People don’t care. The vast majority of people don’t ever use their computers for anything heavy, so it’s not like saving a few hundred mb of ram is going to be noticeable for them. It’d be nice to have a lighter, more performant app but if the cost is that it looks like what you posted (no offence to the dev of ripcord; IMO qt and gtk stuff always just looks super outdated) then I’d bet most people would prefer the more modern/pretty looking app.
The vast majority of people don’t ever use their computers for anything heavy, so it’s not like saving a few hundred mb of ram is going to be noticeable for them.
They will definitely notice. E.g. baseline MacBooks (which is probably what most people outside developers buy) still come with 8GB RAM. If you subtract the OS, video memory, and some disk caching. There is not that much left on modern macOS (or Windows).
Having Slack + Skype in the background and some tabs open with modern web sites/applications can easily much a few GBs of RAM, slowing down quite a lot of 8GB machines. I guess most developers just don't notice, because their employer give them development machines with 16 or 32GB RAM.
People don’t care.
They don't care because they don't understand. They will just believe that their computers are slow and that they have to throw more money at it. Or they just buy an iPad and it will feel fast, because Apple does not allow every application to ship and run its own web browser.
no offence to the dev of ripcord; IMO qt and gtk stuff always just looks super outdated
That's because the developer decided to use their own theme. I have made a few Qt apps and on macOS and Windows you can barely distinguish them from a native app, unless you know where to look. Fully agree with Gtk+ though, it does not follow platform styling and conventions and is very slow on macOS (don't know about Windows).
