Linux is the reason Windows apps are bloated these days

No matter how fanboi-y a Linux or Apple user gets, they can never out fanboi a Microsoft fanboi. They take making shit up about competitors to a entirely new level.

Thats... Thats like a flat earther in computer stuff.

Do those really exist??

I know it gets thrown around a lot, but the Dunning-Kruger effect is real and applicable to people in all fields.

sometimes if you have nothing nice to say to that person, just post rocky horror .gifs. i really wish this site would have a .gif finder though. seriously!

what a great way to create a set of echochambers with schizo worldviews
But once you read his words he's got a foot in the door. Then he's harder to ignore.
So maybe it's harder to ignore fools on social media. Which would make social media a kind of fool-enhancer.
I guess this is where blocking comes in. But that seems drastic.
- Blocking is severe, but boy is my feed clean of morons (I think I've only blocked like 30 people on Lemmy).
  You gotta try it. Very satisfying to click 'read all' on your inbox now and then to clear out notifications for new (hidden) messages from trolls you've blocked.

You need to put this in clear [JOKE] tags, otherwise they'll never get it.

Lame attempt at ragebait.

Every operating system contributed to the bloat. Windows has Win32, OS X has Carbon / Cocoa, Linux has X11 and various widget libs that sit on top of it. So it has been a perennial nut to crack to make cross platform widgets - wxWidgets, QT, SWT/JWT/Swing on Java, XMLShell (Firefox), Electron, GTK/GTK#, winelib etc.

Throw mobile platforms into the mix and it's an unholy mess. Lowest common denominator is HTML and so the likes of Electron "wins" even though it's bloated and slow.

i actually don't have a problem with HTML, i just think that instead of every app shipping their own copy of electron, the operating system should provide basic browser functionality.
- the operating system should provide basic browser functionalit
  Microsoft got literally sued and almost dissolved as a company for that
- that sounds like Tauri!
  Linux and Mac use WebkitGTK, Windows uses Edge/Chromium, Android uses Chrome - as bundled in the respective OS, and you essentially have a frontend running on that webview communicating with a backend running locally via some special IPC protocol
- Then that operating system gets hit with anti-trust

Aren't Qt and GTK cross platform? I have Dolphin and Kate running on my Windows work laptop.

Yeah, he doesn't know what he's talking about. There is a shitload of frontend developers that specialize in web standards and technologies. Electron was developed to take advantage of that deep pool of frontend developers. The side affect, is that other OSes can just support electron and they get the developers and the applications for free. Which has been a major boon for Linux users and those looking to escape Microsoft's vendor lockin strategy. Today might be different, but in the past, nobody was intending to support Linux by creating electron apps. If they cared so much or it was so important, they would have been using Qt and GTK prior to Electron.
As is wxWidgets and others.
- Dear god, I had to write wxWidgets/C++ for Win32 last year for work and it was horrific. Never again, back to modern web standards for me. The irony is that it was justified as being "cross platform" but we never got around to actually making it work on Linux. Makes no sense, it should have been an internal web app. (Admittedly, this was for law enforcement software and they seem to love windows.)

What kind of shit for brains asshole is still defending Windows in 2025?

And what kind of slavering mouth-breathing teoglodyte doesn't understand that Hannah Montana Linux negates all of these issues, will suck your dixk without hesitation, and lets you read news from four days from now.
Lololol

Okay, how does this dude explain native Linux apps?

Meanwhile Microsoft makes the start menu with React

I try not to let considerations get in the way of doing great work.
- That is the most punchable response I've seen in a while.
- "I am a react developer"
  I thought we are supposed to be language-agnostic after 3rd project.
- No way that's real. Tell me it's not real
- This is what's wrong. Distilled.
Well, at least it's React Native, seemingly. Also from what I've heard it's only one section like rendering results from the web or some shit like that.

Abstraction layers? In MY messy pile of spaghetti ass code!?

You wouldn't understand it, it's more of a messy pile of lasagna ass-code situation.
It’s more likely than you think.

Tell me you have no idea how software development works without saying it...

Tbh, it's not entirely wrong, which is the reason why it works so well as rage bait.
It's really not about Linux, but it is about supporting anything and everything out there with a single app. Use Electron and you can have the same app running on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, your car, your game console, your smart fridge and in a website.
Of course the result sucks, but if you can cut development effort into a fraction while also supporting systems that you would have never supported otherwise, that's not a bad deal for businesses.
I read it twice and it felt like word salad.

Eithet ignorant or troling

I thought it was comendy 😅

Yeah, not because they saw a way to develop for Win/Mac/Linux/Android/IOS all at the same time and went yeah, we'd take some of that.

