Who uses these dumb ass apps?

Now this garbage is the bloatware we complain about.

We had Widgets with Win7 that had a lot of potential. They could've fixed the security problem those things had, instead they removed them entirely and gave us this garbage.

macOS still has the widgets 😉

They’re very nice and come in a bunch of different sizes. You can put them on the desktop or on the sidebar.

macOS has a pretty decent desktop/sidebar widget system.

As for the app, where I live, we get a lot of thunderstorms this time of year, so it’s nice to open up the app and get extended weather information once in a while because I don’t watch live TV, so I don’t get live weather reports from the news. The macOS weather app is very nice.

It’s also small and lightweight. I wouldn’t exactly call it “bloatwear”

247MB of RAM sure isn't my idea of lightweight.

Same on plasma with kweather. Uses ~250MB when i open the window. So ~4.8 times less than the windows 11 one.

Considering everything it’s doing? That’s nothing. And the widget only uses 25 MB.

But keep shifting those goalposts…

Honestly the one upside of this RAM crisis is that people are finally paying attention to how bloated modern software has gotten

1.2GB of ram to show a few images and numbers is patently insane though

How does this compare, ram wise, to curl wttr.in ?

Indeed. 247 MB is four times as much RAM as is needed to use the full Adobe Premiere 6 video editor. And it is enough memory to run 30 instances of Word 97.

A weather app with images and backend querying can be made to run in ~20 MB RAM with proper optimalisation. The issue is that most developers don't optimize for memory use anymore. Things like data types, heap allocation and copies vs references used to be a primary concern of developers.

curl wttr.in uses about 14.6 MB. (16.8 MB with HTTPS)

In chrome at work without an adblocker weather.com can hit 2GB for that tab alone.

Well, wasn't talking about Mac here, but the MS implementation.

And anything more than tens of megabytes for an icon on the taskbar is bloatware. It's not like pulling this data is hard.

Additionally, I get that same data in a few megabytes on my phone. Why the hell does a desktop app need multiple orders of magnitude more ram, even considering the difference in environment?

It was quite convenient when I last used windows 10 about a year ago

And anything more than tens of megabytes for an icon on the taskbar is bloatware. It's not like pulling this data is hard.

I agree. On macOS, the Weather app doesn’t run in the background. It’s a full desktop app. Desktop/sidebar weather widgets run in the background, but they only take about 25 MB total.

If you’re telling me that even the taskbar Weather app in Windows 11 takes almost a a gigabyte of RAM (or more??), that’s goddamn bananas.

Care to elaborate on what goalpost I've shifted? You said it was lightweight, I didn't agree as I feel like 247MB is far too much for showing a weather forecast that was computed elsewhere.

It has been my experience that one cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themselves into.

Very educational and not at all what I asked for. Thank you.

We learn by doing

Remember, Windows 11 is using an entire Skyrim worth of RAM at startup, usually even more than that, since 8GB is barely enough for Win11 these days, and Skyrim's recommended RAM spec was 4 GB.

Apparently... From what I have been told... Websites are old-fashioned, and younger generations (post Millennial) prefer apps over browsing the internet, especially on mobile.

I’m not sure I could develop that kind of app to use that much memory if I tried short of intentionally consuming RAM.

When I most recently switched computers, I made an intentional decision to limit the amount of Electron-based applications to a bare minimum, and to focus on using applications that are intentionally designed for resource efficiency. It's been a good choice for managing RAM use.

Few years ago I made an infinite calculator app for fun where each button was also a calculator, and it still used about half as much ram.

Pixelfed link to demo video

you cant. curl wttr.in BARELY takes up any processing power and RAM, the weather app is orders of magnitudes more bloated than that single command.