That argument would hold more power if there wasn't an existing native client for Slack and Discord, made by one person, with all the features I needed, working with absolutely no lag and minimal resource use, working on MacOS, Linux, Windows. Unfortunately the development stopped, or I'd still use it. https://cancel.fm/ripcord/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

Https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ Used it before, worked OK. Now I use Matrix, so I don't need it anymore. Neat trick: AppImages are squashfs compressed filesystems, so they can have slow startup etc. Fix this with ./app.AppImage --appimage-extract, find the binary in the created folder and run that one instead, so that you pay the decompression cost only once. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago

Not sure if it still works (or will continue to work) but this might be what you're looking for: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ I've also had fairly good results using gtkcord4, though it takes it little finagling to get up-and-running: https://github.com/diamondburned/gtkcord4. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago

There are a bunch of features in slack beyond the core chat stuff, like: 1. Being connected to multiple communities and switching between them instantly this can be of course simply replaced by connecting to different servers in a tabbed terminal and use the terminal's built-in cmd-1/2/... shortcut, which happens to be the same as in slack. 2. Meta data about others, like their timezone or how to pronounce their... - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago

All three of these are web browsers (slack and vscode are built on electron) that are notoriously RAM-hungry. If you don't want to buy new hardware, switching to using the slack web-app or using a third party client like Ripcord will remove one of those browsers, and using an IDE that isn't a web browser would take out another. You may also find that another browser like Firefox uses less memory than Chrome. Source: about 1 year ago

Https://chatsecure.org/ > ChatSecure is a free and open source messaging app that features OMEMO encryption and OTR encryption over XMPP. You can connect to your existing Google accounts or create new accounts on public XMPP servers (including via Tor), or even connect to your own server for extra security. > Unlike other apps that keep you stuck in their walled garden, ChatSecure is fully interoperable... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

In this case, I would rather suggest others to use the likes of Element a Matrix client, or e.g. RetroShare, Briar, OnionShare, or e.g. XMPP with the clients like Dino, Conversations, Gajim, ChatSecure. Source: about 3 years ago