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Comment by hex13 | Hacker News Reader

I think Atom gave bad fame to the Electron (it's ironically because Electron was made for Atom).

Atom is bloated and slow and people think that each Electron(or Chromium) app is bloated and slow.

But for example VSCode is a lot faster (and consumes less RAM, from what I just checked) than Atom. So it's not Electron to blame...

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Not only Electron to blame. Electron still gets a decent share of the blame, simply because it's a memory and CPU hungry runtime.

Many consumer laptops are still shipping with only 4 gigs of ram - that's not a lot of space for Electron apps.

I noticed you've been downvoted. I find it amusing the expectations some people have about the hardware consumers should be running. While many on here, being a geek community and all, will have relatively decent systems; most normal people would rather keep a system as long as they can. Not to mention those in poorer communities or countries who cannot afford newer tech.

In fact it was only this year when I upgraded a work colleagues personal laptop from 2GB to 4GB.

I've been downvoted because HN has Dislike Button which encourages people to downvote things they personally don't like instead of making constructive arguments ;)

If it's any consolation I did provide a counterargument and got downvoted for it.

As for the 'flag', that's not the same as downvoting. Or at least shouldn't be used in the same way although I have lately seen a disappointing number of comments marked as "flagged" which shouldn't have been. (There's some guidance about flagging posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Downvoting is something that's only available to members above a specific karma threshold (2000 IIRC).

I upvoted you.

BTW how to downvote comments on HN? I sometimes "flag" them to mark as downvote, but I'm not sure if flag is the same as downvote.

You need karma > 500 to downvote. And even then, you cannot downvote replies to your own comments etc.

Meta:

Downvoting is an accepted method of disagreement on HN. It's a problematic stance IMO since downvotes grey out the text, making dissenting opinions impossible to make out if they're unpopular enough.

Back on topic, 4GB laptops are incredibly common, especially in retail stores. Getting a laptop with 8 GB of memory frequently requires looking online (most folks still buy their computers from retail stores) and customizing your order.

For example, I just visited both Dell and System76, and except for the gaming laptops, all of them default to 4GB of ram, and adding more (while not terribly expensive) requires thought and action on the consumer's part.

It's interesting. What browsers do people use on this machines? Though according to wikipedia most popular browser is Chrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

but it seems weird, because Chrome is such a memory monster (it usually takes almost all RAM memory you have on your machine and additionally disk space if you are running of RAM). I have 16GB ram and Chrome takes me 10GB of it and ~1GB of disk space.

> I think Atom gave bad fame to the Electron And GitHub “desktop” client, and Slack “desktop” “app”, and Git Kraken… The list goes on.

I've found every Electron app I've used to be terrible. This includes VSCode. In fact compare VSCode to Adobe Brackets - both of which are using web technologies as their framework but Brackets is a node.js application while VSCode is Electron, and you'll see just how badly Electron performs when even compared to similar technologies.

I used Brackets maybe 2 years ago and it was very slow back then. Maybe now they have optimized it, I don't know.

Oh it's definitely slow compared to the likes of Sublime Text or vim. But compared to Atom, VSCode, etc Brackets feels a lot snappier and less memory hungry.

This is what I've experienced on 4 different hardware platforms however all running ArchLinux so YMMV.

VSCode is visibly slower than Emacs on my Ubuntu travel netbook.

I only use it due to its Rust's support.

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