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Comment by lbrito | Hacker News Reader

Give it enough time and a new version of Slack will eventually grind to a halt on your puny 2019 CPU.

Will run into memory pressure long before then.

I have a 16GB M1 MacBook Air that feels very snappy for now, but with the pile of Electron app I run daily (Visual Studio Code, Discord, Slack, Signal, 1Password, Plexamp, Google Messages for Web) and some misc other accessory apps (WhatsApp, Teams, Microsoft To Do, Excel, OneNote)... along with a browser, I'm basically running out of memory with my set of startup apps before I even open anything for "heavy" work.

Why not use those as a web app tho. It does exactly the same thing.

I've tried with Slack/Discord/Teams, and have found the web apps to not be particularly workable for my use. The Electron apps have better notifications, and I typically have dozens to hundreds of tabs open, which doesn't work well with keeping a handful of important tabs active. (Both active mentally/visually, and not put to sleep by the browser to save on resources.)

And a bunch of those aren't the same in the web version - Signal, WhatsApp, VS Code, 1Password and Plexamp are all Electron and are either unavailable or functionally not useful for me on the web.

IDK whats wrong with notifications for you. For tabs - I pin core ones (i.e. slack, harvest, asana) to be in front. Use tab groups for each project/ticket I work with for longer term organization.

Another idea is to use a separate browser or profile just for those web apps that need notifications and other settings you wouldn't want mixed up with your daily driver.

TIL that 1password app is now Electron. I guess that means they did a good job?

I was also going to say that Teams needs to go in the Electron list, but apparently they switched to Edge WebView2, so thanks for the second lesson! On macOS, that still means they install another chromium browser per app, sigh...

(BTW, I'm not sure how you installed Google Messages for Web but if you use chrome it's just a PWA meaning two less JS runtimes being installed.)

I took a quick look at my computer and I knew Obsidian was electron... And now I see the Google Drive app seems to be shipping its own browser too(?)

That's quite surprising to me as an 8GB Intel MacBook owner who currently has Discord, Firefox, VS Code, Outlook, Photoshop, Illustrator, Unity, and Blender open. Only very rarely (once a month?) does macOS smack me on the hand for getting too greedy, and the rest of the time it pulls some virtual memory witchcraft to keep things chugging along smoothly.

You could write a new client, but at some time you will run into an issue where they start adding features faster and heavier and more required than you can keep up with by optimizing the software to run on your potato.

Case in point, people have managed to run a bit of the modern internet on Amiga. Enough to be useful. But all of it? Forget about it.

A Google search shows various TUI slack clients: hopefully they all use less resources

I'm sure you're right, but its a sad state of affairs. I mean, is this what Marc Andreessen meant when he stated that famous phrase about software eating the world or something? That is, that software will get so crappy, so bloated that it will simply engulf the world like the Blob from that old horror/sci-fi movie? I'm sure its not, i'm just being silly of course. And, i know its the old fogey in me, but i sure hope more lowfi efforts like Gemini, tildes communites, etc. prosper, and create other similar creativity...Because with all the processing power that exists in the world, among the things that slow our machines to a crawl include a freaking chat app??? Seems like such a waste. (Not blaming you of course, simply went off on a tangent from my frustration with bloatware like Slack, etc.)

You're right. just look at the devolution of Windows by generation. As everyone on HN comments on, how terrible Windows 11 is compared to windows 10, compared to windows 7, etc. (bloat, unnecessary apps, intrusiveness and so on.) Advertising? WTF? We all thought - when we were running Windows 3.11, imagine if we had a faster computer ?!

> ...We all thought - when we were running Windows 3.11, imagine if we had a faster computer ?!

Yep, that was me back in the day; i thought the same! :-)

Is slack that bad? I've only used it for Bernie organizing in 2020, but it worked fine on my 9-year old (at the time) PC.

That's why I only use Slack through a browser.

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