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”
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.
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
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.
I think proprietary Electron apps better run in browser anyway because of trackers that you can disable via extensions.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
Maybe we should make that a trophy
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
Yeah, I’d rather a website
Even native apps usually use cross-platform toolkits which usually have very good Linux support. E.g. Qt, .NET, WxWidgets, GTK (maybe)
We are aware, and we’d take “no app” any day, thank you.
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.
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.
“Not using the app” means instead of developing a real one, I’m being pointed at an abomination.
As a full stack web developer, I FUCKING LOVE Electron. I can make really cool desktop apps, and you can deal with it.
Time to murder you in front of all Linux people
Where Linux
Why don’t you like ctrl-shift-i?
ctrl+shift+i brings up the inspect tool you’ll find in Chrome. Which Electron is based on.
And that’s a problem?
No, it’s just a confirmation that the app is indeed built on electron, and not native.
And is that a problem? Depends.
This might be a hot take but I’ve noticed some complicated electron apps are faster than some simple native apps. The striking example to me is how Vs code runs better and has a lower startup time than the stock Windows 11 File manager.
A well written electron app is better than a poorly written native app sometimes.
I mean, sure, but:
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The Windows File Manager is really just awful in that regard. You can get alternative file managers that start up in a fraction of that time, with more features.
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Startup time isn’t really the worst of it. RAM usage is worse. And if a program uses lots of RAM, it will still appear quite performant. But it makes everything else on your system slower.
There’s also the added CPU overhead from using JavaScript for everything to contend with.
As long as the program is not bloated, JavaScript can be fast. Unfortunately that’s not the case with most programs.
especially if they’re proprietary…
file manager opens instantly.
genuinely curious, I have a shitton of networked drives and at least 7 volumes on this locally, file manager has always popped open ready to go at a click or hotkey.
Are you using the Windows 10 file manager? That one is so much faster than the new Windows 11 one.
TIL
Can you recommend some third party windows file managers?
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Stock file manager has an okay UI (tabs are super nice) but is kinda slow, especially on battery.
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I tried explorer++ but its UI is clunky and it’s only slightly faster than the stock file manager.
Well, the file manager I use on Linux, Dolphin, has an experimental Windows version.
When I learned of that a few years ago, I gave it a shot on Windows and I prefered it to File Explorer, but it’s not like I compared it to other offerings or anything like that.I do think that’s the best file manager on Linux and most features were working on Windows back then, so it’s not unlikely either, that it is by far the best offering for Windows. But it could also be a buggy mess. I wouldn’t know…
I’ve been using Double Commander for years and I love it, but the UI takes some getting used to (and the default settings aren’t great).
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That’s because all the important bits in VSCode are reimplemented in C++
You can use C++ for web technology instead of JavaScript? I’m taking a class in C++ right now so I’d be happy to swap janky JavaScript for pedantic but speedy C++ in new projects.
VSCode is a desktop app, hence using real languages is easy. For websites there is webassembly. Try this: https://www.rust-lang.org/what/wasm
It’s getting there!
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The problem is that even Microsoft choose to use Electron when they built Teams. MS got loads of developers and Teams is really a big product in terms of users.
and vscode
VSC is an interesting case because they opted not to use any JS frameworks for performance
💀 writing a text editor in electron and worrying about performance is wild /hj
It’s quick and doesn’t lag at all, even with the couple dozen plugins I have installed. Compare that to Atom (or whatever it’s called now) with zero plugins.
i cant relate sadly. ive got a decent computer but vscode still takes a while to load (with plugins). neovim on the other hand takes a split second to open, and has never crashed on me, even with the equivilent of my vscode plugins
you can usually tell by the size (and ram usage while just sitting there)
I’ll take shitty electron apps over winforms any day of the week.
I guess I should be happy that I’ve never heard of winforms?
Well, screw you too, do you know how much easier developing web apps is compared to native ones? I’ve only tried to use gtk and qt and took more years off my life than the entire time I’ve spent learning web stuff… I genuinely don’t know how people have the patience and expertise to use native frameworks…
What does Ctrl shift I do (I’m not at my computer and I don’t have any electron apps installed)
opens chromiums dev tools
Lets write an OS in Electron and go to March. Maybe start using the right tool for the right job. If i only know how to build with lego, I dont build a real house with lego, instead i learn how to do it right.
Dude, if it doesn’t hog memory then what’s the problem?
It kinda do though. VSCode, without a project open has 10 processes running and uses over a half gig of ram. I like VSCode to be clear. I also like discord but it’s just a chat app and apparently needs a half gig itself and 6 processes.
It is slow and usually anyway consume more memory than any native application built the same way due to it have to run a web browser. It is also taking up more storage space and updates are bigger and you need to watch out for we browser security holes. I think Electron have some limitations so you can’t do everything you want with it like a native application.
if
Does Firefox support desktop PWAs?
Not natively, but there’s an addon that works really well:
https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox
Some assembly required.
Not very found of them either but it’s hard to do without them, matter wise.
@HenriVolney @Oha I don’t use a single Electron app currently. I might consider VS Code though.
I guess my pun got lost in everybody’s logics. Poor me, unable to connect with my fellow lemmys.
Its not 1990 anymore, you have more than 2 megabytes of ram.
You’re right, it’s not. Now you need 16Gb because no one can be bothered writing their UI without this garbage anymore.
Honestly for me electron apps can also get pretty janky.
Plus Electron takes WAY more than 2mb of RAM.
Jank is one reason I’m not a fan of electron. It’s very common to gain extra scrollbars, for the contents to shift around weirdly. Things break in ways that native apps never do, due to the sheer complexity of web rendering these days. Customizability is nearly always lacking, especially when it comes to cooperating with the host OS’s preferences…
And thus cripples battery life.
I only use things like Discord in Safari and Firefox to not have to use the Electron app.
I really don’t get how everything has to use web UI. SwiftUI is really easy to learn and you can run this on any Apple platform. Flutter is a mess but you can run it on Android. GTK looks just gorgeous and Qt can run on everything but ChromeOS (like 99% of things). Is it really too much to ask for 3 more developers in a company that build native?
Small addition: I unsubscribed like many others from 1Password because with version 8 even they switched from native to Electron. This is just crazy.
I mean guys, frickin think about people who can’t afford recent hardware! Do we really want Electron and thus Chromium/Google to force us to buy 1000€+ hardware to be able to do things?