Naw, They REALLY wanted to dip their toes in that 2013 extra 1% of traffic pool.

(Apple as a platform is so closed that it couldn't be influenced by this utter crap and the developers can use the OS native API's.)

A hidden gem of stupidity and nonsense in the already pretty dumb tirade.

The user land API/ABI is stable to a fault in Linux. The kernel API/ABI is unstable.
Companies are cheap. They hired web devs then tasked them with building a desktop application rather then hiring people to write native apps. They had a hammer and used it to fix every problem they had.
macOS is just as affected by electron apps as a Linux is.
Electron is horrible, but it does bring apps to many an OS once Chromium is ported.
Open protocols or open APIs from the company would fix the non-native app problem.

The user land API/ABI is stable to a fault in Linux. The kernel API/ABI is unstable
It's the other way around. The kernel API stable to a fault, the kernel ABI isn't. If your application only relies on the kernel API you won't have many compatibility issues. If you rely on userland stuff such as C++ stdlib, GTK, QT, Python, ... Good luck.
- I wasn’t clear and that seems to have cause some confusion. I was talking about the Linux kernel itself, and only the Linux kernel.
  There are two sides to the Linux kernel: internal exposed to drivers and such, external syscalls exposed to the public. That’s what I was talking about.
  All bets are off with 3rd party software. That’s just a general problem in software development. It’s not specific to Linux, and it’s why vendoring libraries is recommended.
  This is why all the 3rd party software is frozen at a point-in-time with fixes backported in distros like Debian or RHEL. It fixes the problems of devs being mercurial. The distro is the SDK. It creates a stable base, and it works rather well.
  Unfortunately, most software relies on libc and a compiler. Both of which can be problems, and both of which are external to the Linux kernel. There’s not much which relies on only kernel syscalls.
Further, if you get code into the kernel, anyone who breaks it needs to fix it. So it seems to me it's only a problem if you're trying to do something like maintain a proprietary driver without putting it into the kernel? Or something to that effect?
- Basically. Out-of-tree drivers are annoying without an LTS kernel.
  There are also out-of-tree drivers which don’t get mainlined for one reason or another even though they are FOSS. OpenZFS has this problem, and now so does bcachefs.

Electron is the only cross platform gui toolkit...

If you ignore QT, GTK and everything else.

I'm so glad that Microsoft makes an awesome cross platfor--- wait, no, but they contribute code to--- hmmm ... Hey, what does Microsoft do to make apps more portable again?

The real reasons often are:
They want be able to hire much cheaper webdevs instead of software devs.
Electron has a lot of built-in data collecting metrics, which they urgently need for creating a real-life KITT.
Easy live embedding of content. Sure you can add your own solution, in fact I created ETML as a solution for this problem for my engine, all without any support for nasty scripting languages or convoluted stylesheets (style-inheritance in CSS turned me off from webdev even more than JS did). At best, it can be used for things like embedding videos on Discord, because no one else thought some universal approach, let alone one that disallows proprietary players. At worst, it's being used for ads.
Also a lot of Windows-only apps are Electron apps, only because the manufacturer wants to go "fuck you", even putting protections into the code just in case you wanted to run it on Linux.
EDIT: Forgot the "live embeds" reason.
- Another reason is when developing the Web version first. Draw.io is a good example, where we get a bonus desktop(electron) version "for free" though the product was developed as a web app.
one of the funniest (and sadly accurate) things i've heard said about linux backwards-compatibility is that its most stable API is Win32. you can run really old windows software on wine because they support stuff even windows doesn't anymore.
of course this is because the expectation is that you can just recompile old software to work on new systems, which is not really a thing on window.s
- The most stable system is one that is out of support. No updates == No breakage! 😄
It's so portable! With maximal efforts we support both windows 7, windows 8.1 (but not 8.0), windiws 10 and soon Windows 11 !!!
/s
You can even do inefficient UIs in Python using tkinter, which is part of the standard library in python.
- Python tkinter interfaces might be inefficient, slow and require labyrinthine code to set-up and use, but they make up for it by being breathtakingly ugly.
Flatpak
AppImage
Snap
Hell, let's not forget
Python Perl
Java
POSIX
- The first 3 are Linux only. It's irrelevant.
.net
.net cli apps are cross platform and can be portable :p
Gui in .net isnt fully cross platform ( maui is everything except linux ) but frameworks like avalonia ( .net ) and imgui fix all that :')
- Does not MAUI compile to Linux, just that you need to compile on Windows?
- Thanks for reminding me why Maui doesn't support Linux. I saw Maui mentioned in an earlier comment and was baffled why KDE would make something not working that doesn't work in Linux. It's because Microsoft stole the Maui name from KDE: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-KDE-MAUI
- @DacoTaco @MoogleMaestro there is a port of mono winforms implementation to modern dotnet and it's really works:
  https://github.com/DanielVanNoord/System.Windows.Forms
Lazarus gang, this is your chance!
GTK is not accessible anywhere other than Linux and is therefore not a serious option outside of Linux.
- GTK is available for windows. https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/windows

Someone obviously missed their nap and is having a tantrum.

