If you want things to work every single time on a billion different devices this is how you do it.

▲ titzer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, and then 100 different apps can repackage the browser engine as an Electron app, each weigh 300+mb.

I saw this recently with Balena etcher. It's a firmware flashing app with about 10 buttons total. It's over 400mb because it's written in node and has an electron GUI.

Good jerb.

▲ encom an hour ago | parent [-]

When your flashing app starts getting bigger than the operating systems it's writing, you should start asking yourself some questions.

  ~$ du -h $(which dd)
  76K     /usr/bin/dd

Etcher truly is the clowniest Electron app of them all.

	▲	mort96 33 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Better and similar size: `$ du -h $(which pv) 116K /usr/bin/pv` pv has a progress bar and nicer syntax. Next time you need to write an image, try: `sudo pv -Yo /dev/blah /path/to/your/image.img` The -Y makes it sync after each write so that the progress bar represents actual progress instead of just how fast you can copy to kernel write buffers. My life improved measurably after I contributed that '-o' flag to pv and it then made its way into all my systems through regular OS updates :)
	▲	titzer 32 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Long live dd! Except every time I use it I am terrified I'll blow out the brains of the wrong device :/ Another example clown app: the MacOS downloads of TuxGuitar, a Java app, used to just ship as a zip with a big jar in it. Now it ships an entire Java Runtime environment specific to your processor architecture. It's 480MB. Derp.