Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

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In my experience (with apps like spotify, the signal client and a couple of others) it's only marginally better than running a Windows app through wine as far as the user experience is concerned. It doesn't integrate very well, it uses a shameful amount of RAM etc...

I'd much prefer if these companies used open APIs (some do) and let the FLOSS crowd make clients if they cared for them. I've replaced the spotify application with librespot lately and it works very well, although it lacks a UI so I have to use my phone as a remote. I'm also currently using the signal electron client which works okay but uses an order of magnitude more RAM after a few minutes of runtime than my irssi that's been running for months. It also doesn't have better usability if you don't like clicking everywhere and prefer keyboard control.

I don't hate electron, it's just "okay". It's a symptom of the webification of the world as web technologies make a foray into the desktop and server space. I think a framework like Qt is objectively superior, both from a developer and user perspective but I'm sure these days it's probably easier and cheaper to find webdevs than Qt devs and it's all that matters.

Spotify actually uses the Chromium Embedded Framework, but it's pretty bad nonetheless.

I think making clients died when Twitter shuttered their APIs; companies want to keep control over how their users work with their stuff.

I've looked into alternative Slack clients for example which seem to be doable, but the only ones I saw were dead and/or looked terrible.

This one seems nice enough https://eul.im/

I saw it wasn't open source, they say it's like the subline development model and to click here[1] for more details. Well..

1. https://eul.im/development

> let the FLOSS crowd make clients if they cared for them.

I've yet to see FLOSS crowd come up with a remotely useful client for anything. Event in the days of much simpler APIs and apps like IRC FOSS apps were universally meh.

I'll take weechat/irssi over the signal client every second of every minute of every day.

Super small footprint, I can do everything with the keyboard, I can script it, I can run it on a server in SSH, I can customize it any way I want.

Meanwhile on my large screen I can barely see 10 messages in the backlog of the signal desktop client because it feels the need to emulate an SMS UI (you can even select if you want it to emulate the Android or iOS UI, how cool is that?), I still haven't figured out if you can create groups in the desktop interface (given the very small number of options available I don't see how I could miss it, maybe it's simply not possible). The input box has english spell checking enabled by default which is pretty distracting when I'm typing an other language since everything gets underlined, I haven't found a way to disable it or change the language.

The other day I had to use the Discord webapp for something, what a joke. On my pre-quantum Firefox it was laggy as hell, there was a noticeable delay sometimes while I was typing text. Maybe you'll blame Firefox for being too slow but we're talking about an actual text chat here.

It does look better than a terminal window though, I grant you that. Maybe I should print it and frame it somewhere in my office.

Interestingly I have the exact opposite experience, especially since the rise of github. High quality floss software is everywhere, and closed proprietary crap is suffering if only because without github they still rely on forums or email for users to report bugs or feature requests.

9 times out of 10, a github project fixes my bug report very quickly.

Half the time I'll send an email to a closed source project and never hear back about it.

FOSS is also doing well in an era where proprietary clients mean crappy electron clients. That's a low bar to beat.

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