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?
