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Comment by kgraves | Hacker News Reader

That might be the case economically, but this isn't the future that I or end users want, look where this has gotten modern desktop development, you now have sluggish, slow, bloated applications vying for end user's resources.

e.g. An end user using Discord and Slack has to download 2 Electron applications (~500MB of disk space) and this is for a chat app, Ripcord [0] can do both with less RAM resources and disk space.

> The alternative to electron is not always a leaner different framework.

You can have both, there are newer frameworks popping up such as Flutter, React Native and Reason Native.

[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

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I can't say about you, but your claim about what end users want is quite strong. End users want all the features (including performance) for free and then pick the currently available option that looks best suited for them.

I didn't say that there are no other frameworks. The ones you provided all break the "transferable skill" requirement (React native a bit less so but still).

If you prefer to install ripchord instead of discord and slack nothing prevents you for doing so. Let me write a few comments about it:

- it made sense building it for the author because those two services already existed and already had enough users. Also the author has the skills needed to build it.

- it won't be free

- it is not feature complete compared to the reproduced services

So it might attract users depending of the perceived gain from a faster software vs its price and the missing features. It also has to win over all the people that have already installed the slack & discord clients. If it gains significant market share there are 2 risks: intentional api breaking changes by slack & discord, and them redoing/optimizing their client to win back the lost users. Most probably: they don't care about the client part. They are selling a service and this new client might make some of their users happier.

So we see that even though ripchord exists, it does not mean that electron hasn't helped in making two new services available. The ripchord author might be able to reproduce a client with a better tech, but that doesn't mean he has the skills to create a whole new offer (market research, sales, backend administration, etc).

edit: format

> The ones you provided all break the "transferable skill" requirement (React native a bit less so but still).

At this point what you have can't even be called skill, on?

I am not sure what do you even mean by that. I am not talking about lazyness. I am talking about opportunity cost. Learning an application framework takes time. There is the language, the api, the architecture best practices, the design processes. You might want to learn about accessibility, responsiveness, cross platform issues, software packaging/distribution/update management.

If you skim a tutorial and release an unmaintanable mess because you lacked experience with your tools users are not going to forgive you because thank god you did not use electron.

You might have some time to learn all this. Or not. Maybe you are busy finding funds. Maybe you are pitching companies to get your first prospects.

> That might be the case economically, but this isn't the future that I or end users want

It might not be the future you or I want, but it is the future that the majority of end users want. Market forces don't always work for getting users what they want (see privacy) but in this case the money is talking. Slack's desktop app is a classic example of being a memory hog, but Slack has been enormously successful.

"want", for sufficiently well-chosen values of "want." ;-)

Every time you hear someone complain about how their new PC is so slow to do $trivial_task, think again. Most users unfortunately don't know any better, nor have the inclination to teach themselves to.

This reminds me of the 'dir' test my friends and I used to gauge computer speed in the DOS era. Listing directories was so common its speed was easy to notice and compare to other machines.

Modern OS's don't really have an equivalent to that. Probably because usage has become more fragmented.

A regular user certainly isn't going to say "I want my Slack app to be built with a lean framework that uses less resources". But they very well might say "It's really frustrating that my new computer is so sluggish all the time", without knowing why.

There seems to be an opportunity here for platform vendors like Microsoft or Apple to be a bit more aggressive about "this application is what's slowing you down" notifications. (With the ability for the user to say "yes, I'm editing a 4-hour movie, don't warn me about this app again".)

Don't Apple already do something similar for battery hogs? May be misremembering, but I'd have thought a similar principle applied.

Half the challenge of course would be dissuading the vendor from excluding their own apps from these notifications.

  > There seems to be an opportunity here for platform vendors like Microsoft
  > or Apple to be a bit more aggressive about "this application is what's
  > slowing you down" notifications.

Once I wanted my desktop's features in a phone. Now I want my phone's features on my desktop.

Microsoft did something similar for every browser that wasn't Edge.

But yes, on OS X, the battery drop-down will list any apps that are consuming significant amounts of energy. For me these are constantly Chrome and Intellij IDEA.

