It sounds like your 8 year old computer can't keep with today's technology. If it's possible, might I suggest upgrading your computer? A more modern system would let you run Electron apps without being irritatingly slow. It seems silly that I had to upgrade my laptop in order to run a text editor, but it seems that's just the world we live in.
I know this is not what you're saying, but when I read your post I start hearing an internal voice going something like:
Contribute more to e-waste! Pollute more! Consume! Consume!
A bog-standard 8-year old computer would be considered a supercomputer by the standards of the '80s, so at some point we ought to put some effort into making computers feel like the insanely powerful beasts they are. And Electron won't help with that.
Most people in this world would rather spend the required 400usd needed to get a >=8GB computer on fixing their vehicule/home and pay their monthly bills.
This +environment damage limitations.
Apart from the software and system engineers I don't know a single person in my social circle that own a computer with more than 4GB of memory. And I am not living in a third world country.
On one side, I agree that expecting an 8yo machine to keep up with modern workflows is silly, and that at some point even bill gates or whoever you attribute the famous 512kb RAM quote to had to admit they were wrong
Forgot to type the rest and can't edit for some reason.
On the other hand, vim or Emacs with all features I personally currently use in vscode come in at a fraction of the memory usage, and it is a bit dumb to have to use that much ram for slack or discord considering how light IRC clients used to be.
Yeah it's dumb but what're you gonna do? Technology evolves and the way this industry works is you gotta keep up. Can't keep computing like we're still on mainframes writing Cobol.
According to the industry, my laptop is slow. I, however, think that my laptop is actually very fast. It's just that everyone gets new stuff every year and the threshold for "usable computer" goes up accordingly.
VS Code is unusable on my laptop. I tried it, it's way too slow to be usable. I've used vim with a few plugins that got it to the same feature set as VS Code and it's actually usable. At some point I tried Lite XL, and it was incredibly fast with the same features. More recently, I tried helix and I can say that I've never used such a fast editor with auto complete and all that.
Most electron applications waste me time and energy (both human and electricity), and if software keeps going this way it'll start wasting me money. I'm not thrilled, but like you said, what are you gonna do?