He's a magician, because reading this, I aged 10 years and grew a metastatic tumor.

that's a lot of words to basically say "i'm a fucking idiot".

This is such a hilariously bad take. I like how "I can't use Win32 on Linux" morphed into "re-write the whole app in Javascript just so I can use Electron."

Meanwhile, Wine and QT are like: "am I a joke to you?"

I'll add that (IMO) a lot of applications are becoming increasingly malicious, although less-so in the desktop space. I'm happy that devs like this are forced to quasi-sandbox their crap into a browser. Actually, if anyone knows how to crack into an Electron app in order to restore local plugins, user-scripts, and sandbox security controls, let me know. Or just liberate the guts into a local web app instead so I can use a real browser? This trend could be very useful for local security if those features become available.

I can code in C on all 3 (more if you include BSDs). You would not believe how amazing my skills are to avoid platform specific dependencies in a language that predates all these OS.
- How do you deal with platform specific stuff? I am talking about desktop API and friends. (If that's even a thing in your problem space). /gen
- When I grow up I want to be like you

Show me how you never programmed anything without telling me

Software should be maintained, not built and forgotten about. Windows encourages the latter, which is just straight up bad practice

Fairly large chunks of Windows code are examples of the latter, in fact.
- You dont even have to look at the code to see this. Just make one wrong click in a UI and youre directly getting dragged into a UI that hasn't changed since Windows XP.
No, Windows encourages backwards compatibility, which tends to cause code to e forgotten about.
But hey built and forgotten works great with vibe coding… 🎉🎉

Lol scrub

They must really like the taste of leather.

No.
They like the texture of leather.
Its the polish that provides the taste.

Since when has competition ever spurred innovation? Pff

Wow, that's some serious misinformation.

I hate the Windows API so much. There are like 100 million function that all start with a capital letter and take a kajillion arguments just to do the most simple thing imaginable (see CreateThread). And there are twenty different typedefs for the same type (PSTR, LPSTR, tchar* all point to char*). Also all variables and function arguments should start with their types, like hWindow if the window is a HANDLE.

I hate this joke of a programming interface so much, I hope everyone sticks to programming with POSIX and platform-agnostic libraries.

EDIT: And also, did I mention that if you want to use it, you get all of it or none of it? It's literally a single header file named Windows.h. You get just that and take it or leave it.

The windows API documentation is a joke
- Eh? When I did some Windows programming many moons ago, in the 2000s, MSDN was way above average for software documentation. Can't imagine they trashed it all.
you can also make it lean and mean right?

Clearly rage bait

"Raaaaah my 10 year old no-name laptop with a second-rate CPU and 4 gigs of RAM runs Windows like dirt 'cos Linux raaaah"
- My 13 year old Thinkpad runs Linux great ‘cos Linux…

I welcome other's input but I thought this was a pretty clear cut case of Mac becoming popular. Why write a program for Windows and Mac when you can just make a website. Then Chromebooks in education sealed the deal.

Linux is only starting mainstream use now because of Europe's push for digital sovereignty and windows 10 end of life.

I'm pretty sure you guys just took the bait. This is either satire or ragebait.

I don't man, Hanlon's razor feels appropriate here.
- The whole reasoning and especially MacOS exclusion are so contrived that it just has to be.
There is no way to be sure. Either case, it can be a case of Hanlon's razor. "Never attribute to malice [in this case: baiting] what can sufficiently be explained by stupidity".
Could be a rage-bait but it REALLY does not seem like satire.

Guh

This is what too much windows does to your brain kids.

This is not even mental gymnastics at that point.

Mental... contortionist?

Amongst the apps mentioned as bloated on Windows were Teams, Discord (major offender) and WhatsApp. The latter is a curious case because a Universal Windows app existed (now being deprecated I guess?) that was more memory efficient than the Web wrapper.

And in case, someone in interested there is a terminal client for WhatsApp (and Telegram) called nchat. Sure, it is not at feature parity with web client (images is a big problem, for obvious reasons) but the simple fact that a third party client taking so little resources exists is a damning indictment of Meta. It shows that resource efficient clients are possible (provided the parent company junks the metaverse).

Most applications that are Electron either only support Windows or also want to support Android, iOS and Web. I assume there is some toolkit out there that supports everything, but honestly HTML5 is more well known and tested.

