Introduction: When Your Chat App Eats More RAM Than a Game Engine
You're on a Discord call, everything's fine, and then—bam. Your computer starts chugging. A notification pops up: the Linux kernel just killed Discord because it was running out of memory. Wait, what? A chat application consuming more resources than a full game engine? The original poster wasn't exaggerating—Discord sitting idle can easily chew through 800MB of RAM. And Discord's just the poster child. This experience resonates because it's become the norm, not the exception. Modern software feels increasingly bloated, sluggish, and disrespectful of system resources. But why? Is it just lazy programming, or are there deeper forces at play? In this article, we'll dissect the real reasons behind software bloat in 2025, explore the technical debt we're all paying for, and—most importantly—look at what you can actually do about it.
The Great Abstraction Pile-Up: Why We Have 34,523 Layers
Let's start with the core technical complaint: "34523 layers of abstractions to render the fucking app UI." That number might be hyperbolic, but the sentiment is dead accurate. Modern application development, especially for desktop, has largely converged on using web technologies. Frameworks like Electron allow developers to build desktop apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—the same stuff that runs in your browser.
Here's the trade-off. Building a native application for Windows, macOS, and Linux requires maintaining three separate codebases with three different UI toolkits. That's expensive and slow. Electron lets a team write once and deploy everywhere. But you're not just getting the app's code. You're getting an entire Chromium rendering engine (a whole web browser) bundled with every single Electron app you install. Discord, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Visual Studio Code—they all ship their own personal copy of Chrome. That's why an "idle" app uses 800MB. It's not idle; it's running a complete browser runtime.
This abstraction isn't free. Each layer—from the JavaScript framework (React, Vue, Angular) down to the system's graphics driver—adds overhead. The priority shifted from raw efficiency to developer efficiency and cross-platform consistency. The result? Your chat app is, architecturally, a specialized website running in a dedicated browser instance. It's convenient for developers, but it's a heavy burden for your RAM.
The Business of Bloat: Features Over Fundamentals
Technical decisions don't happen in a vacuum. They're driven by business goals. In 2025, the market rewards feature velocity and user engagement metrics, not lean code. Think about what Discord has become. It started as a chat app for gamers. Now it's a social platform with voice, video, screen sharing, streaming, app integrations, a store, and nitro subscriptions. Every new feature needs UI, logic, and often runs in the background.
The incentive structure is broken. A product manager gets praised for shipping a new screen-sharing effect, not for reducing memory usage by 50MB. Performance is a "non-functional requirement"—it's nice to have, but it rarely blocks a release. There's also the "kitchen sink" problem. To compete, every app feels it must match every feature of its rivals. Can your notes app embed a video? It must. Can your email client manage tasks? It should. This constant expansion turns focused tools into sprawling platforms, each demanding more resources.
And let's talk about data. Modern apps are data-hungry. They collect analytics on everything—which buttons you hover over, how long a menu stays open—to inform product decisions. This telemetry runs constantly, adding background processes and network calls. It's bloat in the name of business intelligence.
The RAM Reality: Why Memory Usage Is the New Normal
"800MB for a chat app" sounds insane to anyone who remembers the days of mIRC or even early Skype. But context matters. System resources have exploded. The average new PC in 2025 ships with 16GB of RAM as a baseline, with 32GB becoming common for enthusiasts. Developers target these higher baselines. When the median user has plenty of RAM, optimizing for memory becomes a lower priority. It's easier to use a memory-hungry framework and assume the hardware will catch up.
There's also a caching philosophy at play. Modern systems use unused RAM as a disk cache to speed everything up. Some applications, especially those based on Chromium, will aggressively cache data in memory on the assumption that free RAM is wasted RAM. This can make performance *feel* snappier as you switch tabs or reopen the app. But when the system actually needs that RAM back, the handoff isn't always graceful—leading to the exact scenario the original poster described, where the Linux OOM (Out-Of-Memory) killer steps in and terminates the biggest offender.
The problem is that this approach assumes a single-application world. In reality, you have Discord, a browser with 50 tabs, Slack, Spotify, and an IDE all running at once. Each one thinks it's the main character and can use a gigabyte of RAM. The collective impact brings even powerful systems to their knees.
Is This Just an Electron Problem? Looking Beyond the Usual Suspects
It's easy to point the finger at Electron. And it deserves a lot of the blame. But bloat is a mindset, not just a framework. Look at native applications that have also ballooned. Adobe Creative Cloud apps, JetBrains IDEs, and even parts of the Windows and macOS ecosystems themselves have grown significantly in size and resource requirements over the years.
The issue is often dependency sprawl. Modern development relies on pulling in dozens, sometimes hundreds, of external libraries from package managers like npm or pip. This is fantastic for productivity—why write a date formatting function when a library exists? But each library has its own dependencies, and many include far more code than your app actually uses (a problem known as "tree shaking" that isn't always solved). You end up shipping megabytes of unused code to every user.
