When can we expect discord not to take 20-30 seconds to launch on a $5000 PC? What exactly is it doing, recompiling the client from source using a single core each time it opens?
It needs to download the 20 distinct update patches that they added in the past 4 hours, in series, all of which combine to together change the actual product in precisely no way whatsoever.
The deb file probably contains new versions of electron (or at least versions of electron that change the actual v8/chrome version) and the regular updates during launch are loading JavaScript. Just a guess.
Flatpak and its ilk are a scourge that should be avoided. I don’t want to have to install another package management system when apt is right there. Moreover, I like apt precisely because it has in-depth knowledge about everything in the system. If I install something from source, it’s a careful decision, and I know the tradeoffs. With things like Flatpak, that line is blurred.
While I think you might be missing out, I totally respect your preferences. For the longest time it was also my preference.
In my case, ultimately, paranoia has won. :)
How much do you really trust discord? Or games on steam, or slack, or zoom client?
Flatpak does provide you, out of the box, with a sandbox for whole discord app. Sandbox is built on standard linux stuff like bubblewrap / seccomp / namespaces. This should prevent discord from, for example, accessing anything other than ~/Downloads (rw), ~/Pictures (ro) and so on. Or seeing what other processess are running on my pc. Or snooping in my ~/.ssh.
Some stuff might not work out of box and will require reading app's README or wiki. I imagine stuff like "john is listening to song - artist" would require additional permission or configuration. File sharing could be complicated if, for example, discord could not access my screenshots directory. Webcam, voice and screen sharing work out of box but are protected by "portals" provided by (in my case) KDE.
Discord, for example, does not pollute my /usr or /home. It stays somewhere in /var/lib/flatpak/ and keeps my user files in ~/.var/app/$APPNAME. Steam, Slack, all other "big proprietary apps" also keep their stuff in ~/.var/app/$APPNAME. It's not really a choice for them; flatpak just mounts proper directories in proper places and it works really well.
You can use `nsenter --target $PID --pid --net --mount --ipc` and look around to what kind of access flatpak apps have to your system.
Sorry about preaching, I just like that bit of additional separation from stuff I don't really want to trust or care about.
Take a few minutes to learn how it works then. Flatpak doesn't replace apt, which is a system package manager. Flatpak is for standalone apps, like Discord.
? Apt doesn’t require you to install from source? It’s not even its default behavior?
Flatpak provides basic level of sandboxing that ensures non-malicious stupid stuff like how steam had a bug to delete the entire user directory doesn’t actually impact you.
Beyond that, discord probably won’t solve issues with the N package managers if something happens. They’re a lot more likely to solve a Flatpak problem though.
I meant that if I deviate from apt (e.g. I want a newer version of something than what the repo has), I carefully consider what ramifications compiling and installing something from source may have on the stability of the system, which likely shares many of the same libraries.
Much of this is just grumbling. I love Debian, hate Ubuntu, and think things shouldn’t change a lot.
This is why I tend to use flatpack browsers. Access to download to Downloads folder is really all they need on my system (for my needs, needs may vary by users)
I mute every "server" permanently, disable all "mentions" (@here, @role, etc) and it stays quiet except for DMs. If there's something I want to see I'll go look in a channel.
I have applied the same measures as GP; if it is interesting/important enough, I will find it manually. (Similarly, I am an administrator of a public server; I regularly remind regulars and other admins that I'll only get notified from DMs.)
For announcement channels that I'm feeling more certain I don't want to miss: I created a server for myself with a channel that has subscriptions to all the announcement channels that I want to be notified about (I also check this manually, but at least it is a custom-tailored feed just for me).
There is no coping with the (..checks Discord..) "4k+" outstanding notifications (and counting) that I am bombarded with. Slightly ironic that the Discord interface can't even be bothered to tell me the exact count; I'm not going to bother.
It used to amuse me to see people complain about @everyone tags. The commonality of it leaves me desensitized these days.
The channels with no activity remain grey instead of white. It's important to me that I discover messages when I have some downtime and am interested in so-called discovery, as opposed to having junk interrupt my flow at times when I am not.
Loads less than a second for me using the website. I'm just on a 1st gen Mac Mini M1 w/ Chrome. I mainly use Discord for MidJourney, it has always been smooth.
Are there any benefits/features to using their Electron desktop app?
