24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

On the one hand, for software that's not complete garbage in terms of optimization (scientific software, video/audio software, games, my own code) the difference is staggering, I hadn't felt a change this drastic since I moved from Pentium 1 to Pentium 3. On the other hand, I now know that there is no amount of resources that will make a modern web browser or Electron app run well.

The good news is that now that I feel I deserve good performance I've made an effort to get rid of most of the crap. Apart from disabling JS etc. by default and blocking everything I possibly can I have no solution for the browsers, sadly, but everything else is gone. The Thinkpads all run minimalistic Arch Linux setups and mostly work as thin clients, so overall every system I use is snappy and responsive, for the first time in a decade. I shouldn't have needed a hardware upgrade to return to common sense in computing, but it is good to know that with some discipline and a low tolerance for garbage it is still (mostly) possible to have a reasonable computing experience. Now, if only there was a usable browser out there...

In my case it was actually being triggered by a piece of monitor management software that came with the LG ultrawide monitor that I use. No significant CPU load, no memory issues, plenty of cores in an older HP workstation with a Xeon Processor, 48 gig of RAM and a Samsung SSD. When that display management software was running a text editor couldn't even keep up with displaying text as it was typed.

Edit: rereading some of the original 2 articles, yeah, I'm not going to be running the same kinds of tests - even if I did it'd take too long to develop the knowledge base to be able to interpret my results adequately.

Again, this is the developer's perspective. As a user, I don't care at all how many others use my email client or text editor. What's more important to me is that it doesn't suck, especially on my personal computer which isn't quite as tricked out as the computer I use at work.

My point is as previously stated: there are multiple perspectives on this. For me as a user there is absolutely no benefit to the developer using Electron. I don't care if it took a million man years to put together; I care about my own resources. I'm not arguing with your perspective, just arguing that it's just that, one perspective, and that users aren't "looking at the wrong thing" when they complain about the result being crap.

> At the same time, I really don't see other viable options at this point in time.

Electron is five years old. Surely, developing a cross platform application was viable before that? Seems like an ironic statement considering that the larger part of Electron is Chromium, a cross platform GUI application predating Electron. There are plenty of libraries and frameworks that abstract OS specific stuff with regards to GUI, networking, file system handling etc.

> I'm curious though, is there something you would recommend instead that meets these requirements with a single codebase (~90% shared code): target all major platforms (macOS, Windows, Linux) and target all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, IE), (edit: and how could I forget, all major phone browsers) with nearly identical UI/UX?

For one, your web app could be just that: a web app. There's no reason to have multiple copies of chromium running and littering your disk when you already have a browser.

Second, these UIs that look consistent across all platforms probably make the designers happy, but for the user (or at least me, personally) it is better if the interface is consistent with the design conventions of the platform it's running on.

But no, I don't really have an alternative to suggest if those are your goalposts. Targeting multiple platforms is just one of those things you have to suffer through with some consideration if you don't want your application to be a bloated webapp-bundled-with-a-browser.