DEV Community

Discussion on: What's the most wasteful software?

 
hackergaucho profile image
Hacker Gaucho • Edited

nowadays performance is no longer so important, most new modern machines already have at least 2GB which is more than enough to run a chromium with nodejs.

what I realize is a great prejudice against electron coming from those who use macOS and are accustomed to high performance native solutions. linux users or even windows users doesn't care much about it.

whereas macOS users represent less than 15% of the desktop segment I see no reason for the rest of users to act with the same prejudice.

in short: if 63% of machines are able to run chrome/chromium with v8 it is capable of running electron very well.

Thread Thread
 
roh_mish profile image
Rohan Mishra

most new modern machines already have at least 2GB which is more than enough to run a chromium with nodejs.

True, but that's enough for maybe one app. I am a linux user myself and am thankful for electron since it brought many apps to platform that otherwise wouldn't run on linux. It makes creating desktop apps easier.

Its easy to say using a high end modern desktop that electron is fine but using a cheap laptop like HP Stream or a really old laptop, those apps are a pain to use. VSCode plus a few tabs in firefox makes my laptop unresponsive frequently.

electron is great for apps from smaller companies in that it allows you to deploy apps to desktop using single codebase but apps that can use 1/4 resources and are run by so many people is a waste when companies can easily invest in making better apps.

Thread Thread
 
hackergaucho profile image
Hacker Gaucho • Edited

VSCode plus a few tabs in firefox makes my laptop unresponsive frequently.

i recommend that on more modest machines use firefox as a browser and install a tab limiter. I also recommend that you exchange vscode by atom with zentabs and try to keep at least the amount of installed plugins.

is a waste when companies can easily invest in making better apps.

It is not enough to have money, you need to have a huge human capital qualified to create an open source project such as electron, atom or vscode in closed code.

if a large company like Github or Microsoft does not have or is unwilling to invest in human capital it needs to invest in languages and platforms that are more popular and accessible to the open source community.