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My 8GB dell xps laptop can't even play music, chat, edit text and browse at the same time anymore. Because it's all Electron/Chrome (Spotify, Slack/Teams, Chrom

by korijn 5y ago

My 8GB dell xps laptop can't even play music, chat, edit text and browse at the same time anymore. Because it's all Electron/Chrome (Spotify, Slack/Teams, Chrome, Vscode). This was no problem in the windows XP days. What makes Electron so great that it is worth this amount of resources?

kabes 5y ago
> What makes Electron so great that it is worth this amount of resources Apparently electron enabled all of those companies to make those apps you use.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  People used to create music players, chat apps, and code editors without bundling a browser engine per app.
  - traviswt 5y ago
    So what’s stopping them from doing that now?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - xkqd 5y ago
      Probably familiarity with and the relative ease of Electron?
      - korijn 5y ago
        This feels like the most probable explanation to me; companies hire tons of people skilled in web development, front and backend, and then suddenly desire a desktop app. Then they either don't want to recruit people who specialize in desktop apps or they don't want to retrain their web dev staff. And even if they were willing, they probably would still impose a ridiculous timeline and expect the app to be delivered. I can understand that an engineering team not familiar with desktop applications would choose Electron in such a scenario. However, in none of these decisions was the user experience a factor at all. That bothers me. "Just buy a laptop with 16GB RAM and stop complaining, get with the times", I hear the downvoters thinking. This development directly drives people towards purchasing a more powerful replacement computer. Chip shortage, electronic waste, does anyone care?
    - eqvinox 5y ago
      "aaS"-ification of everything. If your music is streamed from some service, you're generally forced to use that service's apps. Otherwise you'd StEaL tHeIr CoNtEnT. (formatting intended to convey sarcasm.) Not really related: your German word of the day is "Raubmordkopieren". The content industry, in Germany, decided to phrase copyright violations as "Raubkopie", literally "armed robbery copy". (There are two verbs for robbery in German, "stehlen" for simple theft without force, and "rauben" for forceful theft.) Since this is pretty obviously a far stretch (how is filesharing "by force"?), the P2P scene decided to go for the hyperbole: "mord", as you might have guessed, is murder. "Raubmord" is an established word in German ("holdup murder".) "Raubmordkopie" — you get the idea.
      - nyanpasu64 5y ago
        If you use an unofficial Discord client, you risk getting your account banned. Even banning aside, I wish there were better unofficial Discord clients. Ripcord is closed-source, lacks multi-message select, and doesn't let you search, and gtkcord3's repo is archived (and I didn't try it).
    - schwartzworld 5y ago
      They would have to build an app for every platform they support. If you want to target all three, it's much easier to use something like electron that targets all three. You maintain feature parity and even bug parity across platforms.
      - korijn 5y ago
        There are plenty of alternatives such as Qt
        schwartzworld 5y ago
        I'm not defending the choice. Just explaining the upside. I'm pretty sure you can access slack through a browser tab if you want, so anybody who really hates electron has an easy out.
  - whereistimbo 5y ago
    If you think ChromeOS and iPadOS as desktop, music player and chat app is still written in native apps. These apps available too in macOS if developer opted in. So this problem seems to be limited to Windows and Linux only.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  With the amount of capital these companies have if they couldn't manage without then something is deadly wrong (especially with the kind of people they hire - although that being said the most productive person I know has no formal qualifications). You could literally bring up an entire programming language and GUI framework from scratch with the resources some of these companies have.
  - spicybright 5y ago
    Or you can shoot yourself in the foot and code fast n' loose for those sweet quarterly profits.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- diragon 5y ago
  Enabled them to do create them cheaply, sure. Enabled in the first place? I don't think our profession is that shitty.
cuddlybacon 5y ago
I don't have professional experience in either desktop UIs or web UIs. When I tried making an app using the native macOS UI toolkit, I kept running into issues related to a lack of online discussion and books that were less complete than I expected. I think this is mostly just a symptom of there not being much native UI development happening in the west. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't hear about this often, but I've heard that native apps are still common in China. I bet they don't have this problem. I bring this up because I notice a lot of the time on HN this gets attributed to web UI people being easier to hire and unwilling to learn native UI.

