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Comment by stein1946 | Hacker News Reader

stein1946

> People need to understand even a 70% smaller 290MB GUI app is still terrible

I don't understand that kind of reasoning.

Electron - and anything web - has allowed us to basically solve distribution and iterate at lightning speeds and people are getting bothered because an application in 2026 takes multiple amounts of RAM than the their favourite 90s app?

Come now, the average laptop has a ton of memory and fast i/o to be able to not care even if that 290MB was 1290MB.

The trade off of higher memory for some middleware is totally worth it.

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Software developers need to realize that their app is not the only one that will be running on the user's computer. A single app taking 300 MB of RAM? No problem. 20 apps? That's already 6 GB of RAM.

And keep in mind we're talking about a damn chat client, not some complex video editing or CAD app.

Wish it only took 300mb. Actually that is the minimum.

Teams is a nice example. It will eat 1-2gb of my memory on a regular day. Being limited by 16gb and trying to work... It's not fun.

> Software developers need to realize that their app is not the only one that will be running on the user's computer

The user will need to realize that, and if they don't like it they will close the app and move to a different provider. But that of course will not happen because no matter how the IT people want everyone else to use their xmpp xfce clients or whatever; Slack will always triumph because it is not just a "damn chat client"

> 20 apps? That's already 6 GB of RAM.

No one runs 20 apps in the foreground, my finance runs gsheets, xero and the erp all of which are webkit. The lenovo's were the cheapest ones I could get with 8gb ddr4 and still no one has complained about slack or our erp written in react not being responsive enough.

I understand that people like to constrain themselves for creative reasons but lets not be cheap with resources.

Do you honestly consider this normal? In the 00s I've used to run Windows XP (which was derided as an absolute pig -- what the hell did we know) + Delphi with a GUI designer in it much more advanced than anything we have now + 1-2 PDFs + a web browser with maybe 5-10 tabs + often a chat client in the background (usually QIP -- it supported not just one protocol like Slack, but about a dozen of them, and could send and show multimedia messages in addition to text).

Sometimes also a music player. All of this relatively comfortably fit in 128 MiB of RAM; it was really comfortable once I moved to 512 a few years later, and I thought that should be enough for the decades ahead.

But then we got electron and turning the web into an operating system on top of an operating system.

Now having a document processor barely fit within 8 GiB is considered acceptable...

Normal or not that's how it is. The incentives are not there and the network effects close the casket...

Is it regrettable? Idk. Definitely not unique to software though once you look and appliances, cars etc - they are not optimized for the things I prefer they would have been.

I have 32 GB - 4 GB = 28 GB of RAM in my notebook, I close electron apps every day to free memory.

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