Then there's the constant churn of web standards and APIs. To stay compatible and secure, the bundled Chromium engine in Electron apps needs frequent updates. This often means the entire app is re-downloaded and re-installed weekly or monthly, not because the app's features changed, but because its underlying browser engine did. The update *is* the bloat.
Fighting Back: Practical Tips for Users in 2025
Okay, enough diagnosing the disease. What can you, as a user, actually do? You're not powerless. Here are some concrete strategies.
First, seek out lightweight alternatives. For chat, consider something like Ripcord (a lightweight Discord client) or go back to basics with IRC clients like HexChat. For general software, the "suckless" philosophy (software that is simple, clear, and frugal) has passionate followers. Tools like the Kitty terminal or the lf file manager prove powerful software doesn't need gigabytes of RAM.
Second, become a task manager power user. Don't just look at the main process. On Windows, use Resource Monitor. On macOS, use Activity Monitor's Memory tab. On Linux, use htop. Look for processes with high "Working Set" or "Resident" memory. You might find that closing and reopening an app clears a memory leak. For Electron apps, many have hidden developer settings (Shift+Ctrl+I often opens DevTools) where you can sometimes disable hardware acceleration or certain features.
Third, control autostart and background processes. Both Discord and Slack are notorious for launching background services that run even when the app is closed. Disable this in settings. Use your system's startup manager to ruthlessly prune what launches at boot.
Finally, vote with your wallet and your feedback. Support developers of lean software. When a big app asks for feedback, complain about performance and resource usage. They do track those metrics. If enough users list "memory hog" as a reason for churn, product teams will notice.
What About Developers? Can We Build Better Software?
If you're on the other side of the keyboard, you have a different kind of responsibility and power. The path to less-bloated software starts with intentionality.
Question the default stack. Does your desktop app really need to be an Electron app? In 2025, there are promising lighter alternatives like Tauri, which uses the system's webview instead of bundling Chromium, or Flutter for desktop, which compiles to native code. For truly performance-critical parts of an app, consider writing them in a systems language like Rust or Go and exposing them to a higher-level UI layer.
Embrace profiling and monitoring from day one. Make performance budgets part of your definition of done. "Feature X must not increase cold start time by more than 10% or memory footprint by more than 5%." Tools like the Chrome DevTools Performance and Memory panels (which work on Electron) are incredibly powerful for finding leaks and bottlenecks.
Practice dependency hygiene. Audit your package.json or equivalent regularly. Do you need all 30 dependencies? Can you replace a heavy library with a few lines of your own code? Use bundle analyzers to see what code you're actually shipping to users.
Most importantly, cultivate a culture that values efficiency. Celebrate the engineer who shaves 100ms off a load time or reduces memory usage. That should be as laudable as shipping a flashy new feature. It's harder to measure, but your users will feel it every single day.
Common Myths and FAQs About Software Bloat
Myth 1: More RAM usage always means worse performance. Not necessarily. As mentioned, using RAM for cache can improve performance. The problem is unnecessary or unmanaged usage that doesn't yield a user benefit.
Myth 2: Native apps are always leaner. They can be, but a poorly written native app can be just as bloated as a bad Electron app. Bloat is about architecture and care, not just the technology choice.
FAQ: Why doesn't Discord just make a native app? They did, sort of. The iOS and Android apps are native. The desktop platform's diversity (Windows, macOS, Linux) and the desire for perfect feature parity make the cross-platform web stack too tempting from a business perspective. The cost of three native teams is huge.
FAQ: Will this get better with faster computers? This is the "Jevons paradox" of software. Faster computers don't lead to leaner software; they lead to software that uses the new resources to do more things. Progress in hardware has historically enabled software bloat, not cured it.
FAQ: Is Linux immune to this? Absolutely not. While the Linux desktop has many lightweight options, the same commercial pressures exist. The poster's experience of the Linux kernel killing Discord is a perfect example—the bloat is in the application, not the OS.
Conclusion: Reclaiming Our Digital Space
The frustration in that original Reddit post—"tf is wrong with modern software"—is a widespread and valid feeling. We've traded efficiency for expediency, and control for convenience. Software that uses 800MB of RAM to display a chat window is a symptom of a deeper issue where developer experience has been prioritized over end-user experience, and where adding features is valued more than refining fundamentals.
But it's not hopeless. As users, we can choose lighter tools, manage our systems proactively, and demand better. As developers and technologists, we can make different choices—to value performance, to understand our stack, and to resist the easy path of adding another layer of abstraction without need. The best software in 2025 won't be the one with the most features. It'll be the one that respects your time, your attention, and yes, your RAM. Let's start building and using software that feels like a sharp tool, not a bloated platform.