by korijn 5y ago

kabes 5y ago

> What makes Electron so great that it is worth this amount of resources Apparently electron enabled all of those companies to make those apps you use.

nyanpasu64 5y ago
People used to create music players, chat apps, and code editors without bundling a browser engine per app.
- traviswt 5y ago
  So what’s stopping them from doing that now?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - xkqd 5y ago
    Probably familiarity with and the relative ease of Electron?
    - korijn 5y ago
      This feels like the most probable explanation to me; companies hire tons of people skilled in web development, front and backend, and then suddenly desire a desktop app. Then they either don't want to recruit people who specialize in desktop apps or they don't want to retrain their web dev staff. And even if they were willing, they probably would still impose a ridiculous timeline and expect the app to be delivered. I can understand that an engineering team not familiar with desktop applications would choose Electron in such a scenario. However, in none of these decisions was the user experience a factor at all. That bothers me. "Just buy a laptop with 16GB RAM and stop complaining, get with the times", I hear the downvoters thinking. This development directly drives people towards purchasing a more powerful replacement computer. Chip shortage, electronic waste, does anyone care?
  - eqvinox 5y ago
    "aaS"-ification of everything. If your music is streamed from some service, you're generally forced to use that service's apps. Otherwise you'd StEaL tHeIr CoNtEnT. (formatting intended to convey sarcasm.) Not really related: your German word of the day is "Raubmordkopieren". The content industry, in Germany, decided to phrase copyright violations as "Raubkopie", literally "armed robbery copy". (There are two verbs for robbery in German, "stehlen" for simple theft without force, and "rauben" for forceful theft.) Since this is pretty obviously a far stretch (how is filesharing "by force"?), the P2P scene decided to go for the hyperbole: "mord", as you might have guessed, is murder. "Raubmord" is an established word in German ("holdup murder".) "Raubmordkopie" — you get the idea.
    - nyanpasu64 5y ago
      If you use an unofficial Discord client, you risk getting your account banned. Even banning aside, I wish there were better unofficial Discord clients. Ripcord is closed-source, lacks multi-message select, and doesn't let you search, and gtkcord3's repo is archived (and I didn't try it).
  - schwartzworld 5y ago
    They would have to build an app for every platform they support. If you want to target all three, it's much easier to use something like electron that targets all three. You maintain feature parity and even bug parity across platforms.
    - korijn 5y ago
      There are plenty of alternatives such as Qt
      - schwartzworld 5y ago
        I'm not defending the choice. Just explaining the upside. I'm pretty sure you can access slack through a browser tab if you want, so anybody who really hates electron has an easy out.
- whereistimbo 5y ago
  If you think ChromeOS and iPadOS as desktop, music player and chat app is still written in native apps. These apps available too in macOS if developer opted in. So this problem seems to be limited to Windows and Linux only.
mhh__ 5y ago
With the amount of capital these companies have if they couldn't manage without then something is deadly wrong (especially with the kind of people they hire - although that being said the most productive person I know has no formal qualifications). You could literally bring up an entire programming language and GUI framework from scratch with the resources some of these companies have.
- spicybright 5y ago
  Or you can shoot yourself in the foot and code fast n' loose for those sweet quarterly profits.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
diragon 5y ago
Enabled them to do create them cheaply, sure. Enabled in the first place? I don't think our profession is that shitty.

cuddlybacon 5y ago

I don't have professional experience in either desktop UIs or web UIs. When I tried making an app using the native macOS UI toolkit, I kept running into issues related to a lack of online discussion and books that were less complete than I expected. I think this is mostly just a symptom of there not being much native UI development happening in the west. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't hear about this often, but I've heard that native apps are still common in China. I bet they don't have this problem. I bring this up because I notice a lot of the time on HN this gets attributed to web UI people being easier to hire and unwilling to learn native UI.