GitHub Rewrites Its Desktop Client Using Electron | Hacker News Reader

GitHub Rewrites Its Desktop Client Using Electron

infoq.com

32 pointsgeodel23 comments

Sigh. Yet another native desktop app I will now have to stop using on my laptop in order to get any kind of decent battery life off the grid. Having Electon.JS apps open effectively halves my battery usage in Linux. Each one is a separate Chrome instance, and Chrome uses considerably more power than Firefox (we're talking multiple watts).

When I'm on the go and want my Lenovo P50 mobile workstation laptop to last an entire cross-country flight so I can get work done (a real use case), I have to use Slack web client, Sublime instead of VS Code, Firefox instead of Chrome, and manually close out of a whole bunch of less important Electron apps (Discord, Gitter, Skype, Upwork, Spotify, Atom, etc.), and only then will powertop show an acceptable < 20W of power draw instead of close to 30 W with all of the Electron apps open, allowing my laptop to have five hours of battery life instead of two, which means it will last the whole flight.

I still have a bunch of native Linux desktop apps that I prefer to use to this very day that are fast, responsive, and don't make my laptop's fans sound like a leaf blower while failing to prevent the heated chassis from scorching my lap.

Devs don't let other devs use Electron -- as a real alternative, consider using the wxWidgets cross-platform native GUI app framework (with its myriad language bindings) so that you can have a single code base that supports all of the major platforms.

I agree, what's up with all these Electron apps. Based on memory usage currently, Skype is using 245MB, Slack is using 312MB and Spotify at 233MB. While Telegram is only using 78MB. And I have more active chats on Telegram too.

> I agree, what's up with all these Electron apps.

The common theme seems to be developer convenience. What's best for users is no longer something developers consider when choosing tools.

That's okay for now. Until let's say majority of apps run on Electron. What's gonna be left for memory then.

That's when it's time to push users to get more RAM as the solution to their problems.

EDIT: /s

It's amazing how disconnected developers are when it comes to RAM, the steam user survey (http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey) puts 30% at having 4GB or less, and that's an audience that trends towards the higher end.

For all the complaints of the mac book pro not having enough RAM, it had enough for 99.9% of people.

At the time, it seemed silly that I maxed out my laptop with 64 GB of RAM, but now, I'm starting to feel like it was good foresight.

Dude, I live in a third world where upgrading specs in a computer is really an after thought. As a developer, you should also think other parts of the world. I'm just saying. Majority of the laptops sold here has an average RAM of 4-8GB.

That's basically the same as the first world, plenty still have less then 4GB.

I was not being serious. I was speaking to exactly this problem. Even in the US, the vast majority of users aren't running top-of-the-line developer machines. I find the utter disregard for user resources to be a serious problem with today's developers.

Right, and when I'm a developer with a high end workstation laptop having resource problems, you can guarantee most users are going to have problems.

> While Telegram is only using 78MB

My irssi seems to be using an order of magnitude less than that, 7.8 MB RSS.

Get off my lawn! :-/

(Yes, irc is unencrypted, but still...)

> 7.8 MB RSS.

It's as bloated as emacs!

I mean, GitHub Desktop didn't exist on Linux before at all, so I guess "zero battery used" is indeed a high bar to beat.

I'm going to still be using gitg.

:cool:

Because no one needed a git client that was locked to a single platform. And they still don't

But, didn't you hear? "As it turns out, building native apps for multiple platforms doesn’t scale." How else could they write the app to support 3 platforms? /s

There is also no mention of the fact that electron is also a GitHub product; maybe this is assumed to be general knowledge, but it seemed to be trying to sell electron pretty hard and waves off the platform's deficiencies with a "things will get better soon" line.

Anyways, stand strong & resist the electron assimilation.

Why does github need a desktop client at all? Multiple git clients exist for all platforms, many of which are better than the github client ever was. If they can't afford to maintain multiple versions why don't they just maintain none?

Or do the third party clients not provide enough vendor lockin?

> Or do the third party clients not provide enough vendor lockin?

Ding ding ding we have a winner.

It's wonderful that they open-sourced the whole thing. I will enjoy studying it: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/

Great to see in the interview: "We’re having many good conversations about improving Electron."

One more reason to ditch it in favor of ye olde command line.

Still no Linux client?

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