> For me these are constantly Chrome and Intellij IDEA.

Well, JetBrains is one of few choices that's even more of a hog than Atom.

Does Atom provide a GUI, ER or UML designer out of the box?

I don't know. Atom is too slow for me as well. I generally use VS Code or just VIM.

Disk space has increased by orders of magnitude. Downloading an additional 500MB Of stuff seems like a completely worthwhile trade off for me if it means that the application I’m using is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux, as opposed to the previous situation where uTorrent was a Windows only app, Transmission was a MAC only app, and then after many years they came over to the other side but with half baked functionality, and no where in there was a Linux option (or if it did arrive, it was even later). Compare that to Slack, or VS Code, which were available on Windows, Mac and Linux almost immediately, all while maintaining feature parity.

Average machines in 2006 were mostly desktops with hard drives of 80/120/160GB. Average machines in 2019 are mostly laptops with 500GB/1TB of storage in many cases much much faster ssds. This is less than one order of magnitude in the last 13 years. I personally would like to use that extra space for useful tools and multimedia not bloated chat apps.

uTorrent is perhaps another bad choice.

uTorrents first public beta release was in late 05 Qbittorrent was released in early 06.

By the time about anyone was aware of uTorrent Qbittorrent was already a thing and as good. uTorrent went on to become first proprietary and ultimately ended up installing malware on users system and mining coin whereas Qbittorrent is still awesome.

Slack with its famously crappy performance and battery destruction is probably another bad choice to make the case although I hear its improved lately. Maybe wait another year to use it as an example so people have time to forget how much it sucked.

I would totally stay with comparing say visual studio code to visual studio and hope your audience doesn't remember Emacs and Jetbrains products are also cross platform without electron.

Jetbrains was terribly slow, terribly memory hoggy — far worse than VSCode (which is insanely fast I will note).

I think instead you should hope they do remember those.

I don't know if it's improved, or if it's just my newly-acquired fast computer, but PyCharm (JetBrains with a Python sock puppet on its hand) has been pretty great, at least for the smallish projects that I've been working on.

They are doing more than vscode/slack though, so it is understandable that lots of ram is needed.

Try to load VSCode with the same set of plugins that InteliJ has out of the box and then see how it actually behaves.

Jetbrains is paid and has probably a larger team behind it. Building those cross platform desktop apps is the business model of their company. Of course they should pick something else than electron. They hire developers that will have the java skills needed to build it.

I wouldn't say that emacs is a shining exemple of desktop UI. Everything is based on text buffers and keyboard commands. I don't see this type of application getting the same scale of adoption as vscode or slack (and this comes someone who has used emacs as an editor for python and org mode files for 3 years).

This is what I tell people who post "See what I made" when it's written in Electron.

I don't hate Electron. I just won't trade _my_ limited CPU, memory, and bandwidth for _your_ inabilility to learn Qt. Your Qt using competitor will get my business.

This is a valid opinion but a bit extreme as is. If the competitor lacks some features that would save you days vs a few minute of execution, you are trading your limited CPU, memory, and bandwith for your (unlimited?) own time.

And yet, QT picked JS for the language of its state of the art widget library.

Not to mention a lot of QT apps bundle the entire thing as well, so I have in my PC several versions of qt5win.dll and friends, many exactly the same.

Furthermore QT apps are not a guarantee of fast programs, and often the interfaces look horrible.

I fail to see a huge difference in programming methods, even if the QT runtime clocks at about 50mb instead of 500mb.

But just for the GUI. The rest of your QT application could be written in highly tuned assembler, if you wanted to go that route…

Qt apps break all the way to being unusable on my windows system when plugging in an external display or RDPing to the machine. I use Kleopatra, Electrum, Qbittorrent, VLC, they all have scaling issues where the text and icons does not scale correctly with the buttons and other components.

Is your external display a much higher dpi than your built in screen and are we basically talking about desktop OS being shitty about handling mixed dpi?

