If you're like me, you've grown up on desktop "programs." In the late 00's, this got changed to "apps" because the mobile device market took away the leading attention span from computer users (mainly new ones). The first time I heard someone say the word "apps" to refer to mobile phone programs, it was 2011 or 2012. I knew something had changed. Programs no longer had the same pull as they once did, even though they were practically the same thing.
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| It's pronounced "programs." |
Whenever you hear someone say "bring back this or that," they always sound like a person raising their fist at the sky. I remember someone who used to follow me on Facebook, who would like or share posts that said, "bring back X penalty for X crime" More often than not, they were just a lonely person.
So I am not going to say "bring back program" nomenclature. You can call it whatever you want. Even peach rinds. I know peaches don't have rinds, but now it sounds like they do. You might have been thinking of pork rinds, where I got the name, and then thought oranges have skin, and so do peaches, and so whatever skin peaches have, could be turned into peach rinds. But peaches can be eaten whole (except for the seed and stem), so that's not really a separate thing that anyone would ever need to make.
But it sounds funny because peaches might resemble, in color or shape, another thing that rhymes with rind.
I haven't gotten off topic. This was always probably going to be said. Initially, I wanted to write "5 lightweight programs," but then I thought, "what the hey, why not 5 light humored things to write about?" Actually it will be liteweight programs and whatever I already wrote. They might add up to 5.
In my recent posts, I covered Hugo. I am still working on that. But TCP/IP is a rigid protocol. There have been some clever protocols, both old and new, that can bypass that. If you need or use a lot of bandwidth, QUIC over UDP is a relatively modernized protocol that uses TLS 1.3. Cloudflare has a great write up on the mechanics of it, and major CDNs use it. If it makes your internet go faster, it can be very appealing.
There's also Gemini/Gopher, for the extremely lightweight web, and believe it or not, I already started looking for ways to combine the two (with QUIC). Part of having a very experimental mentality is wanting to mix two completely unrelated things that were never envisioned together. Even TLS and UDP weren't really intended together, but that's how QUIC works.
In theory, one doesn't need QUIC for smolnet, or a lightweight Gemini network. But if one had to surf a lot of websites to find something, or if someone wanted their website to be indexed...perhaps there might be use for QUIC on Gemini?
Chromium has a library for Quic: https://github.com/devsisters/libquic
It was forked over 10 years ago, with over 288 forks:
"This repository is sources and dependencies extracted from Chromium's QUIC Implementation with a few modifications and patches to minimize dependencies needed to build QUIC library."
And it has only has one dependency on BoringSSL? Seems lite.
Is it possible that the original maintainers are working on a fork? Because there hasn't been a commit in that long. There is a browser called LaGrange that lets you browse Gemini: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ and other less known protocols.
I have used it, and think it's really calm. Now my Hugo site seems less important, but it's not. Developing a blog is still important, because I rust if I don't stay active.
You could call this detoxing from heavy social media, but it's more like "lite-toxing.' The terminology isn't great, but I don't want to sugarcoat it either. Some amount of digital computing is ok, but spending many, many hours daily isn't super healthy. Balance is needed. Despite all this, or in spite of all this, I looked for an alternative mail client. Yes, I have used mail clients before (Thunderbird and Seamonkey)- around 2005-2011. Eventually I got sick of the POP duplicates and switched to IMAP briefly, only to return to webmail because I didn't want to have too many copies of emails when I was already cluttered with an internet connection (that doesn't sound exactly logical, nor does this paranthetical aside). But I returned finally to a desktop based client.
Initially I downloaded Sylpheed, because it was only ~7MB. But then I saw Claws, which had support for OAuth2, which would be helpful if I wanted to set up Gmail IMAP. But that took too long, and didn't seem fun after spending a half a day on the Google Developer Cloud platform trying to create a token.
I've heard & seen Claws before because, like Sylpheed, they are included in the hundreds of linux distros I've tested. So familiarity and reliability is important. Liteweight is also one of the main reasons I've looked for one, and at 37MB, Claws is not super large either. If it was over 50MB, I probably wouldn't use it.
