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I HATE electron
(lemmy.ohaa.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
541 points (92.1% liked)
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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”
Web apps don't even need electron, lol
I think proprietary Electron apps better run in browser anyway because of trackers that you can disable via extensions.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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