So what I would like to know is wtf everyone is doing in these apps to create this CRAZY amount of resource hogging they keep bitching about? Or are they rockin chomebooks? Seriously? I want to know where all of this nonsense is coming from?
You're running a music player, a text editor (or IDE), and a chat client. I would expect reasonably that would use less memory. One point you could make is that even native application alternatives, ones that don't use Electron, would be bloated and I would have to agree. Visual Studio .NET is pretty darn slow/cumbersome itself.
That's not to say that there aren't decisions to reconsider about code size, resource formats, etc. but I think it's easy to forget how much more behaviour has moved into our default baseline assumptions.
In my very limited experience, this makes programming anything several times more complicated. Writing a document editor? Difficult. Writing a networked, multi-user document editor? As difficult as the last thing but with asynchrony and lots of new failure modes.
Microsoft Word, with a multi-page complicated document, is using 200mb.
Just because we _have_ the resources to allow applications to bloat doesn't mean we should be alright with it. Its a similar argument to electric versus ICE cars; just because gas is cheap doesn't mean we shouldn't support EVs. EVs are fundamentally better for the future.
If we focus on performance optimizing the apps we use, it opens up a wide range of new computing hardware. You make fun of chromebooks, but imagine how much more interesting your work would be if you could use a machine with that performance. Battery life would be substantially higher. The cost of the machine would be substantially lower. The only reason most people need massive performance beasts is because we've pushed abstraction hell and bad engineering practices, so all of our tools suck.
Docker is another offender in recent times. Its great if you're on Linux, but few people are. So on OSX, we need to run a VM, so there goes another gig of memory.
Your bar should not be, "Well, I don't see a slowdown." Many people still develop software on computers with only 8GB total RAM. Throw in a browser and one or two more applications and you're getting close to exhausting that.
Eventually you are going to exhaust your memory resources; using software with poor performance constraints is (in my opinion) inherently antagonistic to a development machine. That's not to say I'm against desktop JavaScript/HTML5 apps categorically, I just think they need much better optimization.
No idea why, it's only joining one team with under 20 people and ~5 channels.
But I agree, Atom and Slack are really useful to if they consume another 250mb of ram because "It's not optimal", let them use it.
I also run two java processes with 1gb predefined (well probably I could fine tune them to use 512mb). and one angular/cli which accounts for 800mb. plus my database which got 500mb aswell.
spotify on mac used way more than 500mb memory, the last time I used it and also had an extreme amount of i/o pressure. atom actually did use at least 500 mb memory as well, with just the c# plugin.