I don’t know how other Linux distros do it, but Manjaro (and seemingly Arch) seem to carry electron-## packages separately from apps like Signal. Unfortunately, Element requires electron29 and Bitwarden electron28 so I still have two copies of Electron. BTRFS’ deduplication helps reduce the real world size a bit, but it’s still unfortunate, especially since electron31 is already out.
Signal runs some security code natively so you can’t run it in the browser, even though most of the UI is done through a copy of Chrome. At least the reusable packages make it so that only one copy of Chrome will be loaded for all Electron applications!
RE: the RAM: a lot of that is space allocated for JIT. Most of it is filled with zeroes, so if you run a modern OS (recent Linux, Windows, macOS) that RAM will end up being compressed+CoW’d to the point of barely making a dent.
Plenty of optimisations to be done, but it’s not as bad as task manager may make it seem. I’ve personally replaced a bunch of web apps with Element by bridging everything through Matrix (Matrix alternatives such as XMPP can also do that with an even smaller footprint).
I use a whole bunch of Linux distros at work (CentOS, alpine, ubuntu, debian, opensuse) and a bunch on my devices at home (mint, fedora, nobara, and manjaro), and so far the only distro I’ve seen ship decoupled shared electron libs like you described is Manjaro (and presumably Arch).
I don’t know how other Linux distros do it, but Manjaro (and seemingly Arch) seem to carry
electron-##packages separately from apps like Signal. Unfortunately, Element requires electron29 and Bitwarden electron28 so I still have two copies of Electron. BTRFS’ deduplication helps reduce the real world size a bit, but it’s still unfortunate, especially since electron31 is already out.Signal runs some security code natively so you can’t run it in the browser, even though most of the UI is done through a copy of Chrome. At least the reusable packages make it so that only one copy of Chrome will be loaded for all Electron applications!
RE: the RAM: a lot of that is space allocated for JIT. Most of it is filled with zeroes, so if you run a modern OS (recent Linux, Windows, macOS) that RAM will end up being compressed+CoW’d to the point of barely making a dent.
Plenty of optimisations to be done, but it’s not as bad as task manager may make it seem. I’ve personally replaced a bunch of web apps with Element by bridging everything through Matrix (Matrix alternatives such as XMPP can also do that with an even smaller footprint).
I use a whole bunch of Linux distros at work (CentOS, alpine, ubuntu, debian, opensuse) and a bunch on my devices at home (mint, fedora, nobara, and manjaro), and so far the only distro I’ve seen ship decoupled shared electron libs like you described is Manjaro (and presumably Arch).