I don't find disk space worth optimizing for in 2018. For $2 you can buy a USB Thumbdrive that will hold every Electron app you'll ever use.

Ridiculous. I have a 256 GB hard drive, which is pretty common even on new machines. I’m constantly having to delete stuff to make sure I don’t run out of room. It’s absolutely an issue.

Meh, I have an SSD of similar space, and the only stuff I ever have to delete is old Xcode-related data that refuses to go away. Periodically, some Rust build-related stuff I guess.

The litany of Electron apps don't even come close to being an issue (I arguably have more than the average person, too, thanks to every stupid crypto wallet from the past few years).

tl;dr you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

You assume that how you use a computer is how everyone uses one. Your molehill might be someone else’s mountain.

Mmmm no, this isn't really in line with my comment at all.

I'm hoping you have a 256 GB ssd. In any case lots of bad stuff is common and hoping the universe changes seems like a bad strategy seeing as a 500GB ssd is about $85 and a 500GB hd is like $30.

If you want more future proof a 1TB ssd can be found for around $150.

Unless you're on an Apple laptop. There's no upgrading of the components. And before the "you made the choice" guys start chiming in, some people didn't make that choice. If IT says "Dude, you're getting an Apple", then it is what it is. Just because "hard drives are cheap" is not an excuse to ship bloated software. At some point, the app has the features it is meant to have. At that point, it is a good time to refactor bloated code before proceeding to new features. The bloat will just continue, and eventually cause issues that come to a head.

Sure, but the issue there is the poor value offered by Macs (not hating on Mac, I also use one, but bang for your buck is absurdly low). If you have a non-Mac then you likely have a decent sized hard drive. While electron resource use is not ideal, on modern hardware it really shouldn’t be the issue that it’s being made out to be.

On the practical side, why not do as gp suggests and use an external drive? You’ll likely need additional storage with any of the lower spec’d Macs anyway, electron or not.

Of course I use external storage. USBC->SATA SSD has been amazing. Would love to be able to get a USBC->M.2 for the speed difference. Non-techy people that buy Apple might not though, and they're the ones installing stuff with little concern. It's easy to lose sight of the avg user.

single electron app is not an issue, especially high(ish) quality one (I'm positively surprised by low resource usage of messenger for desktop, I know it loads webapp from the web so local space usage isn't that big but RAM usage is also surprisingly low)

but if you have dozens of these it becomes a struggle even for high end desktops

the moment IT guy tells me that I respond with the letter of resignation

actually I'd do the same with any netbook, but being limited additionally by the OS is even worse

either I get the proper tools or refuse to struggle

That's a bold statement. Especially without knowing the full set of facts. In this case, with your stance, you'd be the only computer in the place not on an Apple device. It's a small video/photography shop. Everyone involved uses a Mac including the freelance guys that get hired.

What exactly are proper tools? I'm designing a set of web-based tools to help their day to day operations. Lots of shell scripting and what not to just allow people to drag-n-drop and automagically get things to happen, consistently. Are you saying that the proper tool to write php/css/js/shell scripts/etc can only be found not on a Mac? I have found the world becomes a much easier place to live in if/when you can just accept what is on hand and get the job done. Could it be better? Possibly. Is this my favorite laptop? Nope. Can I do what I've been tasked with to get it done? Absolutely. I'm actually quite thankful that I'm not a one trick pony and I can use pretty much any OS put in front of me.

I can use mac if I'm forced to do but my sanity is worth more than some extra money I can get doing so

and seriously, using slow and noisy machine with poor multitasking and overall terrible UX WILL slow me down considerably, it's not worth it also for employer

and you know what? I've done it before already and been the happy guy in the office laughing at all the trouble people forced to use macs had

EDIT: ofc if I'd know beforehand that mac is the only option I simply wouldn't apply to that place, there's no reason to make your own work lower quality

Since when can you not upgrade the ssd on an apple laptop?

As of the touchbar version, they’re now soldered on.

Excuse me while I laugh my ass off. Looking at the 15" pro with touchbar to name one model it starts at about $2400 with no upgrades. An upgrade to 512 can be had for $200.

