I agree with your counterpoint to OS integration, but Microsoft Teams is infamous for not being "good enough" otherwise. Laggy, buggy, unresponsive, a massive resource hog especially if it runs at startup. It's gotten a bit better, but not enough. These are not complaints on HN, they're in my workplace.

Not everyone is running the latest and greatest hardware, very few actually have the money for that. If you're running hardware from before this decade, or especially the early 2010s, the difference between an Electron app and a native app is unbelievably stark. Electron will often bring the device to its knees.

A single Electron app is usually not a problem. The problem is that the average user has a pile of Chrome tabs open in addition to a handful of Electron apps on top of increasingly bloated commercial OSes, which all compound to consume a large percentage of available resources.

This is particularly pertinent on bulk-purchased corporate and education machines which are loaded down with mandated spyware and antivirus garbage and often ship with CPUs that lag many years behind, and in the case of laptops might even have dog slow eMMC storage which makes the inevitable virtual memory paging miserable.

I run IT for a nonprofit and have 120 "real users" doing "real work" on "low-end machines "providing "real mental health, foster care, and social services" to "real communities".

These workers complain about performance on the machines we can afford. 16GB RAM and 256GB SSDs are the standard, as is 500MB/sec. internet for offices with 40 people, and my plans to upgrade RAM this year were axed by the insane AI chip boondoggle.

People on HN need to understand that not everyone works for a well-funded startup, or big tech company that is in the process of destroying democracy and the environment in the name of this quarter's profits!

BTW Teams has moved away from Electron, before it did I had to advise people to use the browser app instead of the desktop for performance reasons.

> Real users don't have this complaint. What kind of low-end machines are you running

Real users complain differently: "My machine is slow". Electron itself is not very heavyweight (though not featherweight), but JS and DOM can cost a lot of resources. Right now my GMail tab has allocated 529 MB.

> That's not due to Electron.

Of course, but it takes some careful thought. BTW e.g. Qt apps can be pretty memory-hungry, too.

> good enough for Microsoft Teams

It's not easy no pick a more "beloved" application.

What an Electron app usually would miss is things like global shortcuts managed by macOS control panel, programmability via Automation, and the L&F of native controls. I personally don't usually miss any of these, but users who actually like macOS would usually complain.

I personally prefer to run Electron-ish apps, like Slack, in their Web versions, in a browser.

Both electron is too heavy for you, and the other non-Electron overhead of Claude is fine.

Teams is a terrible app, although Electron isn't the only reason for that: It needs a Gig of RAM to do things that older chat apps could do in 4 Meg.

The free ride of ever increasing RAM on consumer devices is over because of the AI hyperscalers buying all fab capacity, leading to a real RAM shortage. I expect many new laptops to come with 8GB as standard and mid-range phones to have 4GB.

Software engineers need to start thinking about efficiency again.

"Real users" don't know what electron is, but real users definitely complain about laggy and slow programs. They just don't know why they are laggy and slow.