Both devices are laptops. The old one had regular cleanups with a compressed air can. The new one is… new. I never cleaned it, but I figure it doesn’t require any cleaning one month in (I don’t live in the desert nor in a mine).

The new one is a thick thinkpad with a fat heat sink and dual fans. Its cooling solution looks much more serious than the old one, which only had a tiny heat sink and a single fan. It was also thinner.

I have no issues with browsers specifically having to use a bunch of resources. They are complicated as fuck software, basically it's own operating system. Same for video games or programs that do heavy data processing.

The issue is with applications that have no business being entitled to large amount of resources. A chat app is a program that runs in the background most of the time and is used to sporadic communication. Same for music players etc. We had these sorts of things since the 90's, where high end consumer PCs hat 16mb RAM.

The issue isn't usage, it's waste. Every byte of RAM that's used unnecessarily because of bloated software frameworks used by lazy devs (devs who make the same arguments you're making) is a byte that can't be used by the software that actually needs it, like video editing, data processing, 3D work, CAD, etc. It's incredibly short sighted to think that any consumer application runs in a vacuum with all system resources available to it. This mindset of "but consumers have so much RAM these days" just leads to worse and worse software design instead of programmers actually learning how to do things well. That's not a good direction and it saddens me that making software that minimizes its system footprint has become a niche instead of the mainstream.

tl;dr, no one is looking for their RAM to stay idle. They're looking for their RAM to be available.

"chrome uses 2gb of ram"

these days individual _tabs_ are using multiple gb of ram.

The web browser on my phone instantly gets killed the moment I switch to another app because it eats up so much ram.

The people I trust to give good security recommendations (e.g., the leader of the Secureblue project) tell me I should completely avoid Electron (at least on Linux) because of how insecure it is. E.g., the typical Electron app pulls in many NPM packages, for which Electron does zero sandboxing.

I think it's a correlation vs causation type thing. Many Electron apps are extremely, painfully, slow. Teams is pretty much the poster child for this, but even spotify sometimes finds a way to lag, when it's just a freaking list of text.

Are they slow because they're Electron? No idea. But you can't deny that most Electron apps are sluggish for no clear reason. At least if they were pegging a CPU, you'd figure your box is slow. But that's not even what happens. Maybe they would've been sluggish even using native frameworks. Teams seems to do 1M network round-trips on each action, so even if it was perfectly optimized assembly for my specific CPU it would probably make no difference.