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Comment by zrail | Hacker News Reader

I know at least one person who would pay _very good money_ for a version of Slack that opened channels in separate windows.

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Yeah, watching that video really reminds me how poor slack performance is.

It genuinely feels like it could fit into a couple of MB of RAM back in those days and been super snappy. I literally do not use slack for anything that IRC wouldn't do back in the late 90s, with the exception of threads, embedded images, and emojis.

It is crazy how close but how far IRC was. Session persistence, notification support even when offline, better admin UI was really all it needed. And probably be totally centralised.

You know whats crazy? A few years back I had this Core i3 Haswell system and I installed Windows 7 with Office 2003 on it. The PC shipped with Windows 8 but I decided to go backwards. My god the performance was out of this world. Everything was instant! It was such a pleasant experience I didn't feel again until I got my M1 mac. Even now the bloat is slowly beginning on even the m1 Mac. I think we need to find every developer/designer/project manager who introduces this software bloat and lock them on a remote island.

> My god the performance was out of this world. Everything was instant!

That's not too far from the performance you can get from a plain Linux install and a lightweight DE (Xfce/LXDE). Though I'll grant you that Office 2003 is going to be a lot lighter than its modern free equivalent.

The problem is the time spent setting up this environment and dealing with the inevitable Linux issues exceeds the ease of setup of the said Windows environment. I am aware though that the windows env is unsustainable due to it being discontinued.

The most responsive computer I ever used was a Macintosh 512ke upgraded with an additional megabyte of memory. I booted the system software and applications off a ramdisk and used floppies only for documents. Resedit and MacPaint, just to name a couple, launched inside the time it took to double click. That machine didn’t have any fans either so I usually just turned the brightness nob down to zero instead of turning it off.

>That machine didn’t have any fans either so I usually just turned the brightness nob down to zero instead of turning it off.

That is actually hilarious! Its as if you told the computer to "hold on for a bit and i'll get back to you". I wonder if you had any issues with memory leaks? I guess the software was so simple that leaks were probably not really an issue.

It genuinely feels like it could fit into a couple of MB of RAM back in those days

You may enjoy this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831951

You may want to give https://volt-app.com/ a try.

Yes. My main takeaway from this slideshow is that designers are control freaks that treat their applications like an art canvas instead of just letting the window manager manage the windows. In my opinion it is 100% better and I wish I could explode features out of various apps into separate windows all the time. Video conferencing is a really obvious one.

For what it's worth, Ripcord[1] can do that (okay, it can open channels in separate tabs that can be moved to separate windows). And it is a native (Qt) application.

The only problem is that it's not free (with unlimited trial, though) and the development seems to have stopped. Still works okay for text chat, though.

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

Not stopped. The next update is being worked on.

I miss floating tool palettes.

I miss dockable floating palettes.

They should make a comeback now that Adobe's patent has expired https://patents.google.com/patent/US5546528

https://web.archive.org/web/20000914161125/http://www.adobe....

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