> You're repeating pretty much what I said, so I really am not receptive to this "repeat after me" statement you're making towards me.

My apologies, that was poor form, and unnecessarily hostile. And, you're right, I didn't read your comment thoroughly. I'm going to leave my original response unedited so that others can see that my original comments were made partially in error.

Now, with that said, here's the refinement of my point: my computer specs are more valid than yours, because they're far more representative of the average user's computer than yours - so your comment "It really depends on individual use" applies far more to your experiences using less-standard hardware than mine using more-standard hardware.

Moreover, all programs written for the performance target of piddly little machine are guaranteed to work on your machine, but not the other way around. It doesn't really "depend on individual use", because implementing an application with native tech vs. Electron just plain works better for a larger fraction of the population - it's not like the Firefox/Chrome performance tradeoff, where Firefox uses more CPU and Chrome uses more memory, and which one is better depends on your situation.

> Like, post my machine specs? lol There's no need to be that sarcastic.

I was dead serious. Show us what your development device is like, and then we'll see how it stacks up to my x230. Better yet, tell me what apps you're using, and I can install them on that x230 and we'll see how it behaves.

> I could just as easily come up with anecdotes of people I know whom aren't developers and run multiple Electron-based apps. It really wouldn't prove anything.

Well, if you're going to insist on statistics, then the best we can do is probably the Mozilla hardware report[1], where slightly over half of users have only two physical cores, two-thirds have Intel integrated graphics, the most prevalent CPU frequency is 2.3 to 2.7 GHz, and over half of users have either 8 or 16 GB of memory - which are pretty close to the x230 example I gave, again supporting my argument.

I don't think that there should be much contention that the average user's computer is significantly less powerful than the average developer's computer.

> My original question was really about just how prevalent the need for apps smaller than 140 MB actually is.

That's not really an answerable question, nor is it a useful one, because it rarely makes sense to talk about the "need" for particular software traits. Unless you perform some pretty egregious violations of users' privacy, you're never going to be able to determine which fraction of users computers literally cannot run a particular Electron app - and that's not even an interesting piece of data, because the question isn't "how many users are there that are in a life-or-death situation where they need an application to not be written in Electron" (as that number is probably pretty close to zero, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was non-zero), it's "how much concrete value is being taken away from users' experiences because of Electron apps" - which is not something you can measure.

The lag you get while watching a YouTube video on a netbook because Discord is in the background isn't measurable, and it's not a need - but it's still there, and it's still bad. Similarly, you don't need Discord, Spotify, Steam, Slack, and Balena to all be running at once - but being able to listen to music in the background sure is nice, as is being able to leave applications running in the background when you aren't using them.

Electron applications detract from the value you get from a computer by needlessly consuming meaningful amounts of disk space, memory, CPU, and battery life, and introducing noticeable lag and jitter, for no value to the user.

[1] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware