This attitude is dumb, people don't just have one thing open on their machine at a time.

If you're designing software like a music player (that is, something people are likely to want to keep running in the background while doing other things), you're just giving people a reason to switch to something else by taking up a bunch of memory carelessly, as it'll be one of the first things to go when the user needs the memory.

I just went to amazon and typed in "windows laptop". The first two listed had 4gig ram

In order it was 4,4,16,8,16,4,8,16,4,16,32,8,16,4,32

9 of them were under $300

My dad had some really crap HP Celeron desktop. I don't remember it if had 4gig or more but I do remember it took 3 to 4 minutes of swapping continuously just to boot up and run all the crapware that HP had launch on startup in Windows.

That said, I'm not anti-electron. Here's some native app sizes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44690856

The overwhelming number of personal computing devices in active use are <4GiB of ram, and with operating systems following your reasoning too: less and less is available for applications.

Stop being greedy, even if it existed as you say, externalising your development cost by having higher runtime requirements is a mild form of resource exploitation for profit.

This might sound contradictory, but I agree with you. 300 MB is nothing!

Problem is, when the music player takes 500 (let's be honest those 300 were probably just a cold-start and before actually doing anything with it), the collaboration chat app takes another <let me check...> 650 MB (Slack right now for me), the profile loader I need for work is <checking again...> another 400. The text editor is 510 MB (VSCode, and still that is a well engineered and optimized Electron marble). The Pomodoro timer, 300 MB.

And on top of that I'm supposed to do my actual work! All that junk is stealing memory that should be available to Visual Studio and compiling my huge code base.

Hopefully we don't end up with Electron calculators, calendars, email clients, file browsers, and image editors, because those things also tend to be open long term in my desktop (which right now I can do without any second thought about being able to, because they are all properly done as decently optimized GUIs)

Except 8 GB of ram is really more like 3 because Windows uses 5 to do nothing. And then Chrome uses a couple more gigs. And then Lord have mercy if you have outlook.

So that's, like, two programs open and were already running out of memory.

Missing the point. When developers dont have to give a shit about resource usage it can become a problem. When every app is using way more ram/memory than necessary it starts to add up.

This is why modern programs and games can barely run on modern hardware in many circumstances. There is no incentive for devs to be efficient.

It's not one program using a lot of memory. It's 45 of them all using way more than they need to. It adds up.

I have 48gb of ram and memory consumption issues.

How are you burning up silicon by using your memory? If anything you're wasting more silicon by making low-density RAM modules.

Sounds totally reasonable to me. I'm running ten windowed applications and they're still leaving 87.5% of my RAM available for other things? No problem there.

Modern OS's handle it just fine.

Paying for RAM and having it sit around doing nothing is stupid.

It must no longer be launching an entire container just for it then.

It took a few seconds to launch too. It was possible to uninstall the snap and install the deb, fixing all these issues, but it wasn’t the default, and I gave up on Ubuntu around that time.