just to nitpick, RAM is usually not idle.

[-] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

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

[-] nicoweio@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year 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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[-] ichmagrum@feddit.de 27 points 1 year ago

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

[-] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] Mio@feddit.nu 2 points 1 year ago

Have fun updating those Electron

[-] MyFairJulia@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] ichmagrum@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[-] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I’d rather a website

[-] Pechente@feddit.de 23 points 1 year 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.

[-] ky56@aussie.zone 16 points 1 year 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.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 16 points 1 year ago

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

[-] scarilog@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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

[-] nitefox@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

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

[-] MyFairJulia@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] rambaroo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year 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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[-] optimal@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 year ago

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

[-] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

Maybe we should make that a trophy

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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
541 points (92.1% liked)

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