• Samskara@sh.itjust.works
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    21 days ago

    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.

      • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        Same here. At first, I thought I was going to get a better Discord experience with the dedicated ‘app’. Nope. Another web app crammed into Electron, multiplying the overall browser footprint on my system. It now happily lives on in a normal browser tab where my ad blockers and user-scripts claw back local control of things.

    • kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de
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      21 days ago

      If you have Spotify Premium, try a third party client. Even GUI clients like Spotify-qt are memory light [though not at feature parity] whilst terminal clients like ncspot, spotify-player take 1/10th the memory. The latter even supports Spotify connect.

    • Cevilia (she/they/…)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      20 days ago

      Correction, Winamp still does this today while using a fraction of the resources.

      Though if you’re on Windows I’d recommend Xmplay instead, it plays basically everything.

      I’m on Linux and I use VLC.

      • skarn@discuss.tchncs.de
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        11 days ago

        XMplay, that brings me back!

        I discovered XMplay while trying to play the tracker files of the soundtrack copied from my old Deus Ex cd. I think it was in MOD files, some kind of spicy midi that includes some samples.

        I use Linux esclusively since 2006 though.

        • Cevilia (she/they/…)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          11 days ago

          ProTracker modules, that takes me back to my Amiga days! I don’t think I’ve ever heard them described as “spicy midi” before though. I may have to steal that. ;)

          Also XMPlay runs flawlessly via Wine. I have it installed on my desktop for the occasional music file VLC won’t play and Qmmp is no help with. :)

    • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      19 days ago

      Spotify suck at programming. When using the app offline, I can view and play songs and podcasts directly or from the queue, but the menu to add stuff to the queue doesn’t load.

  • Ex Nummis@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    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.

    • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      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.

      • TheWizardOfOdd@lemmynsfw.com
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        21 days ago

        180 if you want to play before the day one patch that makes sure you’re can even finish the game.

        Or you can wait two weeks and get it for 10 because the reviews were so bad we‘re happy to move any copies at all.

    • BootLoop@sh.itjust.works
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      21 days ago

      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.

      • dogs0n@sh.itjust.works
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        21 days ago

        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.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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        21 days ago

        tbf, the PC version of console games of the time ran like utter shit on computers with less than 2GB RAM and graphics cards worse than a Geforce 9800. A lot of people were still on WinXP, which was bloated compared to WinME-2000, but by 2006 it was fine.

    • ulterno@programming.dev
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      21 days ago

      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.

      • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.worldOP
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        21 days ago

        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.

        • ulterno@programming.dev
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          21 days ago

          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.

            • ulterno@programming.dev
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              21 days ago

              android-studio : I guess that explains why it ran so badly back when I had to use it for work.
              jdk wouldn’t be an Electron app, right?

              discord is the only 1 of those that I used in any meaningful sense before and I already stopped using it for reasons other than Electron. So, I guess it’s just a personal thing that I don’t tend to require stuff that is made in Electron.

              • BootLoop@sh.itjust.works
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                21 days ago

                I believe Android Studio is built on top of IntelliJ IDE which uses Java, so no Electron. That being said, Java applications are generally RAM heavy as well and Android Studio was always a pig on resources.

                Visual Studio Code (not Visual Studio!) is Electron based but I’ve always had good performance with it.

                • ulterno@programming.dev
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                  21 days ago

                  Visual Studio Code

                  Yeah, that’s one that I can’t talk badly about.
                  While I have used MS Visual Studio and know how slow it was, I tried VS Codium once or twice and it worked pretty smoothly. Someone probably put quite a bit of effort into making it so.

                  Apart from Android Studio, which ended up not even starting up properly on the work computer, Gradle itself also takes quite a bit of time and resources. I was using the NDK with a C++ project and it took way longer to setup than any BSP, despite only being able to compile for a single version of Android.

    • hornywarthogfart@sh.itjust.works
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      20 days ago

      I think pretty much every dev understands the issue but they are limited in what they can do about it. Quitting a job because they won’t let you optimize is noble but unrealistic for the vast majority of devs.

      I would love for optimizations to start being prioritized. More specifically, I would love to see vendors place limits on memory use in apps. For example, Steam could reject any game over 50gb. I do not believe for a moment that any game we currently have needs more than 50gb except maybe an mmo with 20 years of content. Or Microsoft could reject apps that use more than X ram. They won’t ever do that but without an outright rejection, this won’t be fixed.

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      21 days ago

      The upside to the situation is that electron has been a more successful cross platform development framework then literally anything that came before it, from Xamarin to Java. And it’s entirely based on open source software, and open web standards.

    • alk@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      21 days ago

      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.

