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As someone who uses Linux as a daily driver, I can recognize these gargantuan apps a mile away and stay away from them. They are absolute hogs of system resourc

As someone who uses Linux as a daily driver, I can recognize these gargantuan apps a mile away and stay away from them. They are absolute hogs of system resources, and for something simple like Etcher there's no excuse. Things like Electron are good for devs but bad for users. We have more computation power than ever and yet programs still run slow.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Oh, it gets better. Even the default Weather app shipping with Windows 11 is also an Electron pile of trash that uses ~520 MB of RAM. Just let that sink in. 500MB of RAM just to show you the weather forecast for the day and week. That was my entire system RAM of my Windows XP gaming rig. Same for the Widgets app, it's not only bad because it shows you news and ads when you open it, it's worse because it's also, you guessed it, an Electron app. Some VP in Redmond must be off their meds. I assume Microsoft just can't find devs to write C#, their own damn programing language for their own OS, and one of the dozens of frameworks they have for Windows GUI, that they need to resort to using Electron for what are just Windows-only apps.
- ziml77 3y ago
  The Weather app in Windows 11 a UWP .NET Native wrapper around WebView2 controls. It's exceptionally silly that it's basically just a web browser with predefined tabs and that it uses so much RAM, but it's not Electron.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Oh my bad. I think I saw it call some Edge system components in task manager and I assumed it must be Electron.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  Good lord, that's crazy, haha. You'd think with all of their different frameworks, one would have been more suitable than starting from scratch with a browser tab, jeez. I recently upgraded to 10 because of Steam requiring it in a few weeks, and it's been an adventure. Lots of crashes and restarts that I didn't ask for. I really don't know who exactly modern Windows is for, because I'm a gamer and programmer and it's not been good for either of those tasks... Windows 7 was solid and I almost never had issues out of it. It booted and got out of the way.
chefandy 3y ago
Worse for users than nothing? IT shouldn't be a default, but if it's that or nothing-- as it often is when it comes down to limited resources-- I think it's better than nothing. If you're looking to make a useful tool for a broad audience that must run locally, you have to support windows because that's where 80% of the users are. You should support OSX because that's where 15% of the users are. That's two codebases with dramatically diminishing returns. You need a damn good reason to justify adding ANOTHER codebase on there to scoop up the remaining handful of users on Linux. Also, aside from startup time, I don't have any trouble with electron apps running slow on my machines. I think many developers are conceptually annoyed with the absurd, bloated architectural underpinnings rather than the experience that translates into when using them. Perception means a lot when judging performance, and I'll bet with most end users using, say, slack, the speed of their internet connection affects the speed of their work more than the speed of the application.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Your postulate that it is electron or nothing is wrong from the very start.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    You postulate that I said that, which is wrong. > IT shouldn't be a default, but if it's that or nothing-- as it often is when it comes down to limited resources-- I think it's better than nothing. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not. It's certainly an option that's very efficient for dev resources, which is often the primary limiting factor. It's certainly the only real option if you've already got a team of web developers, which is very common. The current state of commercial software supporting linux with native apps is a pretty good indicator of how companies are viewing this equation. The amount of resources it takes to make a native java app is vastly different than the amount of resources it takes to make a native electron app. If you don't understand how that would be something that would open the possibility of supporting linux in many cases, I'm not sure what to tell you.
    - zlg_codes 3y ago

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

Oh, it gets better. Even the default Weather app shipping with Windows 11 is also an Electron pile of trash that uses ~520 MB of RAM. Just let that sink in. 500MB of RAM just to show you the weather forecast for the day and week. That was my entire system RAM of my Windows XP gaming rig. Same for the Widgets app, it's not only bad because it shows you news and ads when you open it, it's worse because it's also, you guessed it, an Electron app. Some VP in Redmond must be off their meds. I assume Microsoft just can't find devs to write C#, their own damn programing language for their own OS, and one of the dozens of frameworks they have for Windows GUI, that they need to resort to using Electron for what are just Windows-only apps.

ziml77 3y ago
The Weather app in Windows 11 a UWP .NET Native wrapper around WebView2 controls. It's exceptionally silly that it's basically just a web browser with predefined tabs and that it uses so much RAM, but it's not Electron.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Oh my bad. I think I saw it call some Edge system components in task manager and I assumed it must be Electron.
zlg_codes 3y ago
Good lord, that's crazy, haha. You'd think with all of their different frameworks, one would have been more suitable than starting from scratch with a browser tab, jeez. I recently upgraded to 10 because of Steam requiring it in a few weeks, and it's been an adventure. Lots of crashes and restarts that I didn't ask for. I really don't know who exactly modern Windows is for, because I'm a gamer and programmer and it's not been good for either of those tasks... Windows 7 was solid and I almost never had issues out of it. It booted and got out of the way.

chefandy 3y ago

Worse for users than nothing? IT shouldn't be a default, but if it's that or nothing-- as it often is when it comes down to limited resources-- I think it's better than nothing. If you're looking to make a useful tool for a broad audience that must run locally, you have to support windows because that's where 80% of the users are. You should support OSX because that's where 15% of the users are. That's two codebases with dramatically diminishing returns. You need a damn good reason to justify adding ANOTHER codebase on there to scoop up the remaining handful of users on Linux. Also, aside from startup time, I don't have any trouble with electron apps running slow on my machines. I think many developers are conceptually annoyed with the absurd, bloated architectural underpinnings rather than the experience that translates into when using them. Perception means a lot when judging performance, and I'll bet with most end users using, say, slack, the speed of their internet connection affects the speed of their work more than the speed of the application.

prmoustache 3y ago
Your postulate that it is electron or nothing is wrong from the very start.
- chefandy 3y ago
  You postulate that I said that, which is wrong. > IT shouldn't be a default, but if it's that or nothing-- as it often is when it comes down to limited resources-- I think it's better than nothing. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not. It's certainly an option that's very efficient for dev resources, which is often the primary limiting factor. It's certainly the only real option if you've already got a team of web developers, which is very common. The current state of commercial software supporting linux with native apps is a pretty good indicator of how companies are viewing this equation. The amount of resources it takes to make a native java app is vastly different than the amount of resources it takes to make a native electron app. If you don't understand how that would be something that would open the possibility of supporting linux in many cases, I'm not sure what to tell you.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago