I don't think that's the target audience here.

Proton makes safer, more private (than, say, Gmail) email a possibility for people who don't have much technical knowledge but who know enough to want to keep their emails out of Google's hands.

If you have both the knowledge and time to run a server, by all means, that can make sense (and can be fun!). It's just not as widely applicable.

You send emails to @gmail addresses most of the time, so... How you can avoid giving Alphabet (or some other giant) your messages?

The point of ownership is having your mails in your hand, on your iron, anything who can talk IMAPs or even POP is ok for that. For voice/chat etc Matrix or XMPP might be yours, so nobody could decide to ban you or shut the service down. You still depend on a ISP ok, but much less dependencies anyway. That's the point IMVHO.

While thinking that company X is better in privacy terms than company Y is honestly meaningless, you can trust them or not, you don't know what happen on their servers or someone else ones where they actually live on (like using Amazon o Microsoft cloud as a backend).

I can't help but wonder if we've already hit the point where real people now write like that because it's what they're exposed to day in and day out.

I have zero evidence to back this up but I'm convinced that autocorrect is what led to people pluralizing word's with apostrophe's. If we keep outsourcing how we express our ideas, how long until we no longer have any left?

Shifting baseline. In a year or two, people will tell you you're being silly, dismissive, or just an old timer for not liking AI writing.

Think of all the stuff that's happened with. How we get something new, it's kinda dumb, then within a year or two it's normalized to 60% of folks.

The issue isn't usage, it's waste. Every byte of RAM that's used unnecessarily because of bloated software frameworks used by lazy devs (devs who make the same arguments you're making) is a byte that can't be used by the software that actually needs it, like video editing, data processing, 3D work, CAD, etc. It's incredibly short sighted to think that any consumer application runs in a vacuum with all system resources available to it. This mindset of "but consumers have so much RAM these days" just leads to worse and worse software design instead of programmers actually learning how to do things well. That's not a good direction and it saddens me that making software that minimizes its system footprint has become a niche instead of the mainstream.

tl;dr, no one is looking for their RAM to stay idle. They're looking for their RAM to be available.

I dunno man, I have 32gb and I'm totally fine playing games with 50 browser tabs open along with discord and Spotify and a bunch of other crap.

In not trying to excuse crappy developers making crappy slow ad wasteful apps, I just don't think electron itself is the problem. Nor do I think it's a particularly big deal if an app uses some memory.

You're right, Electron is not inherently bad and apps need RAM. There's no getting around that.

The issue with Electron is that it encourages building desktop apps as self-contained websites. Sure, that makes it easier to distribute apps across systems and OSes, but it also means you've got front end web devs building system applications. Naturally, they'll use what they're used to: usually React, which exacerbates the problem. Plus it means that each app is running a new instance of a web browser, which adds overhead.

In real life, yeah, it's rare that I actually encounter a system slowdown because yet another app is running on Electron. I just think that it's bad practice to assume that all users can spare the memory.

I'll admit that my concern is more of a moral one than a practical one. I build software for a living and I think that optimizing resource usage is one way to show respect to my users (be they consumers, ops people running the infra, or whatever). Not to mention that lean, snappy apps make for a better user experience.

The problem with having 32gb of RAM is that there is no mechanism to power off part of it when it is unneeded (plus RAM constitutes a significant fraction of a device's total power consumption) so if the device is running off a battery and is designed to keep device weight to a minimum (e.g., battery as small as practical), then battery life is not as good as it would be if the device had only 16gb.

This is why the top model of the previous generation of the iPhone (the iPhone 16 Pro Max) has only 8 GB of RAM, bumped to 12 GB for the current top model (the iPhone 17 Pro Max at the higher tiers of additional storage). If Apple had decided to put more RAM than that into any iPhone, even the models where the price is irrelevant to most buyers, they would not have been serving their customers well.

So, now you have to pay a penalty in either battery life or device weight for the duration of your ownership of any device designed for maximum mobility if you ever want to having a good experience when running Electron apps on the device.

Lazy developers can make bad apps that waste RAM no matter what framework. But even conscientious developers cannot make an app with Electron that compares favorably to a native app. Electron is inherently a problem, even if it isn't the only one.