I generally find that it's easier to interact with AV devices (webcams, microphones) on the desktop app, than when having to deal with a browser's opinions. It also separates it from your browser, which might be desirable if you keep a bunch of tabs and don't want them open in the background.
I use either option in different circumstances, they're both comparably fine.
It almost never is. While HN contrarians endlessly complain about it, the rest of the world happily ships Electron. Discontent with Electron is so comically over represented here that I'm beginning to think it's an insecurity or complex or something.
In my experience, some regular users also dislike the UX of websites as applications, and that's what Electron apps are. They feel heavier than native software, the UI elements tend to redraw and jump around unexpectedly, and the keyboard response is noticeably slower.
You can recognize them because they dislike the feel without even knowing what's an electron app. I can vouch they're not insecure about Electron.
Only if using DOM right? If someone ported a WebGL game to Electron the same 3D engine would be at play. Or 2D canvas for that matter. I think you're specifically referring to the overhead of browser DOM and how elements therein load, focus, apply styling, etc.
I hate every Electron app I use, and that includes vscode.
There is a unique type of jank associated with it.
Would love to live in the apparently "bizzaro" world where desktop class apps developed using tools which try to be more native to the OS were still successful in 2024.
Every update to Adobe creative suite makes it more and more close to an electron app and further and further away from it's roots as one of the premiere high end desktop caliber programs. I interpret the rise of Electron to be mostly correlated with the lack of knowledge on how to do old school desktop GUI development among the folks who teach CS education.
I expect that fl studio, photoshop, word, and every other remaining good desktop caliber app will be lost to the "make everything a in web-browser" trend, eventually. I'm so over it and it hasn't happened yet.
This is also the reason why GenAI STILL has no good prosumer tools. ComfyUI/Automatic1111/Forge/lm-studio are the closest we have and they're gradio or electron webapps which indicates that AI folks are not down with leaving the python or JS ecosystem for even a minute.
This means we need good desktop caliber GUI developers who understand AI. Unfortunately, they basically don't exist.
Thus, the world runs SOTA models on janky shit gradio or electron frontends instead of the desktop GUI's we had for similar UIs 10-20 years ago.
Word 2003 was peak software, and I'll never change my mind.
For me the problem with Electron is the “uncanny valley” effect - every app implements its own UI elements, and nothing is quite the same as the OS’s native behaviour.
Different apps have different unique quirks/odd behaviour, almost none of them do the right thing on platforms like macOS.
I do find it sad that native apps were quick and snappy back in the day, but now everything is effectively a browser, and has a DOM that needs to be parsed and dealt with, thus negating the hardware Moore's Law improvements that have happened since.
I used to feel the same way until Apple started dogfooding their ill-performing SwiftUI. The insane hardware packed into M1-3 chips compensates for it a bit (not always), but especially on my Intel mbp it can be jankier than most of the electron apps I interact with regularly. If VSCode was as janky as the "native" Settings app on macos I sure as hell wouldn't use it
yea man, I think it's stupid for a text editor like Atom to be 200mb and take up 1gb of ram because I have a "complex". I'm annoyed at the 120 independent copies of CEF on my computer using 20gb of disk space because I'm "insecure"
The onus is really on Discord, but you can use https://openasar.dev to partially fix the problem for yourself - it's an open source drop-in replacement for the client updater/bootstrapper.
* You can't share your screen in a way optimized for text clarity. In the native app, even without nitro, you, effectively, have the "source resolution, 5 fps" option. With the web app, you are limited to 720p.
* You can't make the full use of your camera. On the web, 640x480 is the only available resolution, while in the native app, 1280x720 is the default.
* Also, on platforms other than Linux, with the native app, you can stream the game audio separately from your microphone. This functionality is not available via the web or on Linux unless you install an unofficial client.
Ah, I didn't know people were using Discord for video calls. No one has ever asked me to to jump on a Discord video call. Then again, I'm not a PC gamer. I honestly thought it was basically just a modern IRC, to chat in specific groups/channels, and to ask the MidJourney bot to generate images of cats wearing pajamas.
In true JS fashion, it rewrites itself in a new framework every time you open it, and every fifth time, it chooses a different package manager just for fun.
This is true, but in the past various Discord employees have explicitly said (on HN no less) that they don't intentionally ban accounts for using them, only that sometimes their anti-spam systems can also flag them as false positives (and that you may be able to submit a ticket in this case), so I wouldn't worry too much
