Honest answer: medical imaging. If your data doesn't fit into ram, it's a right royal pain in the arse, and being able to do linear algebra on huge, 14-dimensional datasets and seeing if the final result actually looks like the inside of a person in real time as you fiddle with the code is a huge plus.

And yes, Gnome is still sometimes completely unresponsive...

Very cool. Is it all CPU-based or can you leverage GPGPU for that? My linear algebra is admittedly a bit rusty, but I would have imagined that GPUs would do very well in applications like that.

For me everything became much more responsive when I switched to KDE. It seems like GNOME doesn't play well with Linux buggy graphics driver.

Electron apps

While i do think your answer is funny, I don't think it belongs on Hacker News (no mean to offend).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

You know I have so much mixed feelings about Electron apps.

One one had, the performance really sucks.

On the other, there's no way we would've had Spotify, Slack, Teams, and all these big apps supported on Linux.

Like this dude said [1]

Electron app memory usage: 150 MB

Native app memory usage: 0 MB (because you never ship it)

1: https://twitter.com/jamonholmgren/status/1105876480930734086

150 MB RSS of a single worker process (out of typically 4+)? Did the dude at least try running `free -h` before and after starting any Electron application? Multiple that by at least 5 and you're somewhat closer to the truth.

In my experience, the performance of Electron Apps is even worse than WINE.

I second this. WINE is fast in comparison.

Wine Is Not an Emulator ;-)

But seriously -- wine should have equal performance to running a program "natively" on windows because it essentially is running the program natively, just with different system DLLs that call back to the linux kernel instead of the NT executive.

Their implementation may be slightly slower in places, but it's not a problem inherent to Wine itself, and could always be fixed.

I know there's a stigma against running win32 apps on linux, and possibly rightly so, but there really isn't a reason why Wine couldn't be a legitimate runtime environment for linux. You can make 100% open source software that targets Wine, and never needs to use or link to proprietary software.

Wine has even been ported to architectures where there have never been native windows ports, like the ppc64le port of Wine.

(Wine/win32's binary interface is also easier to intercept and automatically translate/emulate calls for non-native architectures, which is the basis of WoW64 and x86 on ARM emulation, and in Wine land, projects like Hangover https://github.com/AndreRH/hangover )

> wine should have equal performance to running a program "natively" on windows

That is not guaranteed. Windows programs and Win32 APIs are writting for and optimized to run on the the NT kernel which has different perfomance characteristics from the Linux kernel. Some example:

- Wine needs to emulate a case-insensitive filesystem on top of a case sensitive filesystem, which is less efficient thatn using a filesystem / kernel FS layer that is designed for this.

- Some locking primitives are different enough that Linux will need additional syscalls to let Wine reach the same perfomance when emulating the Windows ones [0]

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FUTEX2-2...

Hmm, the filesystem thing would be a constant slowdown, and there is the locking/async primitives that are generally better on Windows, but at least those are being worked on, both for Wine and Linux in general. I kind of recall reading about an option for ext4 to allow optional case insensitive operation? Ah! Recently added it seems. Needs a pretty recent kernel and a format-time config option that I doubt any linux distro is using yet, though [0]

I just meant that, in general, Wine should be very close to as fast on Windows, since it can usually implement win32 DLLs without much emulation/translation needed. Excepting all the bits that do :-)

[0] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/usin...

Now that it is becoming easier to run linux on windows and maybe macos, linux dev should make an effort to guarantee linux apps run REALLY fine on window and mac. That way instead of creating 3 native apps (win, mac and linux), you could simply target linux.

This won't work - developers will always target the biggest platform first and then complain that it takes to much work adapt the program to more portable APIs.

The people that need to make sure Linux apps run REALLY fine on windows and macos are windows and Apple.

> Spotify

If the app had only essential features, it could have functioned well on web.

Back when Russian Facebook rival vk had an unlimited offering of pirated music, their music player on the web was the best. You have a list of songs, a search bar, and play/pause.

Nowadays Spotify web client takes a second or two to register mouse click. This is just sad.

"a second or two"

Whenever that happens, I just start doing "4 billion... 8 billion... 12 billion"

We waste soooo much horsepower.

They would have worked just fine on the web, and then some of those 150mb would be shared between all of them at least. I mean, we are talking glorified chat apps and music players, not 3d imagery or physics simulation. They even integrate pretty poorly (or not at all) with desktop systems, so really the whole Electron thing is just sad and often pointless.

At least users on other operating systems suffer as much as we do.