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> then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software.

I really want to like Zulip Chat. It has everything all the alternatives have + self-hosting, but as soon as they switched to their Electron client, it has become yet another resource hog that I have to put up with.

I already have to put up with 10+ electron apps slowing down my Macbook. I shouldn't have to make space for another to do the same.

4 comments

> as soon as they switched to their Electron client, it has become yet another resource hog that I have to put up with.

FWIW I use Zulip every day -- I work on Zulip, and naturally we use it among ourselves -- and I never touch the Electron client, because I prefer the experience of a browser tab.

Chrome's task manager (shift-esc) reports that tab is using 281M right now. Less than Gmail, or some old GitHub tabs (>1G, yikes!), or a freshly-started VS Code (... oh wow, or my Emacs which is at 337M. Wasn't expecting that.) Not sure how that compares to the Electron app.

As another reply pointed out, there is also a terminal client! You might enjoy trying it: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal

There's a terminal client for it: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal

Zulip desktop is working to move from a electron's webview to Browserview. Slack has completed that migration and seems to have received a good control on its memory usage after that. Hopefully, once Zulip migrates it stops being a resource hog.

10+ electron apps seems excessive, what other Electron apps are you running? I think Slack is the only one I'm running (that I know of)

Well, on my Macbook I still have Slack (Since work colleges still use it) and I use Discord, Trello, Keybase, VS Code, Dropbox for Mac, Ledger Live, Skype, InVision Studio, Framer and Nylas Mail.

I just migrated off of and removed Atom, GitKraken and Github Desktop to only use VS Code but I don't think I am able to open Chrome or Firefox without it swapping out to my SSD. I have to kill two or three other apps to recover my RAM usage just to stop the constant freezing when using either browser. After sometime browsing the internet, I see a list of swap-files everywhere and eventually I run out of space.

So when I see another Electron app to use instead of Slack, I usually avoid it and I try to find another usable alternative if I can.

I run VSCode, Slack, Discord, GitHub, and my company's own app. There are others out there that I would use but my memory pressure is already too high.

Plenty of popular project management / task-tracking tools are very memory heavy too, and also so slow to load that one's reluctant to close their tab(s). Plus if I close them I sometimes have trouble finding WTF I need again. Jira, Asana, both major offenders. Can easily eat many hundreds of MB of memory. It's entirely fucking absurd for what they do and the content they deal with. Harsh (and harsher) language justified.

While don't have any info or even anectada about the other, JIRA is even more bloated on the server side - we had JIRA hosted on premises and it was used mainly for tasks and tickets in a team of 5 people. This "metric" (team size) limits the amount of tasks/tickets that would be processed. Anyway, the JIRA itself needed 2 cores and 8 GB of ram just for that. This is really even beyond absurd.

I would guess from my experience with my colleagues that they're running at a minimum vscode and some kind of electron git app.

I only use Electron apps if I like them too much or if they're unavoidable. The only two I have running all the time are Slack and InVision.