Oh what a lovely cycle. Every dev knows 16gb is the new 8gb so sure, why not have every desktop app consist of 20 independent webview/node processes. Can't wait until 32gb is the new 16gb.

Eventually, when every single desktop app is like this, and we can no longer keep shoving more RAM into computers, we'll realise that the only way to manage such hogs is to pickle background apps to disk Android-style and to just have one foreground app in memory. And that's when we'll all realise we might as well switch to Chrome OS. Well played, web devs, Google says thanks.

Or maybe Electron is a conspiracy by someone heavily invested in RAM production?

32 is already the new 16.

Too many devs are on MacBooks and Apple doesn't even offer a 32 GB option yet. It sounds like Intel will close the gap soon and we'll see it in the next year or two though. Maybe 32 will be the new 16 by then?

That's horrifying.

That's progress.

That's regression. Despite having vastly more memory than 20 years ago I'm not getting anything more done with it.

What OS were you using in 1997? I believe I was using Windows 95 then and was definitely getting a lot less done with it.

RAM is harmless. Even the most inept developers would struggle to waste as much of it as Slack Desktop.

No, the real casualty in this cycle have been spinning rust, good old hard disks. Their performance was never great but a sure fire way to kill it and make sure it never recovers is to trigger a full fucking unthrottled index scan at every boot that inevitably finds nothing changed. Looking at you Dropbox.

But all the fancy stuff still doesn't work, it's mostly just fluff. (NB: I don't use VS Code or Atom and the Slack App on Linux has literally zero upsides for me vs a pinned desktop chrome bookmark or using nativefier, screenhero still misses features.)

Spotify, Slack, and Atom work fine for me, though slack is probably the most annoying one on all platforms. Atom is far from fluff in terms of functionality, but it's fine if you don't use it.

the fluff was obviously directed at slack and other "apps that are just bundled websites" - I see that an editor is something different (and I do use VS Code on Windows at times, but not very often)

> RAM is pretty cheap

Everything is cheap when you have a high salary even by your rich country's standards. There are other users outside of SV.

I paid for Sublime Text because to me it's better than the editors you mention.

I rather put money towards responsible developers than contributing to the waste of more computing power and more electricity than Bitcoin wastes, while doing basically nothing over what Sublime Text can do.

I mean, if there were no other way to code a text editor I could accept the idea of Atom. But with faster alternatives, it is just an exercise in consumerism. Wasting computing power for the sake of wasting computing power.

It's the rolling coal of computers.

> RAM is pretty cheap

There are many laptops which have fairly low total system RAM limits. Those in our workplace are 4GB and 8GB for example. Once you hit that limit the cheapness of RAM is irrelevant.