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Comment by cyanydeez | Hacker News Reader

Yawn.

What's important to the majority of computing tasks is boring, doesn't need super computer sppeds or IoT sized products This lament is really narrow sighted.

Resources are cheap for the majority

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This doesn't scale though. My mouse needs an always running Electron app. And the app suspends itself somehow everytime my computer is locked or the screen sleeps. This leads to a 30 second wait while it awakens when I get back.

Now if every device and app is built on Electron with such minimal effort then I'm not sure even resurrecting Moore's Law could keep up.

So you bought and are using a mouse that takes 30 seconds to wake up from sleep, and are using that as the justification for why Electron is bad?

The point is not one anecdote alone. It's the trend my example highlights. IME it's hard to buy a feature rich device without needing to run more and more electron apps. Or have a tech job without such apps. This cannot scale to everything even if physics weren't standing in the way of significant die shrinks.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that if I configure the device to do 'hardware' assignment then it's not as bad a problem. (Yet at the cost of some flexibility.) So it suggests that the software level bindings are being loaded through this Electron abomination.

I don’t see how you can call it a “trend” when I can’t think of a single mainstream device with such a requirement.

What's a high quality programmable gaming mouse that doesn't require an app to manage it?

Core functionality for all these devices will work perfectly well without an app.

For functionality that does need additional configuration (like extra buttons, RGB colors), you will have to install a companion app and use it once.

There's no case where a peripheral will be non-functional unless a heavy electron app is permanently running alongside it, as the parent comment alleged. If there is, it is absolutely not the standard.

I mean yeah you buy bad products and they’ll be bad… They’d manage to fuck that up in native land as well. Seems orthogonal.

Getting harder to buy products that don't suffer from these kinds of problems as Electron enables producers to cheap out on software development at the cost of user time and energy.

Ah so 2008. Was not caused by rampant fraud in banking, its just that many people bought bad products. In fact that explains away any injustice that ever happened!

> Resources are cheap for the majority

Sure, if you're OK with running only one or two applications at a time.

Also, if applications were written with care toward performance/resources, imagine how much more those applications could do?

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