Good to see. Electron is trash for a few reasons.
How will this affect the vesktop users
Discord is as much spyware as anything else. Its efficiency in using my computer’s resouces in order to log everything about me, build a dossier on me and sell me out at every opportunity is not a consideration, as I view it as something to be avoided like Meta, et al.
That said, Electron does suck.
Anything else? Nah bro. It’s as much spyware as Google chat or Whatsapp… But Matrix, XMPP, mumble, etc are not spyware (sure, if your host is the CIA maybe, but with these software you can be your own host if you want. No spying guaranteed.)
I think that the headline says more about Electron than it does about Rust.
Even the guys who invented Electron (developers of the Atom text editor) stopped using it years ago and switched to Rust when writing their new editor, Zed, and its UI framework GPUI (which Discord will be using too).
Yeah exactly. “Just” 240 MB, it’s still a lot for a glorified chat app
240 is quite little considering how much media there’s in it
Windows 98 required far less disk space and was a complete operating system - that is if you consider Win98 an operating system…
Perhaps it’s vibecoded slop?
Anything new coming from any non-bootstrapped company is likely slop, and even the bootstrapped deserve a second look
Rust apps seem to always be on the heavy side, maybe depends how much debug info they leave in
Indeed, they’re probably shipping a backtrace symboliser, and since there’s no system-wide equivalent of libc to link against, they’ll be including the entire Rust standard library with the binary too.
My other hunch is the Krisp noise cancellation ML model is a huge chunk of the memory footprint.
Why are people on Lemmy using discord?
It’s actually really difficult to get your friends to switch over little things like ‘being a spy platform’, and ‘leaking tens of thousands of users private information’.
Someone at work with much more political power, and much less knowledge of how dangerous surveillance capitalism is, insists on using it 'cause they use it all the time and it’s functional.
:(
To easily chat and stream with friends
Things I want are held hostage on Discord. If I want to play Motorstorm online, I look at the fan server channel and it has real time lobby stats and chat rooms to get some games going. Just an example. My friends usually use Steam for voice chat.
People probably voice chat with their friends, I don’t think Lemmy has that feature?
I also use it for socializing. Basically a collection of giant instant messaging groups.
It’s a mainstream platform, so many non-Lemmy people are still there.
Besides, it’s always worth the praise when someone makes good technical decisions that benefit users.
Desire?
man I love that they are ditching electron but, they “just” fixed the discord linux client to properly update and now they are rehauling it? can’t wait to get this update 3 years from now.
It’s great, but I wonder what happens with the linux client? There is no mention of it in the article.
Do we get optimized native client or is that too much work if they don’t have universal framework anymore?
Marketing director of Discord on Reddit says linux will have a native client.
They are using GPUI. Rust native UI framework from the Zed IDE team. I think the creator of Zed is the one who created Electron in the first place, then left. I’m not sure though.
So it should be cross platform
It’s a bold strategy. “Electron sucks! Let’s see what else these people made”.
But seriously, why do I need GPU acceleration for my chat UI?
But seriously, why do I need GPU acceleration for my chat UI?
Because rendering things is quite literally the reason GPUs exist, it takes load off the CPU and is more efficient at it to boot.
Do you like having battery?
It’s a video player. You want GPU acceleration.
What video? 99.99479% of my Discord experience is text.
A lot of people talk and stream to their friends. If I only needed a text app, I would not use discord at all.
You ever use a Swiss Army knife to open a letter? It’s a lot of extra shit you don’t need but it’s there anyways.
