what are you doing with an ultra book that would make it need 32gb of ram?
Arguably you can schedule an FPGA synthesis or bitstream generation job on a build server rather than locally but I am just saying this an example of a use-case.
slack alone is using 300mb. discord is using another 300mb.
Next highest single process is Firefox with 1G RSS and 5G Virt. I have 113 tabs open at the moment, although there's about 4G of RSS in "Web Content" processes which are firefox related.
I remember recently I freed 10GB of RAM just by restarting Firefox. I literally looked at Ubuntu's System Monitor. And I keep everything updated.
Tried to play with settings in about:config, made even worse and reset.
that's on linux, latest nightly.
I'm using a 6/7 year old ASUS with 8gb of RAM. It has no problems running 20 Chrome tabs, Slack, Spotify, VSCode all at once. Are these programs really pushing people's laptops that hard, or is my laptop some kind of weird mega-performer?
I haven’t really seen the memory problems with slack, but we use the free slack without extensions. Maybe it has a similar problem with extensions?
But simplicity is not what they're optimizing for. They're optimizing for productivity -- specifically, how fast a typical corporate webdev shop can go from zero to working app. That's really the only thing that matters, because there's no room for something like Qt in today's move-fast-break-things environment. Qt means developing, compiling, testing, and supporting across multiple platforms which a modern webdev shop may not even be able to do if they had the budget for it (which they don't). Hell, there's barely room for any language besides JavaScript.
So hence, we get Electron and we get memory bloat. And it's perfectly reasonable, given the right perspective.
it's not only simplicity we're leaving on the table but efficiancy (resource usage) as well. this is not sustainable industry practice (see climate crisis, rare earth depletion). the need for ever more hastly crafted apps is compareable to the need for cheap plastic toys from the 1-dollar store i.e highly questionable.
I'd like to add macOS to the mix but it's something of a pain to virtualize. I'm aware of hackintoshes but there seem to be a bunch of gotchas and it seems you can never upgrade them.
I also have some VMs where I need decent security guarantees and confinement, such as running different web services.