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”
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”
Honestly even with more than 1 application open it shouldn’t be an issue. Maybe with a really old computer, but anything modern really should handle an electron app just fine
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 run slack every day. It’s a bit slow sometimes but it doesn’t cause any real issues. Still better than teams. I’d rather have it as an electron app than as a web app.
VS Code is electron but it’s not meant to be a lightweight text editor like notepad. Must people are using it as an IDE at this point. Can you explain what’s “bloated” about it?
These apps probably wouldn’t exist at all if it wasn’t for electron so I’m grateful for it. The purists can pound sand like always.
on the vscode comment, that’s just plain wrong. here’s vscode opening up on a base model m1 air (it’s a test project but my works codebase also opens just as fast)
on a 8gb ram m1 air, with 3/4 chrome windows, slack, postman and two node processes running. as for slack, i agree its not as snappy as say, native macos apps but it doesn’t really bother me a lot.
not everyone can afford 16 GB of RAM though, if you want to make your software accessible write it to work on as many systems as possible with few or no slowdowns or hiccups. Electron is a shitty bandaid because you’re a lazy ass that doesn’t want to write more efficient software for desktop and instead you keep making web applications running natively, which is and will always be wrong
It didn’t cause problems since i have a lot of RAM but i still hold the opinion that just because we have a lot of RAM, we don’t need to waste it. We could keep being efficient about it and get even more out of the same amount of RAM, you know. That said, if Tauri lowers the RAM usage of the same applications i’m looking forward to it.
that would change nothing to you. Unless they are seriously consuming a lot of memory and filling up processes while not needed, then it’s fine. Otherwise it means the app was developed by a bunch of monkey, but that could happen - maybe even more likely - with native software as well.
Tldr: to the end user it changes literally nothing nowadays, to the companies and the devs it changes quite a lot. And to some degree, end-users won’t have to deal with shitty ugly apps (unless the designers are jerks, in which case you are probably working in the same company as me)
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.
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.
Keep at it, eventually things will click and you might find yourself appreciating the compiler errors and type strictness. Perhaps you’ll even spend time getting rid of warnings even though it will let you run without doing that, because they indicate edge cases that might break your program in difficult to debug ways.
It’s all kinda the same btw. Like you’ll have different sytax and styles, but most languages have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, objects, inheritance, APIs to access OS functions like files and network, etc.
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.
The same reason why webapps are a bad idea. We’ve built monstrous browser engines to do fancy stuff to pages in a bonkers language in a sandbox, and the resulting abomination is neither pages nor apps. And now we’re like: we have so much expertise in shuffling page parts around to look like they’re apps, let’s build “real” apps out of them. It’s like rejecting headphones and towing a car with broken windows around with you just in case you’ll wanna listen to music: it technically works, but makes negative sense.
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”
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Web apps don’t even need electron, lol
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I think proprietary Electron apps better run in browser anyway because of trackers that you can disable via extensions.
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This is a damn homicide lmao
Running electron apps becomes a genuine ram issue when running heavy ram workloads like running heavily modded games
Download more ram, problem solved
And very true. 32gb is 99 dollars Australia pesos, 16 is about 70 percent that. What a waste to let it sit around.
The issue is not RAM, it is how slow it performs.
I’ve never had a problem with the speed of an electron app be it steam or Spotify.
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.
Just to nitpick, RAM is usually not idle.
Alright, let’s nitpick! No, it is never ever idle, every few cycles is a refresh cycle, which is work.
It’s great that you mention this, but this is a different layer of abstraction than what we were previously talking about.
Honestly even with more than 1 application open it shouldn’t be an issue. Maybe with a really old computer, but anything modern really should handle an electron app just fine
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.
Have fun updating those Electron
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.
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.
Yeah, I’d rather a website
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.
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.
C++ is generally more difficult to use than JS. Styling is also more difficult.
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.
VS Code is low than a text editor these days. It’s frequently used as a full fledged IDE now.
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.
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I run slack every day. It’s a bit slow sometimes but it doesn’t cause any real issues. Still better than teams. I’d rather have it as an electron app than as a web app.
VS Code is electron but it’s not meant to be a lightweight text editor like notepad. Must people are using it as an IDE at this point. Can you explain what’s “bloated” about it?
These apps probably wouldn’t exist at all if it wasn’t for electron so I’m grateful for it. The purists can pound sand like always.
on the vscode comment, that’s just plain wrong. here’s vscode opening up on a base model m1 air (it’s a test project but my works codebase also opens just as fast)
https://imgur.com/a/q6iw2Bk
on a 8gb ram m1 air, with 3/4 chrome windows, slack, postman and two node processes running. as for slack, i agree its not as snappy as say, native macos apps but it doesn’t really bother me a lot.
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I use both daily, never noticed a problem. MacBook Pro M1 with 8GB ram. Eight!
not everyone can afford 16 GB of RAM though, if you want to make your software accessible write it to work on as many systems as possible with few or no slowdowns or hiccups. Electron is a shitty bandaid because you’re a lazy ass that doesn’t want to write more efficient software for desktop and instead you keep making web applications running natively, which is and will always be wrong
It didn’t cause problems since i have a lot of RAM but i still hold the opinion that just because we have a lot of RAM, we don’t need to waste it. We could keep being efficient about it and get even more out of the same amount of RAM, you know. That said, if Tauri lowers the RAM usage of the same applications i’m looking forward to it.
Your kernel allocates all the ram anyway lol, it literally changes nothing to you
Hmm yeah, but what if applications had to ask for less memory from the kernel?
that would change nothing to you. Unless they are seriously consuming a lot of memory and filling up processes while not needed, then it’s fine. Otherwise it means the app was developed by a bunch of monkey, but that could happen - maybe even more likely - with native software as well.
Tldr: to the end user it changes literally nothing nowadays, to the companies and the devs it changes quite a lot. And to some degree, end-users won’t have to deal with shitty ugly apps (unless the designers are jerks, in which case you are probably working in the same company as me)
Even native apps usually use cross-platform toolkits which usually have very good Linux support. E.g. Qt, .NET, WxWidgets, GTK (maybe)
Maybe we should make that a trophy
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.
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It could be doing so much more if you hadn’t gone with Electron you fuck
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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.
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Keep at it, eventually things will click and you might find yourself appreciating the compiler errors and type strictness. Perhaps you’ll even spend time getting rid of warnings even though it will let you run without doing that, because they indicate edge cases that might break your program in difficult to debug ways.
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Yeah, time is always the hard part.
It’s all kinda the same btw. Like you’ll have different sytax and styles, but most languages have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, objects, inheritance, APIs to access OS functions like files and network, etc.
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.
We are aware, and we’d take “no app” any day, thank you.
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.
This means not installing app AKA open in browser
“Not using the app” means instead of developing a real one, I’m being pointed at an abomination.
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?
Electron app I don’t use is less chances to get a normal app.
Making a normal app costs much more than making an electron app, so I press X
Dumping a trashbin into your backyard is even cheaper, doesn’t mean it’s a remotely good idea tho.
So, why is electron a bad idea?
The same reason why webapps are a bad idea. We’ve built monstrous browser engines to do fancy stuff to pages in a bonkers language in a sandbox, and the resulting abomination is neither pages nor apps. And now we’re like: we have so much expertise in shuffling page parts around to look like they’re apps, let’s build “real” apps out of them. It’s like rejecting headphones and towing a car with broken windows around with you just in case you’ll wanna listen to music: it technically works, but makes negative sense.
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Uhhhhhh no