
GitHub Rewrites Its Desktop Client Using Electron - geodel
https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/05/github-electron-desktop-client
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Hydraulix989
Sigh. Yet another native desktop app I will now have to stop using on my
laptop in order to get any kind of decent battery life off the grid. Having
Electon.JS apps open effectively halves my battery usage in Linux. Each one is
a separate Chrome instance, and Chrome uses considerably more power than
Firefox (we're talking multiple watts).

When I'm on the go and want my Lenovo P50 mobile workstation laptop to last an
entire cross-country flight so I can get work done (a real use case), I have
to use Slack web client, Sublime instead of VS Code, Firefox instead of
Chrome, and manually close out of a whole bunch of less important Electron
apps (Discord, Gitter, Skype, Upwork, Spotify, Atom, etc.), and only then will
powertop show an acceptable < 20W of power draw instead of close to 30 W with
all of the Electron apps open, allowing my laptop to have five hours of
battery life instead of two, which means it will last the whole flight.

I still have a bunch of native Linux desktop apps that I prefer to use to this
very day that are fast, responsive, and don't make my laptop's fans sound like
a leaf blower while failing to prevent the heated chassis from scorching my
lap.

Devs don't let other devs use Electron -- as a real alternative, consider
using the wxWidgets cross-platform native GUI app framework (with its myriad
language bindings) so that you can have a single code base that supports all
of the major platforms.

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dirtylowprofile
I agree, what's up with all these Electron apps. Based on memory usage
currently, Skype is using 245MB, Slack is using 312MB and Spotify at 233MB.
While Telegram is only using 78MB. And I have more active chats on Telegram
too.

~~~
jabl
> While Telegram is only using 78MB

My irssi seems to be using an order of magnitude less than that, 7.8 MB RSS.

Get off my lawn! :-/

(Yes, irc is unencrypted, but still...)

~~~
flukus
> 7.8 MB RSS.

It's as bloated as emacs!

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flukus
Why does github need a desktop client at all? Multiple git clients exist for
all platforms, many of which are better than the github client ever was. If
they can't afford to maintain multiple versions why don't they just maintain
none?

Or do the third party clients not provide enough vendor lockin?

~~~
stephenr
> Or do the third party clients not provide enough vendor lockin?

Ding ding ding we have a winner.

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lioeters
It's wonderful that they open-sourced the whole thing. I will enjoy studying
it: [https://github.com/desktop/desktop/](https://github.com/desktop/desktop/)

Great to see in the interview: "We’re having many good conversations about
improving Electron."

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menckenjr
One more reason to ditch it in favor of ye olde command line.

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vfclists
Still no Linux client?

