I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.
I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.
It's not just electron apps or browsers, as I'd argue modern .NET apps are almost as bad.
I have an example.
I use Logos (a Bible study app, library ecosystem, and tools) partially for my own faith and interests, and partially because I now teach an adult Sunday school class. The desktop version has gotten considerably worse over the last 2-3 years in terms of general performance, and I won't even try to run it under Wine. The mobile versions lack many of the features available for desktop, but even there, they've been plagued by weird UI bugs for both Android and iOS that seem to have been exacerbated since Faithlife switched to a subscription model. Perhaps part of it is their push to include AI-driven features, no longer prioritizing long-standing bugs, but I think it's a growing combination of company priorities and framework choices.
Oh, for simpler days, and I'm not sure I'm saying that to be curmudgeonly!
I use a browser at home, but I don't use the heaviest web sites. There are several options for my hourly weather update, some are worse than others (sadly I haven't found any that are light weight - I just need to know if it would be a thunderstorm when I ride my bike home from work thus meaning I shouldn't ride in now)
Yr.no [1] is free, and available in English. Thanks to Norway. Apps available as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yr.no
Try Quickweather (with OpenMeteo) if you're on Android. I love it.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.ominous.quickweather/
I'm giving up on weather apps bullshit at this point, and am currently (literally this moment) making myself a Tasker script to feed hourly weather predictions into a calendar so I can see it displayed inline with events on my calendar and most importantly, my watch[0] - i.e. in context it actually matters.
--
[0] - Having https://sectograph.com/ as a watch face is 80%+ of value of having a modern smartwatch to me. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother. I really miss Pebble.
fun fact, you can kill all firefox background processes and basically hand-crash every tab and just reload the page in the morning. I do this every evening before bed. `pkill -f contentproc` and my cpu goes from wheezing to idle, as well as releasing ~8gb of memory on busy days.
("Why don't you just close firefox?" No thanks, I've lost tab state too many times on restart to ever trust its sessionstore. In-memory is much safer.)
Yeah, I found this out the other day when my laptop was toasting. In hindsight, probably related to archive.today or some Firefox extension.
You have to close Firefox every now and then for updates though. The issue you describe seems better dealt with on filesystem level with a CoW filesystem such as ZFS. That way, versioning and snapshots are a breeze, and your whole homedir could benefit.
FWIW: the Tab Stash extension has worked well for me.
Why would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for accessing stuff on someone else’s computer.
The only subscription I have is Spotify, since there's no easy way that I know of to get the discoverability of music in a way that Spotify allows it.
For the rest: I agree with you.
lastfm is still a great way to discover music, countless times I've gotten great recs from a music neighbor.
Plex or Jellyfin client access.
mpv + sshfs is the way.
I kind of hate how the www has become this lowest common denominator software SDK. Web applications are almost always inferior to what you could get if you had an actual native application built just for your platform. But we end up with web apps because web is more convenient for software developers and it's easier to distribute. Everything is about developer convenience. We're also quickly running out of software developers who even know how to develop and distribute native apps.
And when, for whatever reason, having a "desktop application" becomes a priority to developers, what do they do? Write it in Electron and ship a browser engine with their app. Yuuuuuuck!
We have an open, universal application platform. That alone is something to celebrate.
Yeah it's awful. Web apps are slower, they don't integrate well with the system, they are inaccessible if the network is down. A native app has to be truly abysmal to be worse than a web app. But far too many developers simply do not care about making something good any more. There's no pride in one's work, just "web is easier for the developer". And of course the businesses producing software are all about that, because they are run by people with a business ethic of "make the product as cheaply as possible, ignore quality". It's a very sad state of affairs.