Spotify using several processes and GB of memory just play some music and browse a library is an abomination. WinAMP did most of that 20 years ago while using a fraction of the resources.
Discord similarly is an affront.
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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don't worry, this will all be solved now with incompetent vibe-coders, just give it a while
or you will look back to this with a nostalgic tear in the eye. one of these.
I use discord.com/app for exactly this reason. Its footprint is lower and the experience is almost exactly the same. And I can block things I don't like using ublock/other extensions, like animated reactions and those crazy new premium video profiles with explosions and confetti etc
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I run those thing in the browser, where they belong.
If you have premium, there's probably a better native client.
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If there's any upside to the entire situation, it's that perhaps, maybe, developers will again start paying more attention to optimization instead of just throwing more powerful hardware at it.
Some of the greatest games ever developed for consoles were great because the developers had to get extremely creative with the limited resources at their disposal. This led to some incredibly optimized games that could do a whole lot with those very limited resources.
Best I can do is mandatory Lumen and Nanite. You can get almost-stable 60 fps on a 5090 with DLSS Performance and 3x frame gen, which should be optimized enough for anyone.
My game will sell for 80 bucks, 150 if you want the edition with all the preorder-exclusive content.
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You don't even need to go that far back. It blows my mind that the 360 and PS3 have 512mb of RAM. Halo 4, GTA 5, and The Last of Us did some impressive graphics work with 512mb.
Oh wow my mind is blown. Even more so that it's 256mb of DRAM and 256mb of VRAM separately.
We have really gone down hill and fast ;(
In my brain memory I find it hard to believe all the textures loaded at one time could ever be so small. Im amazed.
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I always care about how much memory I end up using.
Problem is, most places won't pay for caring about that. Those that would, are doing so because they are using the product on their own systems instead of some customer's systems.
I think we will first see a batch of alternative apps, which either will get shut down by manufacturers etc., or get tolerated as an alternative.
I'm not sure I know many Electron apps that are worth running.
There is WhatsApp, but I just run the browser version. For Matrix, there's NeoChat, which uses QML and is definitely better than Electron.
I think spotify / discord / vscode (and derivatives) / slack are probably the most installed electron apps.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?O=0&SeB=nd&K=&outdated=&SB=v&SO=d&PP=50&submit=Go
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?O=0&SeB=nd&K=&outdated=&SB=p&SO=d&PP=50&submit=Go
A lot of pretty popular packages in those lists are electron apps, unfortunately
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dude just fuckin
curl --data-ram @ram https://downloadmoreram.com/release/20.1until curl rewrites in electon and you don't have enough ram to run it anymore
"On next week's episode of whycombinator"
according to string theory, you can see the string that started the universe with
cat ~/.zsh_history | head -n 1switch it to bash_history to see the real big bang
*hashbang
back in the day people would download more ram and put it on giant tape-based backup systems. Big companies started downloading massive amounts of high quality ram this way. This created a ram shortage, and companies like corsair are now using their massive reserves of downloaded ram and filling empty ram sticks with them and making lots of money. That's why ram is so expensive today. Any ram you can download today is low quality ram, and the only high quality ram can be had on physical sticks, which were filled by the companies with ram reserves. 1969 was the peak of the ram harvesting, so you'll probably get some really great ram if it came from that year.
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Lutris is impressive when it comes to game launchers and RAM efficiency, especially when compared to the ones using Electron.
Kinda depressing what numbers are considered impressive these days.
Jesus Christ, Steam at 1.4 GB and you are expected to run that WHILE PLAYING GAMES? That made my eyes pop outta my head.
There's no way that's normal. I'm pretty sure mine only uses a couple hundred.
Who knows, maybe this dram scarcity will cause a change of heart and make people optimise more again. :)
The bubble will pop before that
For real, I remember when an entire game being over a 20 MiB made me hesitate to download it because it'd take a while.
The Half Life demo was 50MB. Took me 4 tries to get it over dialup. Played till the sun came up!
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Atom was kinda revolutionary in its plugin support and everything IIRC.
Well, now that Atom has been replaced by VSCode, which is also an electron app, the original Atom devs, or at least some of them, are creating Zed. Zed's written in Rust and uses a lot less memory.
Of course it's not yet as mature and they're trying to earn money by integrating AI and selling that as a service. BUT the AI is voluntary and even if you do want to use it, you don't have to pay to use their AI (which comes with a free tier if you DO want to use it), you can literally run your own model in ollama.
It's not perfect, but I love how little RAM it uses compared to VSCode and (shudders) the Jetbrains suite (which I normally love, but hate the RAM and CPU usage, it can drive my computer pretty slow)
It has become my favorite editor, even though I don't need or want the AI stuff. They do something that I do quite appreciate, that I wish other apps (looking at you, Firefox) would do:
In the AI section of the settings, the first thing is a toggle that turns off all AI features.
still have the patch they sent for people who published packages. I made a theme no one but me used but still! Pre microsoft github was cool
They also developed their own Rust UI library and open-sourced it.
Didn't Sublime Text come before Atom?
it did, but this is about electron, which isn't relevant to sublime. sublime's plugins mechanism is a little different from atom, which is much more like emacs
Yes, but the plugin ecosystem really was pioneered by sublime and then ported over everywhere. A big reason atom was so successful is the plugin and themes were compatible.
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It's kind of an abomination when VsCode, supposed to be a lighter IDE, runs like dogshit compared to JetBrains, a fuckin' Java based IDE. Since when was Java light on RAM?
(Caveat: I haven't directly compared their memory usage, my experience is in very difference codebases for each)
Lmao this is quite frankly, horseshit, upvoted by people who have never used an IDE.
VScode is lightweight, snappy, and fast to open. VSCodium gives you all of that without any of the Microsoft. And even runs in a web browser.
It's not "horseshit" - I gave you a caveat precisely so that you can understand the limitations of my comparison, and so that you don't need to be so antagonistic.
lightweight
I launched VSCode fresh this morning. Just now, 4 hours later, I closed it and watched my system memory usage: 1.3GB. I am doing remote development, so there's a whole server process as well which is chomping a few GB. My old laptop repeatedly ground to a halt until the OOM killer woke up/I rebooted as its measly 32GB of RAM couldn't cope with two VSCode sessions (plus other normal apps) after a while.
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And here I was thinking this was about emacs and lisp. Yougster complaining about not knowing how to quit Vi smh they have never experienced the horrors of emacs
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