See also: Ripcord[1], which has both Slack and Discord support.
* No search (Slack/Discord)
* No huddles in Slack
* Thread support in Discord
For these reasons, I typically navigate to Discord/Slack in the browser when I need access to those features. Not ideal, but the snappiness of Ripcord over the slow bloat of Slack/Discord make it worth it to me.
To me it sounds like an artifact of architectural choices, eg by polling before rendering to avoid flicker, lack of client side caching, or possibly just bloat. Companies won't stop their poor software practices even if they switched to native.
I don't doubt you can make a performant snappy chat GUI with Electron/web tech, but more often than not, in my experience, Qt apps (like Ripcord) perform much better and are less RAM hungry.
There is a theming system included, however, it only allows you to change colors/fonts of UI elements.
I don’t hate it (as much as I hate using Slack in a web browser or electron app), but I certainly don’t love it. I’ll be giving Shrugs a try, but it sounds like it’s missing a lot, too, so I’m not hopeful.
Why do a lot of these alternate clients purposefully leave out vital features?
Video calls are somewhat involved, and no third-party implementation exists to my knowledge. Discord uses WebRTC over the browser, but the desktop app uses a native module written in C++ that I assume handles decoding, audio screensharing, and other related functionalities. It's not impossible of course, but the cognitive barrier is much higher than simply observing the WebSocket and HTTP requests to get text chat working.
That being said, Discord can ban people at random for whatever reason they choose, and this has happened before.
For the record, I've been using Ripcord with the same Discord account for 3 years, daily.
Although like with all things, proceed with caution.