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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Slack desktop app is almost 1 gig in size.

On a whim I just checked how big the copy of Adium still lingering in my Mac is: 60 megs.

And Ripcord (a native discord/slack client) is a mere 40.

And Winamp is 4MB (after removing the stock plugins that I don’t need, like modern skins and the long-broken media library internet lookup stuff).

How big is Spotify now?

Spotify is 273MB (on Linux at least), 70MB for the binary and 137MB for Chrome, plus some other bits and bobs.

  $ pacman -Qi spotify
  Name            : spotify
  Version         : 1:1.1.10.546-4
  Description     : A proprietary music streaming service
  Architecture    : x86_64
  ...
  Installed Size  : 272.79 MiB

So at least it's smaller than Slack.

I have a noob question, but how do proprietary apps (IE: Slack) make it onto the AUR without having an official binary?

There’s nothing to really block much on the aur. There are some guidelines in naming and no duplicates, no maliciousness etc that are enforced, but that’s it. But anyone can upload a build script (PKGBUILD) for anything.

If you want to see how it’s done search the package name and AUR and you can see the build script right on the website.

TIL! Thank you :)

Both Slack and Spotify do provide Linux versions, even if not/less supported officially.

Thanks! I hadn't tried Arch yet, but I just saw the pkgbuild script on the site (didn't know it was there) and it makes since now :)

There are many PKGBUILDs on AUR that cactually download rpm / deb packages and unpack the binaries and deps from it.

iTunes, in all its bloated, much-maligned media-managing glory, is a mere 188 megs on my Mac.

ooh I'll have to check out ripcord!

I've found it's great for Discord, and pretty good for Slack (although I've been using Slack in my browser now that it's become critical during WFH).

Unfortunately it's proprietary, but there's another native client called gtkcord3 [0] that seems to be progressing well.

0: https://github.com/diamondburned/gtkcord3

I use it daily. It's OK. It's better than having a full electron app/browser running, but it's fairly incomplete. (For example, in Slack I can't find a way to set my status.) I also have to reauthenticate every Monday morning which means launching Slack in a web browser to grab my credentials. It's a pain.

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