Yeah, but HTML5 needs a webbrowser that may have an Adblocker and then you cannot do tracking and you „cannot“ earn money. Also all (client side) features are potentially available for anyone and anyone can provide userscripts to improve your webpage for free.
If you wrap it in an App, it’s against the DMCA (or your local equivalent) to reverse the App and disable the tracking. Or make a better version, or enable some features that are purely client side and you just decided to paywall into a subscription to earn more money. Or generally do anything that might hurt your current or future profits.

I'm glad I'm not this guy

Maybe you are, but we haven't found your worst take yet.
- I don't mind systemd

I have this sudden urge to do an FLTK project.

Sure, except that end user market share for MacOS is larger than Linux probably

Depends, apple & linux are toe to toe in the research world.
- is that where you find a lot of electron programs?

Boy, imagine when that idiot finds out about iphones and android!

I feel the opposite. I expect things NOT to work on linux.

Just wait until they figure out Mac has been an OS just as long as MSDOS

And that macos often breaks things because of new access/'security' policies hehe.
Also, to counter all of this : c++ & qt or .net and avalonia (because maui doesnt support linux.. )
- KDE Maui does, but Microsoft Maui doesn't .
  (Sorry, I know you were referring to Microsoft Maui, I was just annoyed at being reminded how Microsoft stole the name: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-KDE-MAUI )
The MacOS of 7.x< is nothing like the MacOS of the modern era (based on BSD). It is a drastic change and old software wasn't even compatible with the new one.

@kirk781 no, it is not because of linux support. It's only because managers hiring web developers instead of desktop apps developers. Because.. managers do not see real difference, but see some stylish web design.
Microsoft ruined cross-platform desktop apps many years ago in early WPF/Sliverlight/XAML era by ceasing Moonlight project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight/_(runtime)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120716033915/http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/moonlight-list/2011-December/001392.html
So there is no reason to blame Linux that we do not have modern cross-platfrom toolkit for GUI apps.
Microsoft decided to make new XAMP/UWP incompatible with classic widgets GUI and kill classic GUI in WinRT/Win8 era, Microsoft decided to make XAML GUI Windows-only and cease mono developement entirely, not providing any GUI supportt

More wishful thinking of this person than fact. The more to SPA and all the focus on javascript frameworks is more likely to be related to this shift than linux. But I get it, the writer knows that the ground is shifting and is trying to connect things that they and other people dislike into one big bad.

VSCode is super light on resources on linux, I have two running right now and they don't break the top ten on btop (often). It can be done right, rarely is, but it can be. Generally electron is badly used, probably a skill issue, seeing as the skill is locked behind useless documentation, proprietary BS and whatever, but the ppl who made it actually make it work, might be black magic or chicken sacrifice...

Someone's actually gonna take this seriously, and they're right.

There’s something to be said for its scripting accessibility, too. Hence the many fabulous VSCode extensions.
There's Stretchly, a break reminder tool, so has to be always running. Made with Electron, but surprisingly takes like 20 MB of memory.

Why did you cut out the author's name? :)

It is a generic one at a forum. The screenshot is from the comment section of Windows Latest site.
Back in the day on Reddit, some subs had a rule where names had to be blurred or removed. Since then, it is reflex for me to just cut out the author's name (not that it mattered in this specific case).
I found the article and the comment, if you're curious:
https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/07/ram-prices-soar-but-popular-windows-11-apps-are-using-more-ram-due-to-electron-web-components/#comment-6806399879

Has someone schooled 'em yet?

Welp, that's an opinion one can have. whatyoujustsaid.gif

Imagine the stupidest person on earth. Now realize this guy to the right of that.

Fascinating. Please carry on.

Regardless of the stuff that needs to be done for crossplatform development, building a native Windows version without looking at Linux isn't hindered by Linux at all. That's like saying you can't drive your car because another car exists.

That's such bullshit! Those supposedly cross platform shit are the least compatible softwares you can make! What can of idiot can pretend it's used because of Linux?

The problem is that mobile versions of the app is expected, and maybe also a web version. And then it should work on Mac as well. Linux is just a tiny fraction of the market share.

Each platform would require their own team if developed natively. That’s a huge headache to coordinate all features between the teams. Let’s build just one cross platform application which one team can be in charge over.

The fun thing is that those supposed cross platform framework also require a full team for each platform.

I still have a Google pixel book that basically is just online only.

That's cute

@kirk781
this is incorrect. #win32 applications run natively on #linux with #wine.

Is it really "running natively" if it requires running through a translation layer? WINE is not an emulator, but it also isn't a native runtime library with a stable API, it's a translation layer translating a reverse engineered, unstable third party's API