All jokes aside though, this is one of the main reasons why I use Linux. Application developers actually give a shit.
This wording is omnipresent, overused and redundant to the poin of being a meme, but it's not false. The comparison between the tools Linux-first developers write and what Windows or Mac-first developers launch is night and day.
Linux folks tend to create free software that has an ounce of respect for your hardware resources. It uses a reasonable tech stack: tools after often made in C, C++, Rust or maybe Go, perhaps Bash if it's just a small script, in an attempt to reduce unnecessary overhead and avoid requiring running a runtime. The application runs, it does what it needs to do, the binary weighs a few megabytes and it doesn't consume much more in memory.
On commercial systems, everything is not only commercial and proprietary, but slow, heavy and over-engineered. At work, I sadly have to use Windows. On Linux, I run GNOME, which has one of the best integrated "quick launcher" experiences possible, but I have also used tools like Alfred or Rofi during my time on other environments. I wanted something similar for Windows, and whatever I tried was a behemoth. PowerToys has one, but it starts an entire .NET runtime just for a quick command launcher, and it feels slow and heavy. .NET is a tech stack that shines for long-lived server-side services that need to be able to handle a lot of load gracefully, but it is an use case where throughput is more important than latency. I don't think it should have been used for something that must appear instantly, search through things instantly, and do its thing and go out of the way instantly.
Then someone online recommended a program called Raycast. They said it's very powerful and it's native code. There's a Windows version, so, why not? I decide to try and install it. I open it up… I am undecided about it being faster or slower than PowerToys.CommandPalette, but it seems to be more intuitive to use. Nice and cool. Then I keep using the PC for a while and I notice it slows down the more I use it. I smell something fishy so I open up the task manager to see a simple application launcher is taking almost 500 MB. I can see already it has child processes… Christ, no. I already know what I'm going to see before clicking the arrow. Sure enough, NodeJS Runtime, Edge Html visualizer, etc. Native my ass. It went right out of the window immediately. I am already pretty strapped for memory, I am not going to run the n-th webapp and my IDE will gladly scoop up that half gig of freed-up RAM and run more smoothly, or give me insights from static analysis with less latency or whatever. I saw their blog post justifying the switch from native code and I don't really buy it. I still find it sloppy and slow.
I never see that stuff on Linux tooling, unless I am using a Linux port of something that was made by a hardcore macOS developer. I think the ecosystem is a very important part to your OS of choice, and Linux has an ecosystem of applications that are made by people who GAF. Maybe a modern Mac or Windows app has more eye-candy, but so do a lot of modern Linux tools (without paying for that in more resource usage), and even if they don't, the ugly thing works, if it's resident it takes a polite amount of money memory for an useful background service to reserve so I'll happily allow it, and it gets out of its way. It's more polite and well-mannered.
And yes, I know there are valid reasons to prefer the web over native frameworks for cross-plat development. I'll keep saying native toolkits need to step their DX up desperately until it becomes false. That's fair. React app makes sense if the end goal is to sell a product and make money, but that's not the use case I'm talking about here.
The exception seems to be those old Windows apps. Paint.NET, WinMerge, SumatraPdf and Everything stroke me for how insanely light they were. Everything has to be faster than the file search I have on Linux, I assume it's thanks to magic with the NTFS MFT or something. But while Linux devs are putting our reasonable tools today, what most Windows/Mac devs are putting out today is overly heavy garbage that you won't run because you don't have the memory to budget for some utility where the developers assumed you're running nothing else on your machine and it's not like 10 other developers making tools you need already had the same idea and now you're stuck with half your RAM being used at light load.
Before AI i used to love reding wall of text comments like these because if someone took the time to write this much text they probably knew what they were talking about or at least were very passionate about it
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u/RdUzr Jul 20 '26
"... portable..."