I looked up the numbers out of curiosity. The X1 Carbon has a i7-8650U processor which does about 26 GFlops. The Cray-1, the classic 1976 supercomputer did 130 MFlops. The Cray-1 weighed 5.5 tons, used 115 kW of power, and cost $8 million. The Cray-1 was used for nuclear weapon design, seismic analysis, high-energy physics, weather analysis and so forth. The X1 Carbon is roughly equivalent to 200 Crays and (according to the previous comment) displays animated emojis with some effort. I think there's something wrong with software.

> I think there's something wrong with software.

Amen

Well yes, it's quite noticeably sluggish and bloated on the whole, with even UIs seemingly getting worse over time. Probably doesn't help that everything these days wants to push and pull from multiple networked sources instead of being more self-contained.

That’s because Slack runs on top of basically Chrome, which is a horrible battery hog.

If you run the web versions of Electron “apps” in Safari you’ll get substantially better battery life. (Of course, still not perfect; irrespective of browser all of these types of apps are incredibly poorly optimized from a client-side performance perspective.

If large companies making tools like slack had any respect for their users they would ship a dedicated desktop app, and it would support more OS features while using a small fraction of the computing resources.

(Large-company-sponsored web apps seem to be generally getting worse over time. Gmail for example uses several times more CPU/memory/bandwidth than it used to a few years ago, while simultaneously being much glitchier and laggier.)

Yes, Electron is a bit of a battery hog. But the Slack app itself is horrendous. If you read through their API docs and then try to figure out how to recreate the app, you'll see why. The architecture of the API simply does not match the functionality of the app, so there is constant network communication, constant work being done in the background, etc.

I'll turn your anecdote into an anecdatum and say the same; for all devices I've owned. (Linux on a Precision 5520 w/ Xeon CPU, Macbook pro 15" 2019 model, Mac Pro 2013)

Turn off animated gifs and emojis in slack.

You can do that? /me looks it up... OMG you can do that. Thank you so much!

Why does a CPU running 500+ gigaflops struggle to animate a gif? Is the software stack really that bad?

On my laptop, scrolling through Discord's GIF list can cause Chrome and Discord to hard-lock until I kill the GPU process. Possibly because of a bug in AMD's GPU drivers on Windows.

My anecdote mirrors yours, plus an extra nod towards animated 'gif' wars.

never leave slack in the foreground.