Spotify using several processes and GB of memory just play some music and browse a library is an abomination. WinAMP did most of that 20 years ago while using a fraction of the resources.
Discord similarly is an affront.
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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don't worry, this will all be solved now with incompetent vibe-coders, just give it a while
or you will look back to this with a nostalgic tear in the eye. one of these.
I run those thing in the browser, where they belong.
If you have premium, there's probably a better native client.
Same here. At first, I thought I was going to get a better Discord experience with the dedicated 'app'. Nope. Another web app crammed into Electron, multiplying the overall browser footprint on my system. It now happily lives on in a normal browser tab where my ad blockers and user-scripts claw back local control of things.
If you have Spotify Premium, try a third party client. Even GUI clients like Spotify-qt are memory light [though not at feature parity] whilst terminal clients like ncspot, spotify-player take 1/10th the memory. The latter even supports Spotify connect.
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Lutris is impressive when it comes to game launchers and RAM efficiency, especially when compared to the ones using Electron.
Kinda depressing what numbers are considered impressive these days.
Jesus Christ, Steam at 1.4 GB and you are expected to run that WHILE PLAYING GAMES? That made my eyes pop outta my head.
There's no way that's normal. I'm pretty sure mine only uses a couple hundred.
Who knows, maybe this dram scarcity will cause a change of heart and make people optimise more again. :)
The bubble will pop before that
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For real, I remember when an entire game being over a 20 MiB made me hesitate to download it because it'd take a while.
The Half Life demo was 50MB. Took me 4 tries to get it over dialup. Played till the sun came up!
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I remember the stories my father told me of his early dev days... "so the mainframe we wrote the whole national social security system for had 8K of RAM".
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Nobody's mentioning the system monitor taking 227MiB?
Atom was kinda revolutionary in its plugin support and everything IIRC.
Well, now that Atom has been replaced by VSCode, which is also an electron app, the original Atom devs, or at least some of them, are creating Zed. Zed's written in Rust and uses a lot less memory.
Of course it's not yet as mature and they're trying to earn money by integrating AI and selling that as a service. BUT the AI is voluntary and even if you do want to use it, you don't have to pay to use their AI (which comes with a free tier if you DO want to use it), you can literally run your own model in ollama.
It's not perfect, but I love how little RAM it uses compared to VSCode and (shudders) the Jetbrains suite (which I normally love, but hate the RAM and CPU usage, it can drive my computer pretty slow)
still have the patch they sent for people who published packages. I made a theme no one but me used but still! Pre microsoft github was cool
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It has become my favorite editor, even though I don't need or want the AI stuff. They do something that I do quite appreciate, that I wish other apps (looking at you, Firefox) would do:
In the AI section of the settings, the first thing is a toggle that turns off all AI features.
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They also developed their own Rust UI library and open-sourced it.
Didn't Sublime Text come before Atom?
it did, but this is about electron, which isn't relevant to sublime. sublime's plugins mechanism is a little different from atom, which is much more like emacs
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It's kind of an abomination when VsCode, supposed to be a lighter IDE, runs like dogshit compared to JetBrains, a fuckin' Java based IDE. Since when was Java light on RAM?
(Caveat: I haven't directly compared their memory usage, my experience is in very difference codebases for each)
Lmao this is quite frankly, horseshit, upvoted by people who have never used an IDE.
VScode is lightweight, snappy, and fast to open. VSCodium gives you all of that without any of the Microsoft. And even runs in a web browser.
It's not "horseshit" - I gave you a caveat precisely so that you can understand the limitations of my comparison, and so that you don't need to be so antagonistic.
lightweight
I launched VSCode fresh this morning. Just now, 4 hours later, I closed it and watched my system memory usage: 1.3GB. I am doing remote development, so there's a whole server process as well which is chomping a few GB. My old laptop repeatedly ground to a halt until the OOM killer woke up/I rebooted as its measly 32GB of RAM couldn't cope with two VSCode sessions (plus other normal apps) after a while.
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Kate my beloved
My gripe with Kate is that whenever I open a file and get an LSP error it displays a pulsing warning notification in the lower left of the window. This might be okay except that I cannot read things if something is moving in my peripheral vision and there is also apparently no way to suppress this pulsing warning notification other than to disable the LSP features entirely. I want to use kwrite because at that point I might as well, but there is a long-standing bug in plasma that causes Kate to be defaulted to over kwrite for some file types despite my preferences!
I still prefer this to vscode, but I just need to vent a bit
Meanwhile my Linux runtime still boots for 1G and Emacs is looking pretty good right now lol
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And here I was thinking this was about emacs and lisp. Yougster complaining about not knowing how to quit Vi smh they have never experienced the horrors of emacs
Linux wins again. Still runs on same hardware as 10 years ago. :) No forced updates by any big corp.
Electron apps are on Linux too
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NodeJS is worse. One dude just had to write a cli based JavaScript runtime and holy hell now entire backends run on the least performant runtime possible.
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Scintilla my beloved
(This is the text editor component in Geany and Notepad++)
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