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I tried to use Slack multiple times and it is the same - laggy, slow experience that caused me to completely leave it. I would assume more from a tool praised b

I tried to use Slack multiple times and it is the same - laggy, slow experience that caused me to completely leave it. I would assume more from a tool praised by devs, to be honest. The whole experience was for me super negative, and it seems that Slack is mostly re-wrapped IRC, thus getting overwhelming support from IT guys in large corporations. My laptop is only i3 with 6 GB Ram and some integrated graphics card, but I would assume this is enough to run a chat app, if the machine can flawlessly run Flash games and never cause an issue when I develop apps...

nextos 9y ago
Things are getting out of control. Some of my non-technical friends are already moving into 16 GB of RAM on their new laptop purchases. For surfing the web and watching movies... The worst thing is not just memory consumption, but sluggish UIs. Everything is turtle slow. I notice a significant lag when typing on their machines no matter how much RAM or CPU you have. I run a WM (XMonad), Firefox (vimperator), a terminal (urxvt) and Emacs, with no actual desktop environment (but all services, including firejailed applications). Without opening Firefox, I'm comfortably below 200 MB of RAM. And Firefox is not a memory hog either, if setup and used with care. Even more, before starting X, I'm around 128 MB of RAM, yet I can do most stuff inside a text-mode Emacs. An additional benefit is robustness. With fewer components things hardly break, and when they do you can easily fix them. Especially if you use a Nix-style package manager and system configuration. Not a setup for everyone, I know, but an average HN reader will have no problem putting it together. If friendlier GUIs are still your preference, I believe some lightweight Linux desktops are worth a shot. Last time I tried Xfce, it was simple and lightweight. Even my old dad was able to adjust to it quickly.
- dijit 9y ago
  it's the weird memory logic of HN biting again: "Memory is cheap, development time is expensive" and: "What do you need more than 16G of ram for?" These two things are not compatible, but every time a story comes up about new laptops (macbooks being a prime example) everyone jumps on the guy who asks for more than 16G of ram while routinely excluding things (like browsers) that just chew memory.
  - jjnoakes 9y ago
    It is almost like hn is made up of different people with different opinions.
microcolonel 9y ago
Yeah, if I were setting up messaging at a company, having witnessed the true total cost of these single-source solutions, I would set up IRC and/or XMPP. For some companies, the costs are lower with Slack, and I think that's where it shines; but I am fed up with it. That said, the author of this article is actually just trying to promote his startup. I think that's fair enough, but I think he should disclose that more prominently than just having it in his byline.
agumonkey 9y ago
Should Adobe kill Slack ?

nextos 9y ago

Things are getting out of control. Some of my non-technical friends are already moving into 16 GB of RAM on their new laptop purchases. For surfing the web and watching movies... The worst thing is not just memory consumption, but sluggish UIs. Everything is turtle slow. I notice a significant lag when typing on their machines no matter how much RAM or CPU you have. I run a WM (XMonad), Firefox (vimperator), a terminal (urxvt) and Emacs, with no actual desktop environment (but all services, including firejailed applications). Without opening Firefox, I'm comfortably below 200 MB of RAM. And Firefox is not a memory hog either, if setup and used with care. Even more, before starting X, I'm around 128 MB of RAM, yet I can do most stuff inside a text-mode Emacs. An additional benefit is robustness. With fewer components things hardly break, and when they do you can easily fix them. Especially if you use a Nix-style package manager and system configuration. Not a setup for everyone, I know, but an average HN reader will have no problem putting it together. If friendlier GUIs are still your preference, I believe some lightweight Linux desktops are worth a shot. Last time I tried Xfce, it was simple and lightweight. Even my old dad was able to adjust to it quickly.

dijit 9y ago
it's the weird memory logic of HN biting again: "Memory is cheap, development time is expensive" and: "What do you need more than 16G of ram for?" These two things are not compatible, but every time a story comes up about new laptops (macbooks being a prime example) everyone jumps on the guy who asks for more than 16G of ram while routinely excluding things (like browsers) that just chew memory.
- jjnoakes 9y ago
  It is almost like hn is made up of different people with different opinions.

microcolonel 9y ago

Yeah, if I were setting up messaging at a company, having witnessed the true total cost of these single-source solutions, I would set up IRC and/or XMPP. For some companies, the costs are lower with Slack, and I think that's where it shines; but I am fed up with it. That said, the author of this article is actually just trying to promote his startup. I think that's fair enough, but I think he should disclose that more prominently than just having it in his byline.

agumonkey 9y ago

Should Adobe kill Slack ?