Who cares? I've never had performance issues with Slack, Discord and the like. It runs fast enough on my MBP. They could make it faster by removing the casino lights and prompts and upsells, and research other ways to monetize. Electron is not the issue with Discord, it's their constant annoying nagging.

Apps end up being implicitly targeted for performance at a certain level of computer. If your computer is faster than that level (which it seems it is), you won't face any problems. if your computer is slower, you will face problems.

But the kicker is, if everyone buys faster computers, the developers will correspondingly stuff more "features" in there to make it slower so the same number of people are still screwed. This is the recorded history of software engineering.

People playing games trying to squeeze out a few more frames.

A MacBook Pro is one of the most performant possible computers you could try this on. Electron apps are absolutely terrible without those kinds of resources (RAM especially). Keep in mind that Discord is also an app intended to be used by people who are gaming or streaming video as it’s original purpose, so it should be using as little CPU as possible to not interfere with e.g. the game.

Discord takes over 2 seconds to launch for me, which is ridiculous for a mostly text-based app.

In fact, there's almost no electron app that feels good to launch. I care very much about having things I interact with on a daily basis feel quick.

Not everyone is on a Macbook Pro. There is an enormous addressible market of people on lower end devices.

No snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche.

From that angle, sure. But maybe every program running on my machine doesn't need to run a full web browser instance.

Exactly. Most people hating on electron have hundreds of tabs open

Discord runs games inside it now, although it's just a wrapper around a frame for the game it still doesn't help if its heavy.

Me, but also everyone a bit. Almost nobody cares about one of those applications in isolation. You start caring when you get a few of them and run out of ram. Sure, you can run Slack and Discord or something similar at the same time. But once you do, can you comfortably do other work without any visible slowdown? Or is this the threshold for "I need more than 8GB of ram?" You may be spending $ because of decisions like that.

Hot take: We should be able to comfortably run generic office desktops today with 4GB ram. We don't because too many people think "Who cares?"

> They could make it faster by removing the casino lights and prompts and upsells, and research other ways to monetize. Electron is not the issue with Discord, it's their constant annoying nagging.

Amen. I hate Discord, and I loathe that I have to use it just because "gamers" use it and it became the default for video game communities.

Slack used to be a sizable portion of my old business stack on an 8GB X1 Carbon.

Windows doesnt leave you a lot of change from 8GB these days.

I used to have issues as Firefox would open a tab, cap out my available memory and 3cx would start stuttering causing voice issues.

The solution was to move to a carbon with 32GB RAM, but like, I should probably expect more out of Windows/Slack/3CX/Firefox in the first place. Feeding the beast more RAM is no longer a financially viable alternative for a lot of people.