    • hedge_lord@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      My gripe with Kate is that whenever I open a file and get an LSP error it displays a pulsing warning notification in the lower left of the window. This might be okay except that I cannot read things if something is moving in my peripheral vision and there is also apparently no way to suppress this pulsing warning notification other than to disable the LSP features entirely. I want to use kwrite because at that point I might as well, but there is a long-standing bug in plasma that causes Kate to be defaulted to over kwrite for some file types despite my preferences!

      I still prefer this to vscode, but I just need to vent a bit

  • tangonov@lemmy.ca
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    21 days ago

    Meanwhile my Linux runtime still boots for 1G and Emacs is looking pretty good right now lol

  • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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    21 days ago

    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

  • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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    21 days ago

    The alternative to Electron not existing is that you have slower developed, clunkier software, that’s buggier and has fewer features.

    There is no magic bullet of being like ‘just code the exact same thing in C’. There are tradeoffs to every development framework.

    • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de
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      21 days ago

      Thank you for saying this. I’m seeing this thinking, have people used native apps recently? They’re not as great as people say. Have they tried coding a UI in a native library instead of the holy HTML CSS JS trifecta? It’s usually fairly miserable and usually extremely non-customizable by comparison.

      All this hating on Electron, hating on UE5, etc. really rubs me the wrong way. Firstly because people talk about optimization and “the good old days” while ignoring that we have completely different requirements these days. The new Witcher game isn’t fucking Quake. It’s gonna use some hardware. What do you want people to do? Implement custom rendering engines for every game? That’s the same as saying you want less games, because most teams literally cannot do that for various reasons, and the same applies to the Electron apps.

      Like, I get it. Things should be optimized. But I feel like “software is unoptimized now” is mostly a meme propagated by tech and gaming YouTubers who don’t really know what they’re talking about, through an audience of wannabes who don’t really know what they’re talking about. People whining about le yandere dev toothbrush!1!1! And le undertale dialogue if statements!1!1!. E.g I remember hearing people saying that because borderlands has a cel-shaded effect it should be cheaper to render - a completely wrong and backwards statement.

      It’s incredible how gamers think they understand rendering technology just because they play a lot of video games. And similarly I don’t like when developers (and probably a lot of non-developers) make a lot of assumptions about other people’s apps. See the complaints about Spotify memory usage. We don’t know anything about how Spotify works internally. There could be an algorithm running to determine which songs to queue up next which is analyzing multiple songs at once, or all sorts of other things. It’s so presumptuous to just look at an app in Task Manager and be like “pathetic, I could do better”, especially if it runs without problems on your device. And maybe it is built with Electron? So what? That just means that you’re paying some RAM in order to get an always updated UI that is matching what you get everywhere else. Like are we just gonna neglect that Electron provides a basically fully homogenous experience across all platforms with no extra code needed? We’re just gonna act like that’s worth nothing? It’s so entitled to say “nooooo I need you to spend an extra $2M/yr paying a Windows 8 UI dev team so that the Windows 8 Native App can have a full ten years of service and it can use 80 MB instead of 1 GB of RAM so that way I can also use this app and 200 other glorious native apps all simultaneously but also I don’t want to pay any more for the product and I don’t care if you’re a solo developer because back in my day solo developers authored papers about their custom algorithms and if you don’t do that but with my new 100x more demanding requirements you’re trash”.

  • zorro@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    rust_analyzer takes 16GB of ram though so good luck actually working on a rust project

    (Semi kidding, the project I work on is very big)

    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      Honestly I can’t imagine a project getting that size unless there are no placeholder assets for visuals. Or if it uses a buttload of local libraries.

  • tempest@lemmy.ca
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    21 days ago

    Bunch of people complaining about electron in this thread but I’m happy it exists.

    Without electron you would get way fewer Linux apps and often no GUI to go with them.

    The RAM usage is high sometimes but I have 128gb and unused RAM is wasted RAM. I don’t care how much something is using until it starts to swap or gets oom.

    • dogs0n@sh.itjust.works
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      21 days ago

      Most people still only have 16gb of ram (like me).

      Electron is net good, but only for small teams that need to ship fast or solo devs etc who already know js and just want something to work.

      Billion dollar companies using it instead of paying more for native apps is a horrible use case (that’s mainly where my complaints live).

      At the very least, I hope we move to something that can use webviews on our system rather than bundling their own which would save on resources (but opens the possibility for version mismatches i guess, I dunno if you can “peg” that sorta stuff to a working version… but i guess thats just how browsers work so…).

  • WormFood@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    the problem isn’t electron, the problem is that A) html is the only truly cross platform UI framework and B) that html (and the web stack in general) has way too many features and is way too complex, because Google’s been bolting features onto it for decades.