In order to be in your position your company had to simultaneously overpay AND underpay. How can you be so cost conscious that you say nah give them the tiny ssd it costs less while shelling out 2400+ per unit

Why are you blaming us as users for a decision made beyond our control? Yes, we "get it" already, Apple is overpriced. I'm really happy for you that you get to decide what gear you use. Rubbing it other peoples faces really makes it better, so thanks for that.

I'm not blaming you just laughing at the absurdity of the matter not you personally.

Funny way of putting it, yet so true. My employer decided (without asking me) to get me one with 128GB storage. IN 2018!

You’re talking to the wrong guy buddy.

That got a downvote? For telling the other guy he was addressing the wrong user. Ha, it's actually funny.

It's opinions like this that cause first day downloads for new games like Red Dead Redemption 2 to be 55GBs.

In the case of an Electron app disk space might not matter as much, but it's absolutely worth optimizing in 2018, at least because not everyone has high speed connections (e.g. in Germany, a lot of infrastructure is built around DSL, which obviously doesn't get great speeds).

You’re comparing apples to oranges.

3D models vs. app code.

You will be hard pressed to find any Electron app that exceeds 200 MB in disk space. Most are ~50 MB. Overall in 2018 that is not a big concern.

In gaming, high definition graphics are going to result in massively larger files. That’s not going to change anytime soon and no gaming company will prioritize a small download over better graphics.

> You will be hard pressed to find any Electron app that exceeds 200 MB in disk space. Most are ~50 MB.

Huh? Looking at my applications folder right now:

Atom 1.31: 822mb

Daedalus 0.8: 265mb

Mist 0.9.2: 186mb

Neon 0.0.7: 180mb

Patchwork: 185mb

Riot 0.11.4: 160mb

VS Code: 193mb

The electron framework alone is 117mb on MacOS. Honestly, how many copies of that do I need?

If you have 20 such apps, you use 1% of your 250gb SSD (which is on the way low end) on redundant framework copies, with the benefit that the developer gets to test on the version of Electron you are running.

I don't understand why apps don't download an Electron runtime on launch and store it in a shared location. That way, if apps share a required runtime version, only one copy of that version runtime exists.

carlo by Google Chrome team

https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo

Yes I know, and the size of an Electron app versus a AAA game is sometimes 3 orders of magnitude in difference, which is why I pointed out that even a "small" app that's 100MB is still a lot to download on a limited speed connection.

50MB isn't a big of a concern until you realize high quality native app would do it in less than 5 and probably in less than 5% of RAM usage

>It's opinions like this that cause first day downloads for new games like Red Dead Redemption 2 to be 55GBs.

RDR2's size comes from media files (high-resolution textures, models, audio).

Pray-tell, what magic compression technique would you use to do better AND still support 4K textures?

A lot of space in some recent games, truly a bizarre amount has been in some cases dedicated to uncompressed audio.

Given that most people can't tell the difference between high grade mp3 and uncompressed it seems likely that this could be something like mp3.

I suspected you meant lossless, but no, Titanfall literally did include 35GB of uncompressed audio. Their reason was to lower the CPU overhead from decompression, which sounds like nonsense to me.

> Pray-tell, what magic compression technique would you use to do better AND still support 4K textures?

How about downloading textures and movies on demand in the background when you enter new areas? It's not like all that stuff is required for the game to start.

Given 55GB of data and the internet speed the average person has, the fact that most users will ultimately need to load most data, and the fact that a huge mass of users will need the data on day one this seems like a bad strategy.

tbh I'd use configurable installer: download only these assets you'll be using at worst case allow us to set up everything with full version installed and then cleanup

Sure. For the price of increased complexity, you can get something going (and in fact some games do do that, e.g. WoW), but to be clear, you're still downloading 55GB of assets. The game isn't actually any smaller, which is what OP was complaining about.

Also, this is why the big console makers are investing in cloud-consoles.

Hey, that's not fair to RDR2! I actually bought it the day it came out because it _didn't_ have a huge day one patch. I think it was only about 4 GB, which is barely a blip on my ISP's arbitrary data cap. Fallout 76, however, had a patch that was larger than the disc itself, so that was an easy "pass" for me.

Edit: I just checked, and even now that they've added multiplayer to the game (which didn't come on the physical disk), the patch for a new installation of RDR2 is 8 GB. Meanwhile, Fallout 76 is 50 GB and COD:BO4 is 65 GB.