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samschott / maestral

Open-source Dropbox client for macOS and Linux
https://maestral.app
MIT License
3.13k stars 64 forks source link

Future suggestion: Gnome shell extension #68

Open coxackie opened 5 years ago

coxackie commented 5 years ago

Running maestral-dropbox, using Gnome 3.34 (Arch Linux). The back-end takes up around ~55MB memory; if I also run the front-end (gui) there is an extra ~70MB of memory. Combined (~125MB) is still a bit better than running dropbox (>130MB), but it is clear that most memory is spent by Qt. For Gnome DE, there is the possibility to create extensions in JS and connect to the back-end directly; see, for example, https://github.com/jaystrictor/gnome-shell-extension-syncthing for the same idea applied to syncthing. Such extensions add almost zero memory footprint to the shell. If you would like to go the Gtk way at some point, maybe this would be the leanest way; and Qt would not be needed at all for having an indicator.

I understand that this may not be a priority right now, but I thought one should keep this in mind as a possibility.

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samschott commented 5 years ago

Yes, I am aware that Qt accounts for more than half of the current memory usage. Also, it is by far the largest dependency to install. Unfortunately, I don't have the time at the moment to look into alternatives. But ideally I would aim for native Cocoa and Gtk 3 frontends with Qt only as a fallback.

I didn't know about the JS gnome-shell-extensions (I mostly use macOS) and will keep this in mind!