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Comment by cultofmetatron | Hacker News Reader

My laptop has about 32 gigs of ram so its less of a concern. That said, I find electron apps to be a huge drain on my Battery life.

As a developer, (with a lot of js experience) I sympathize with devs trying to build a product that works seamlessly crossplatform. Electron is a great value when you want to push out a product fast that serves a lot of users accross all devices and you have limited resources.

But I'm calling out slack specifically. you have millions in funding and profit. You can afford to hire a few more devs to make a polished native platform optimized version for each platform that is resource efficient. Slack runs on my desktop all day so having it run fast and not take up too many resources would be a huge win.

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> But I'm calling out slack specifically...

I also don't understand this. What makes it even worse is that someone has already done this. I've been using Ripcord [0] for a few months for Discord and Slack, and it performs way better (it's native, written in Qt 5), and supports nearly all of those platform's features [1]. It is unfortunately proprietary (although I think the dev has open sourced the theming engine).

it doesn't look as beautiful (if you care about that), but it has most of the features. This is all done by 1 guy. Imagine what Slack and Discord could do themselves.

The real solution is to drop these proprietary solutions that don't respect their users. Unfortunately, while I love Matrix and Signal, the large majority of my social circle would never move to those.

Edit: I should also add, there's a very promising, open-source Discord client being developed called gtkcord3 [2], it's still very early in development, but it looks great and already supports the essential features, excluding voice chat.

[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ [1] https://dev.cancel.fm/service_features [2] https://github.com/diamondburned/gtkcord3

> My laptop has about 32 gigs of ram

Mine has 8GB, and I'm a developer and photographer. A "normal" user won't even have that.

In the course of my "computer-janitorial duties" that the extended family expects from a relative who "works with computers", I have only seen >8GB in one teenager's gaming PC. All their laptops (some rather recent) have 4GB and low-power mobile chips. Skype, Spotify and Discord (in the background!) will bring their computer to a crawl. Add one or two Chrome tabs and all the computer is good for is a space heater.

Electron is a great value, true, but that's mostly because JS developers are plenty and therefore cheap. As a mostly web developer with little C++ experience, I was able to pick up QtQuick in a week and I've gotten actual user feedback saying they prefer that over the previous otherwise-identical Electron versions.

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