I love how people claim Lagrange is so bloated when it's one of the ones that doesn't even use a GUI library - the GUI is completely custom - and tries to use very few libraries.
I suspect the people that are hating on how "bloated" it is are just being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
3 years ago · 👍 aka_dude, gnuserland, martin, lykso
@lykso
in theory this means you could run it directly on a Linux framebuffer
Not just in theory. 😊 I've run Lagrange on a Raspberry Pi 3 in framebuffer mode (no X11), both with sw render and with native GLESv2 acceleration. The latter ran quite smooth, although it has max texture size limitations. · 3 years ago
Yeah, I don't see it as bloated either. Maybe in comparison to CLI clients, but those don't feel nearly as frictionless to me.
On my machine, Lagrange is using 14MB of resident memory at the moment, compared to Firefox at 340MB.
I like that it uses SDL2 also, because in theory this means you could run it directly on a Linux framebuffer like you can with Netsurf. Running without X or Wayland would *really* cut down on overall system resource use, I'd imagine. · 3 years ago
I don't know who wrote this, but for me Lagrange was one of the reason who got me into Gemini.
Having a pleasure experience while I navigate into the Geminispace makes me really happy.
I don't see it bloated but features reach it really looks crafted with sincere passion about Gemini. · 3 years ago
Yeah it's definitely an apples-to-oranges comparison. And all framework choices have pros and cons — a fully GTK based app, for instance, may benefit from having shared resources with other GTK apps and thus may seem to have a small footprint, but portability is severely hindered.
Gempub and subscriptions specifically are not very complex, as they integrate and build on other core features of the app.
I don't plan on adding more and more features to the app. The guiding principles are: what benefits the end user experience? How can new features be integrated with existing ones? · 3 years ago
@skyjake That makes sense. However, what I'm kinda opposing here is thinking that gempub and subscriptions add substantially to the ram usage or line count of the program. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see that. The biggest memory usage is from the rendering. And you can't compare the memory usage or rendering to terminal apps if you don't take into account the memory usage of the terminal emulators themselves.
Finally, if people want to define bloat to be "bigger than something else", then everything is bloated. But that's not how bloat should be defined. I agree with the position that Solderpunk makes - it's about a "Power to weight ratio" · 3 years ago
Personally, what I consider "bloat" in Lagrange is needing to bundle 29 MB of fonts with the app, because text rendering is completely platform agnostic. It's great for portability, but adds to the footprint.
RAM use is affected by in-memory caches (configurable) and view buffering, which may use plenty of memory when using a GPU.
However, some people may just want a minimalistic app, like a TUI one, without a full set of complementary features like Gempub and subscriptions. In comparison, Lagrange seems big and complex. · 3 years ago
@benk Some people started saying it over on the mailing list. · 3 years ago
I have actually never heard this complaint before · 3 years ago
@defunct Sure, but I've never heard of a person saying a program is "bloated" solely because of its interface. About the rendering - I don't think it takes as much memory as what people are thinking. Lagrange doesn't use a GUI library or a terminal emulator to make it appear like it's using less memory than what it really is.
Additionally, there might actually be something wrong with the appimage using more memory than other ways of running lagrange, as noticed by some people in the geminauts chat. They are looking more into that. · 3 years ago
maybe people base that on its presentation. it has config UIs and it does waste some space in how it renders. I don't think it's bloated on size, ram or speed, just on its presentation choices. then again, you don't need to use it if you don't want to.... · 3 years ago