Hacker News Reader

Comment by SllX | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. If you have a CPU from 2012 onwards, 16GB of RAM and an SSD, that’s a respectable hardware setup. It might not be the fastest piece of kit on the planet, but I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t last another 3 to 5 years without feeling slow.

Electron apps invariably make such kit feel slower than it actually is. You can get good performance out of even older hardware if you treat it well and load it with good software that respects the hardware.

View on HN

I type this from a 2014 MacBook Air with 8GB of ram, still going strong, no upgrades except a battery replacement. Everything is still as snappy as the first day I got it.

No electron apps!

Yep, the new Steam library being a bloated web app is what forced me to install more RAM. I normally don't close out of applications when I'm not using them, so I was always hovering around ~6-7 of my 8 gigs of RAM in use. Then they update the library to the new bloated version, and my computer starts freezing because the library memory footprint is so much larger that my computer was having to use over a gig of swap space.

I have a rig powerful enough to run a lot of last-gen games at 4K with high quality settings, and a lot of current-gen ones at mid to high settings and 1080p. The fucking redesigned Steam library lags, none of the animations (why does it need animations?!) are even close to smooth, and there's massive delay on every input. I've never once encountered a move toward webtech, or toward heavier and "appier" JS use in something that's already webtech, and gone "oh good, this works much better now, I'm so glad they did that."

And somehow it's still dramatically better than the Epic Games launcher.

I don't know what these companies are doing. Clearly they're not paying attention though. This is not merely low-hanging fruit that's going ignored, it's watermelons.

>I normally don't close out of applications when I'm not using them, so I was always hovering around ~6-7 of my 8 gigs of RAM in use.

That sounds like your problem. And I refuse to believe that the new steam UI uses 2gb of memory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com