this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
541 points (92.1% liked)

linuxmemes

21612 readers
1394 users here now

Hint: :q!


Sister communities:


Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
  • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
  • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
  •  

    Please report posts and comments that break these rules!


    Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.

    founded 2 years ago
    MODERATORS
     
    you are viewing a single comment's thread
    view the rest of the comments
    [–] [email protected] 230 points 1 year ago (32 children)

    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”

    [–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    I think proprietary Electron apps better run in browser anyway because of trackers that you can disable via extensions.

    [–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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

    [–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    Running electron apps becomes a genuine ram issue when running heavy ram workloads like running heavily modded games

    [–] rambaroo 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Download more ram, problem solved

    load more comments (3 replies)
    [–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

    [–] nicoweio 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    Just to nitpick, RAM is usually not idle.

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    Alright, let's nitpick! No, it is never ever idle, every few cycles is a refresh cycle, which is work.

    [–] nicoweio 6 points 1 year ago

    It's great that you mention this, but this is a different layer of abstraction than what we were previously talking about.

    load more comments (1 replies)
    [–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    A lot of the time, the alternative would be a website running in the browser.

    [–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

    Have fun updating those Electron

    [–] MyFairJulia 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, I’d rather a website

    [–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    Doesn't Qt provide native, cross platform UI? I agree with your post though.

    [–] scarilog 2 points 1 year ago

    C++ is generally more difficult to use than JS. Styling is also more difficult.

    [–] nitefox 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    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

    [–] MyFairJulia 9 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    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.

    [–] rambaroo 1 points 1 year ago

    VS Code is low than a text editor these days. It's frequently used as a full fledged IDE now.

    load more comments (11 replies)
    [–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

    Even native apps usually use cross-platform toolkits which usually have very good Linux support. E.g. Qt, .NET, WxWidgets, GTK (maybe)

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

    Maybe we should make that a trophy

    load more comments (21 replies)