External display has a lower dpi. I don't know if it's the OS or something else but it only happens with QT apps which makes me avoid them if possible.

Here is an example: https://imgur.com/a/RZZK7nA

I agree with you, but man oh man I have not had a good time with react native. We made a tiny little mobile application in it, and due to various libraries exploding with every minor release, I wound up spending hours upgrading and patching and screwing around whenever we needed to add some tiny feature, which inevitably required some kind of update. I don't know if I just got unlucky with my choice of packages, but it's soured me to the whole platform.

The average end user does not care or even think about what the app they are using is made with.

Nor do they know which app is eating their resources.

The hardware industry has trained them to think, "This machine is slow. It must be getting old. Time to get a new one!"

In reality, they've probably just accumulated applications that run in the background and/or put less developer time into constraining resources.

As ripcord is only free during the beta period, I don't think you'll find many "end users" who would want to pay for it. The vast majority of Discord users being Gamers with big disks and plenty of RAM. Maybe some of the more technically inclined Slack users might consider switching, if they find the alternatives aren't missing too much functionality

I want to thank you for making me aware of Ripcord. So far I'm very impressed with it.

Their guide for getting your discord token is broken afaik.

I was able to find it by:

1. Go to discord

2. Control + Shift + I

3. Application Tab

4. Storge/Local Storage/discordapp.com

5. Refresh with Control + R

6. Token will appear, quickly copy it.

https://github.com/revery-ui/revery

Cross-platform desktop apps with Reason

> NOTE: Revery is a work-in-progress and in active development!

Recreating all widgets is a huge task and such a framework needs a lot of dev momentum behind it to be usable in production. I really like everything Revery promises but right now it's just not an option for anything beyond simple apps for personal use.

> "isn't the future that I or end users want"

End users do want it as seen by the commercial success of Electron based products, including completely free products like VSCode even when Sublime and Visual Studio exist.

Features and functionality almost always overrule performance. I'd rather wait a little longer to do something than not be able to do it at all.

Who really cares about 500mb on a laptop?

There is a world beyond people who throw their notebook into the trash after 3 years. There are still plenty of users with 128 GB or even 64 GB. Now imagine Windows taking 30 GB out of these 64 before you even start installing any apps. Those people absolutely care about 500 MB.

This is such bullshit, who the hell runs 64gbs of hdd. Budget laptops 6-8years ago already shipped with at least 300gb hdds.

Plenty of laptops were released with small SSD's thou, probably still are.

When the switch the SSD came the price per GB was high and machines/ssd actually went as low as 30GB.128/256GB ssd are still very very common.

You can, today, walk in to a Best buy and buy a Windows 10 machine with 64 or 128gib mmc. You can buy them in most US department stores and people do buy them.

The newest(2019) macbook air ships with a 128GB SSD ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also if you're running 64gb hdd there's no way that you're running Windows version that takes 30gb

Actually yes. Walmart sells a few dells with 64gb eMMC and win 10 (30gb+)

I do. Not necessarily because of dick space but because this bloat on applications with rather limited functionality usually comes with being memory hog, sluggishness and otherwise unpleasant experience.

Your comment has a typo that I suspect you'd like to fix before your window expires...

Electron is also problematic for memory usage.

My main laptop has 4GB ram. I cannot afford to use 500mb for a chat app. Beside, did you even go outside? A lot of people cant afford (or dont need) a computer with more than that. For example lets see in a community where having a lot of ram matters. In the Steam Community, around 12% of people have 4GB or less. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey#cat0_stats_row

I'll turn that question around. Wouldn't it be nice, not to mention cost-effective, to be able to do an office job on a Raspberry Pi? Fifty to seventy bucks a head, all in, and you have a machine that was plenty fast enough 15 years ago. When you commit to giant apps, you commit to hardware that costs twenty to fifty times that amount.

If you need more power, that's fine. But does an administrative assistant, or a lawyer, for that matter? Give me old-fashioned desktop applications, and I can compete with you at hundreds to thousands less per head. How many people doing that does it take to make a software engineer's time worth the trouble?

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