I’m freaking out the equivalent of mutt and irc require more than 8GB of RAM to run simultaneously.

What are modern operating systems and applications doing?

You can post images in Slack and use text formatting. Those are things that use memory.

Sloppy memory management is what uses memory. But those apps are in a class of their own, along with Electron apps.

Slack is an Electron app.

Gifs. I'm only half joking.

I used outlook on the browser when needed and slack was open most of the time

I also had around 200 tabs open on the regular

Now I wouldn’t tell you it was a good experience because it wasn’t. But it was usable even pushing the hardware to the max.

Children don't have Slack and Outlook open. Gmail in a web browser and Discord, maybe. My old M1 Air works just fine for productivity workloads, and has for years.

Is Slack that much worse of a memory hog than Discord? Aren’t they both built on electron?

Not sure about slack vs discord, but browser Gmail is almost certainly less memory hungry than Outlook. And that’s probably enough of a difference by itself.

You can make a pretty good electron app or one that kinda sucks. Slack is in the latter category.

VS Code (or rather VSCodium in my case) is also electron based but it's been relatively snappy in my experience - though I don't use a lot of third party plugins.

Say what you will about Microsoft but the performance of VS Code is really good.

Not having to use outlook is a feature not a bug.

Do you actually have a problem with Slack and Outlook open at the same time on an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB of memory? Or are you assuming?

I was replying to someone that made that claim from apparent experience.

> Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.

I read this as how bad software quality has gone down, that a mail program and a chat program don't fit in 8GB of RAM.