I downloaded Nuclear (the AppImage, if that matters) and booted it up. Instant 300MB RAM usage.
I think I'll pass.
"I got 32 GB of RAM, who cares?"
I see a parallel with networked services being developed and tested under "works for me" lab conditions without latency, jitter, or reduced bandwidth.
"It works fine on my 10 Gbps network, who cares about 2 extra MB of Javascript?"
For one, because the very moment you have that line of thought, you're probably already an outlier.
Okay, let's assume you have a computer with 4 GB of RAM. Still 7.32%. That is low.
This is why modern programs and games can barely run on modern hardware in many circumstances. There is no incentive for devs to be efficient.
It's not one program using a lot of memory. It's 45 of them all using way more than they need to. It adds up.
Stop being greedy, even if it existed as you say, externalising your development cost by having higher runtime requirements is a mild form of resource exploitation for profit.
If you're designing software like a music player (that is, something people are likely to want to keep running in the background while doing other things), you're just giving people a reason to switch to something else by taking up a bunch of memory carelessly, as it'll be one of the first things to go when the user needs the memory.
But to be fair. An Open Source project done in someone's free time for the love of it and shared freely in the wild as a humble contribution to humanity for the price tag of a Like in a forum, really should use whatever the author feels like using, as long as they don't treat it as a product and attempt to market it like it was done with care for anything but the developer's ergonomy. For what is worth, it could be made of Minecraft Redstone if the author feels like it, and nobody can judge them for it.
In order it was 4,4,16,8,16,4,8,16,4,16,32,8,16,4,32
9 of them were under $300
My dad had some really crap HP Celeron desktop. I don't remember it if had 4gig or more but I do remember it took 3 to 4 minutes of swapping continuously just to boot up and run all the crapware that HP had launch on startup in Windows.
That said, I'm not anti-electron. Here's some native app sizes
So that's, like, two programs open and were already running out of memory.
Problem is, when the music player takes 500 (let's be honest those 300 were probably just a cold-start and before actually doing anything with it), the collaboration chat app takes another <let me check...> 650 MB (Slack right now for me), the profile loader I need for work is <checking again...> another 400. The text editor is 510 MB (VSCode, and still that is a well engineered and optimized Electron marble). The Pomodoro timer, 300 MB.
And on top of that I'm supposed to do my actual work! All that junk is stealing memory that should be available to Visual Studio and compiling my huge code base.
Hopefully we don't end up with Electron calculators, calendars, email clients, file browsers, and image editors, because those things also tend to be open long term in my desktop (which right now I can do without any second thought about being able to, because they are all properly done as decently optimized GUIs)
Okay, bad analogy. My point is: just because your budget is high and you've got bytes to burn doesn't mean all those bytes should be burned.
It is NOT true for desktops which run different applications all the time, the user often switches between them, and where uncommitted memory is automatically used by the kernel as disk cache space.
And we're talking about memory usage here. Nothing is stuttering from not enough memory if they're only using 12.5%.
But who has 10 applications all showing animations at the same time? Or constantly animating at all? If a button animates when you click it, or a message animates when it pops up, it's not exactly slowing down my system.
This non-concern for resource usage and good software design is why energy costs are sky rocketing today.
When so many little tools that you normally keep running in the background, it starts adding up. Not to mention that not everyone has that much RAM. Until recently, Apple still shipped Macbooks with 8GB RAM.
I've also started having issues with my Windows partition filling up with these applications. Again, no one application is a problem, it's the trend that's the problem.
No single raindrop is responsible for the flood.
It took a few seconds to launch too. It was possible to uninstall the snap and install the deb, fixing all these issues, but it wasn’t the default, and I gave up on Ubuntu around that time.