story
This isn't the 90s, we live in the future.
Pretty much every file I use daily is always in my disk cache, but they won't all fit there if I run a bunch of electron apps.
Besides, with SSDs and NVMe your experience loading data from disk is plenty fast. Again, this is the future; I/O isn’t the bottleneck it once was.
My view is backed up by the fact that people do exactly this, with great success. The complaint about memory is not reflective of the typical user experience.
I use 5-7 Electron apps on a daily basis and not even once have I had anything resembling memory issues. Nothing gets slow, nothing becomes unusable.
Memory most definitely is a previous resource.
If you round, approximately zero users of Electron apps know how to do what you’re talking about, and yet they continue to successfully use Electron apps across a variety of platforms.
The fact that you have to finely manage your system’s memory is a you thing, not an Electron thing. The two are entirely orthogonal.
Memory is not a precious resource, no matter how much you want to live in a world where your obsessive compulsion to manage it is reasonable.
I only care about managing my memory because the consequences of running out of free memory are severe. Linux as shipped by mainstream distros is quite happy to start filling swap (with attendant kswapd CPU usage) when there's multiple gigabytes of pointless inode/dentry cache to evict.
Both of these are problems that simply don't exist on Windows and MacOS. Windows because it doesn't pretend half of my system RAM is useful cache, MacOS because it does compression out of the box and doesn't appear to be so aggressive.
Linux is not good for desktop environments for exactly the reasons you outline here (and many more). It’s not Electron’s fault you’ve used the wrong tool for your desktop OS.