Fortunately, I already set up another email address, one that supports IMAP and POP3 with another provider. And I finally set one up- with POP3. I still use Gmail, and Proton, but Proton requires a Premium subscription and a Bridge "app" to allow IMAP/POP. So I skipped that too.
I now have a desktop app that lets me download email without needing to fire up a Chrome/Firefox browser with 16 pistons (or virtual threads, or whatever it expands onto/into).
This should be spring cleaning, but I was late to that, or technically it's been spring cleaning that's been happening very slowly over the course of several months. I think it's working, because relying on web apps for everything can be very, very weird. Maybe it's because I've been using them for so long that offline apps have been neglected so long that its weirder to ignore them than not.
The third client I recommend, and only because I'm using Windows at the moment, is Github Desktop. If I was using Ubuntu/Mint, and I might again soon, I would recommend Forjero, because it sounds cool. But I've been using the weblogin for Github for over 5 years (for the most part- occasionally I used the desktop version). But since I'm testing out a slower internet connection, I am starting to appreciate a desktop client for repositories (yes, I know there's a Git too, but I tend to edit files in the explorer and then push them back to Github). So do I really need the Git standalone? Not yet, but I have it installed anyways.
Someone else recommended Kristall instead of LaGrange, but it requires a new link to Microsoft 2010 C++ Distributable (9.8MB, if you're using Windows) since the one on their website is an old or broken link. I haven't tried it out yet.
If one is downsizing or putting their digital life on a diet, I can't think of much else other than simply using less. But if you have a smartphone or desktop with a lot of programs/apps installed, it's probably best to uninstall unused ones, even if you have plenty of space left. There's a lot of clutter in the desktop and it's easy to forget tasks when there's a bunch of icons on the actual wallpaper. Make a New Folder, and put all the shortcuts in there. Never Save to Desktop unless it's a really important file, because setting that as the default is a bad habit. Yes, I've done that before.
So the list is:
1. LaGrange (for browsing and exploring, not for knowing where you will visit next)
2. Claws Email Client (and an alternative email service)
3. Github Desktop
4. I did use Chrome 148 to write this post, because it was already installed on my PC, and it would have taken more than a couple hours to download on a 128Kbps connection, so while I can't recommend it for lightweight use, it does actually use QUIC for Gmail and Youtube, and a lot of sites still depend on it (like banking). I do wonder how much faster modern browsers are because of some of these neat tricks, or whether it's just the horsepower of the machine that is sometimes doing the heavy lifting (using a 2013 era i7 with 8 threads).
One desktop client alternative to YouTube (an alternative also to their own desktop app) that I found really impressive was GTK Pipe Viewer - it can stream Youtube directly to a desktop app, typically on linux. On a lightweight machine, it is a godsend (I tested it on an Atom N450 with eXe Linux a few years back- buffering only from bandwidth, rather than performance). But you could also just use a different video sharing website, like PeerTube.
5. Any federated instance, made for desktop. Avoid Electron based (if you can), as they are heavier:
"Finding truly lightweight, native desktop apps for Mastodon on Windows can be tricky, as many are resource-heavy Electron ports. The most performant native and lightweight clients include: [1]
Top Lightweight Windows Clients
- Dowstodon: A modern, native client specifically built for Windows 10 and 11 using WinUI 3. It is highly optimized and provides a clean, native, and lightweight experience. You can get it directly on the Microsoft Store. [1, 2]
- Whalebird: Built as an Electron app, it is specifically designed to consume fewer resources while maintaining a multi-column, Slack-like interface. It’s highly efficient and includes great keyboard shortcuts. Download it from the Whalebird GitHub Releases. [1, 2, 3]
- Sengi: While it is also based on Electron, its interface focuses on displaying a single column at a time, making it very responsive and perfect for keeping on the edge of your screen. You can download the desktop version from the Sengi GitHub Releases. [1]
The Best "Lightweight" Alternative (PWA)How to set it up:
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